Ask HN: How do you decide on when to leave/switch job?

Chris Dixon once posted something along the lines of this: "If you think you're going to fire someone six months from now, you should fire them now."

I believe that if you think things will get worse 6 months from now, then leave now.

Then I got offered and accepted a new job which seemed nice but it's just so boring.

I need to be more picky seeing how companies like Buffer exist. I always just take the first offer I get because I don't like interviews and I've been lucky enough to get a job offer after the first interview I do when looking, but it's pretty stupid in retrospect. It's a gamble that has long lasting effects.

You are living in the happy little world I got to live in before my current job (when I was simply a senior dev), where there was enough protection of the dev team that I didn't need to concern myself about the business (beyond the occasional clarification of a story), didn't need to concern myself with departmental and organizational 'politics', and when I saw it I rolled my eyes at it, hated it, decided I'd never deal with that sort of thing, etc.

But even at the dev team level there were 'politics'; technical decisions would oftentimes be made based on who had the most clout. Now, that clout was usually due to, de facto, speaking to what the rest of the team cared about, understood, etc (i.e., technical language and priorities). But once you go inter-disciplinary, that stops being true.

Fundamentally, most people want to succeed, and they recognize that the way to do that is delivering results. Sometimes there are leeches, who learn to abuse the system and take credit while not helping deliver. It's abuses like this that deserve our condemnation. But the fact is that in an organization there are multiple roles, with differing priorities, and differing definitions of 'success', and fundamentally the way you deal with that -requires- a level of empathy and influence. You can decry it all you like, but that's reality, and something you'd benefit from adapting to rather than objecting to. I'd love it if everyone was technical, even those whose roles are solely focused on business direction and strategy. I'd love it if everyone thought like me, prioritized like me, and was completely objective in making decisions. But that's simply not the world we live in, and, I suspect, that would actually lead to a worse outcome (I'm not good at sales, for instance, and I don't have the insight into how best to sell something, even if it's technically superior and the UX is better than any competitors). You don't have to like it (and again, I -don't- like it), but that's the truth.

Please note, I'm not saying that every org is healthy. But I -am- saying that regardless of the health, understanding what people's motivations are, and how best to disseminate, discuss, debate, and prioritize information given the context you're in will help you tremendously.

I'm at a stage where I have learned a lot, but I find a lot of resistance to implementing my ideas for political reasons - e.g. in replacing our ticketing system, I drew up a proposal for something we already had licenses for, would integrate with our systems and provided features our developers would want. An unrelated team in America had been trialling some expensive software in isolation. I learned the software I was proposing, taught colleagues how to use the prototype, got positive feedback, got licensing sorted (free)... and my idea was swept aside because it wasn't the expensive software the guy in charge (who had approved my prototype) had already decided to go with.

Figured then there was little point in me learning stuff that would benefit this company because decisions have already been made, so I'm moving on.