Are you a software engineer at a company with a languishing flagship product where any attempt at innovation is prematurely killed in the name of optimizing quarterly profits?
Stuff like this bothers me and I think paints an unfair picture of a corporate environment. Corporations aren't some Disney dichotomy of either being incredibly encouraging of change or a supervillain who purposefully punishes developers in order to line their own wallet.
The reality, I think, is that the vast majority of companies are in the middle. Change is good; change for the sake of change often goes against business principles. Why is a company shunning your 'innovation'? Is it because its unfeasible, or costly? Does it not integrate well with the product line?
Products have lifecycles. One of the states is the milking state, where you minimize investment in that product to maximize profit (put another way, the incremental value of new work is less than or equal to zero). Anybody would be stupid to continue dumping money in those.
The problem is that state occurs right before product death. If you aren't investing that milk money somewhere new, your company is in a death spiral, regardless of how much money there is coming in today.
So if your company is only milking and not investing, then, yes, leave, immediately. Personally, I've not seen that happen often, but I have seen it.
I'd leave also if the company's definition of "investing" is limited to some combination of polishing, enhancing, or repackaging the same milk money projects repeatedly. Its almost as dangerous as just sticking to the milk money projects (unless your company is a government contractor).
Textbook definition of the last company I worked at.
A gigantic monolithic struts1 Asset Management product with 19k LOC in some of its JSP files. All they ever did with it was pitch it to companies, get us some minor web services to add to it and move on to the next company.
I couldn't even persuade them to use Agile or start to use Unit Testing, let alone start something new. When I suggested in some brief down time that we make something new, I was actually laughed at by the senior sales guy/project manager who was my boss.
God I hated that place so much. So glad I work somewhere that actually builds things and has a decent business strategy.
Well, obviously some of what he's saying is marketing appealing to emotion, but those corporations do exist. If you think you work at one, then it might be time to go, as something led you to that perception.
There is no hard and fast rule for when to leave a company, but the one rule that works for me is: it's time to go when it isn't fun anymore.
Stuff like this bothers me and I think paints an unfair picture of a corporate environment. Corporations aren't some Disney dichotomy of either being incredibly encouraging of change or a supervillain who purposefully punishes developers in order to line their own wallet.
The reality, I think, is that the vast majority of companies are in the middle. Change is good; change for the sake of change often goes against business principles. Why is a company shunning your 'innovation'? Is it because its unfeasible, or costly? Does it not integrate well with the product line?