When Growth Stops Feeling Like Progress
On agency, restlessness, and the limits of traditional career paths
Over the last few months, a pattern has repeated often enough that it no longer feels coincidental.
A senior front-end engineer, recently promoted, wonders aloud whether staying “just FE” is quietly narrowing his future. There are more interesting things happening elsewhere—platform work, AI—and he’s unsure whether he’s missing out.
A lead engineer, new to the team and performing well, talks about moving again. Not because the work is bad, but because he doesn’t want to spend the next few years doing “more of the same,” even if the same is going well.
A back-end engineer, comfortable, effective, recently promoted, mentions planning a move anyway. Nothing is wrong. He just doesn’t want to stay too long.
None of these conversations are new to someone who’s been managing engineers for close to a decade. What is new is the profile of the people bringing them up.
They’re high performers. Recently promoted. Engaged.
And the frequency has increased.
It made me pause—not to diagnose individuals, but to question my own assumptions about motivation.
For years, I’ve carried a fairly traditional model: growth happens through scope, recognition, compensation, trajectory. When someone feels restless, one of those levers usually helps. Lately, they don’t.
So I asked myself a quieter question:
Is something changing at a macro level that I’m failing to notice?
I spoke with my mentor. The signal I received was simple and unsettling: yes. Traditional levers—money, titles, long-term plans—don’t work the way they used to. Not because people don’t want them, but because waiting feels different now.
Waiting doesn’t feel neutral anymore
Most of the engineers I speak to aren’t anxious about survival. They’re anxious about relevance. About optionality collapsing faster than experience compounds. About timelines shrinking in ways no career ladder fully acknowledges.
AI is part of that background pressure—not always as an explicit threat, but as a constant uncertainty. So is visibility. Everyone can see faster paths, adjacent paths, improbable outcomes that nonetheless feel nearby.
When patience no longer feels neutral, restlessness starts to look rational.
This doesn’t feel like disengagement in the classic sense. No one is checking out. If anything, they’re too aware.
The pressure seems to come from higher aspirations meeting constrained paths. People want judgment, leverage, voice. They want to feel that their decisions matter—not eventually, but now.
And when the traditional signals of progress are slow, opaque, or misaligned with how fast the world appears to be moving, people look for motion elsewhere. Switching domains. Switching teams. Switching narratives.
Sometimes those moves help. Sometimes they just provide temporary relief.
Agency as the missing variable
What helped me make sense of this was a reframing I came across while thinking through these conversations: agency over intelligence.
Not skill. Not output. Agency—the felt ability to shape one’s trajectory.
Many of the engineers I work with are exceptionally capable. But capability without perceived agency creates friction. You can be good and still feel stuck. You can be promoted and still feel late.
From that lens, some career decisions that look impulsive begin to look like attempts to reclaim control—even if they carry real risk.
The manager’s tension
This leaves me in an uncomfortable middle.
As an engineering manager, I’m responsible for creating conditions where people can do meaningful work and grow. Historically, retention followed naturally from that.
Lately, retention feels less coupled to intent or quality. Even strong environments don’t fully offset the broader forces at play.
It leaves me with an unresolved question:
What’s going to change in the way we assess & compensate developers that retention becomes relevant?
I’m not sure whether that question points to an existential crisis of my role—or an opportunity to lead differently.
What compounds quietly
If agency is the limiting nutrient, it’s also the hardest to “provide.”
Beyond a certain point, agency doesn’t come from tickets closed or systems mastered. It comes from judgment, influence, and context. From being trusted to shape direction, not just execute within it.
These are slow skills. They resist clean benchmarks. They don’t map neatly to performance frameworks designed decades ago. Yet they compound faster than most technical advantages once they take hold.
The irony is that many of the engineers most restless today are the ones best positioned to develop these capabilities—if the system made room for that kind of growth.
An unfinished thought
This isn’t happening everywhere. Not yet. But it’s disproportionately visible among people you’d put on your A-team.
I don’t have a clean conclusion. Only a sense that something fundamental is shifting—away from patience as virtue, toward agency as survival.
For now, I’m trying to listen more carefully—to what’s being asked beneath the movement.
Notes
A framing that helped me articulate agency came from a short post by Andrej Karpathy, contrasting agency with intelligence as a scarce and powerful trait.
A longer thread by systematicls offered a broader socioeconomic lens on why patience feels less rational under compressed timelines and structural uncertainty.
These didn’t provide answers—but they helped me name the pressure more clearly.
Wow! Brilliant post, Tamil. Only a manager who cares deeply about his team can sense this.
I am sure your 'A-team' consists of highly motivated people—the ones constantly looking to improve and go above and beyond. But like anyone else, they need constant validation. While good appraisals and recognition work initially, eventually the 'kick' wears off.
I don't think this is a new phenomenon, but with AI, talented devs realise they can do so much more. Now that writing good code and complex logic has been democratised, there is a constant internal pressure to find new ways to stand out. This leads to burnout and a deep sense of dissatisfaction.