Any advice on handling being an engineer at a shrinking team?
I work at a Series A startup. I joined on the promise that it would be 16 backend engineers a year from when I joined. It never grew and maxed out at 8 (non-eng headcount experienced the most...
I work at a Series A startup. I joined on the promise that it would be 16 backend engineers a year from when I joined. It never grew and maxed out at 8 (non-eng headcount experienced the most growth). Fast forward to 18 months and it's looking like between parental leave, illness, responsibility differences, and general departures, in a few weeks I'll be one of 2 backend engineers actually writing code, and one of 3 backend engineers overall.
There's 1-2 resume-building projects I'd like to stay for, but it's likely that one of them will get deprioritized. I've never been happy in this role for a slew of reasons, reasons for which others have left. This could very well leave us at 1-2 backend engineers in Q1-Q2. We are hiring, but I suspect we'll only backfill 1 role as 1-2 engineers are on "temporary leaves" (but one leave is 3 months, the other is basically indefinite).
Any advice on what to do in this strange situation? I'd like to say that I'm considering quitting and want to train another backfill, but it could hurt me more than anything else. I'd be interested in more options (no backend engineer's comp has increased in the 18 months I've been here except 1 underpaid / underleveled person) or a small sabbatical of 5 weeks. I wouldn't mind a senior title but lots of qualified engineers have been rejected for it so I stopped putting weight on the title. But all of those are a little rude to accept if I quit less than 6 months after.
edit: removed some typos, clarified some timelines e.g. months -> weeks