Position was refocused from security to software engineer, worried about preformance?

Question

I'm a staff security engineer and my team was rescoped to Software Engineering. I'm nervous that I won't be able to keep my high performance as a software engineer at similar level because its not what I've been trained in. I've expressed this to my manager whom is also a new manager himself. I'm not sure how to handle this, do i just quiet quit and spend my time training until I'm let go or still contribute in hopes that I will make it through next round of interviews?

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

A domain switch will definitely hit your productivity and performance in the short term. However, I do think general software engineering has a big benefit over security engineering in the market: Flexibility

Startups don't really care about security as they're just trying to get users on their product to begin in
The lack of security can go surprisingly far. Even when I was at Course Hero at a Series B stage (50+ engineers, $10M+ yearly revenue), their security was terrible. I found massive security flaws as a regular SWE
This means security engineers are largely relegated to larger companies

All that being said, the biggest factor here is you and your passion. Do you genuinely love security engineering? Then I think you should stick with it. Are you maybe getting tired of it and are open to trying new things? Maybe give SWE a shot. As a Staff Engineer, you have options. Junior engineers on the other hand need to pragmatically stick with what they already know just to survive.

Here's a good related thread: "How do I know when it's time to leave a team/company?"

Position was refocused from security to software engineer, worried about preformance?

Discussion