I have a chance to change teams, should I take it?

I've been at my current company for about a year and a half, the team I was hired for hasn't worked together until the last two months. because of some organizational decisions all the engineers on that team have been lent to other teams during the period I'm describing. My team didn't have a manager until three months ago, and this manager hasn't been doing a good job either, he's onboarding feels slow and he's just started to get closer to the team.

Since you were already working with other teams, it doesn't seem like you've built enough reputation on your current team where it could help you during the next performance review cycle.

It also sounds like you are more confident in the other team's manager and you have a deeper relationship with them.

I would switch teams because it feels like an opportunity to work with people that are compatible with you.

You might need to grind for the next 6 months to catch up, but 6-12 months is plenty of time to make an impact on the new team. If you only had to wait 1-2 months before the next performance review cycle, then maybe, I would say to wait it out, but since the timeline is longer, I would probably switch teams.

I would make the team switch. There may be a short-term dip in your momentum to get to Staff, but the new team feels like the clearly better choice for longer-term growth.

Manager strength and relationship

To get promoted to Staff, you need a strong manager. Even if your manager likes you, they may not have enough context or political sway in the organization to get you promoted. That's my worry with your current manager.

It sounds like your new manager doesn't have as many question marks about their stability in the company.

Tech domain

I love that you're excited about the technologies you'll be able to learn in the new team. Not only is this good because of your excitement levels, but being able to move around the codebase makes you more valuable to the company.

Depth is more important than breadth early in your career, but for a Staff engineer, being able to dabble in backend as a frontend engineer makes you very powerful!

Questions to ask

Talk about what you'd work on in the new team, and what a path to promotion might look like.

• I highly recommend going through question: What questions can I ask to my to-be manager about the team I'll be joining?
• In addition to talking to the manager, I'd talk to high-level ICs who have previously worked with this manager. They'll give you more unbiased answers about what it's like to work with them.

This feels like an obvious team switch to me. I think your good ratings are coming more from you building up raw skills as opposed to deepening certain relationships given how chaotic your prior team was (no manager until 3 months ago is... wow).

All of this means that I don't think you'll lost that much momentum for your Staff promotion. Momentum is lost when you have a bunch of built-up social capital and deep relationships that you're leaving behind, but since your prior team didn't have a manager for so long and there were so many loans, you shouldn't have too much of that to lose.