I have stayed at companies and on projects that I knew were "dying", or, at least, not doing so well because I had good management. On the other hand, I have le

I have stayed at companies and on projects that I knew were "dying", or, at least, not doing so well because I had good management. On the other hand, I have left successful companies because my particular product group wasn't getting enough management support. People forget that companies like Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et. al. are huge. As an individual contributor, Marissa Meyer's policy shifts affect you in subtle and hard to diagnose ways, because they're filtered and mediated through a long chain of management before they get down to you. Your individual manager has a much greater impact on your day-to-day happiness than the CEO of the company. That said, good programmers always have opportunities, and while good management can do a lot towards helping retention, if the company is dying, people will start to look elsewhere. After all, nobody wants to be in the lurch when the layoffs hit. It's always better to have another opportunity arranged, so that you can leave on your own terms, without having a gap on your resume. I would say that I make a trade-off, balancing the benefits of staying where I am (social capital, rapport with my coworkers, etc.) with the potential benefits of moving elsewhere (quit-before-I'm-fired, opportunity to work on a better technology or a more interesting problem). When the benefits of staying become less than the benefits of switching, then I start looking. Individual management can do a lot to increase my propensity to stay where I'm currently at, but it's not an unlimited power. At some point, broader economic concerns swamp the benefit I get from staying with my current team.