Have you quit any jobs where you knew it was all over ?
Where you were aware you were in a sinking ship ?
I recently just quit and one of my biggest fears prior to quitting is that coworkers (who I knew were looking for other jobs) were going to leave me in the dust trying to fix issues at a scale way beyond our collective pay and skill set.
In this scenario I would have 0 chance of making meaningful changes and handle basic tasks like site reliability or feature releases, just fixing issues with integrators could take 2 devs alone full time.
I’m curious what other people’s experiences are when quitting similar jobs, I had another job way long sgo where the project was already almost dead by the time I joined. I made massive changes along with new collegeaues but the technical debt was insurmountable. I left because I found a much better job to the point my manager tried to counter offer me but just couldn’t make it work (I wouldn’t have stayed even if the offer is better)
I have sometimes switched to “do the job I would stay for” mode, but it’s a fine line between that and “burn bridges” mode. In the end it hasn’t worked out; things kept going downhill, though it did help confirm my feeling and improve my day to day a little.
So I’d say trust your instincts — if it seems bad and you’ve raised concerns and have a way out, take it. The caveat there is to always be on the lookout for better options / do the occasional interview, since you won’t have as high a bar once you absolutely have to get out.