There's a question I ask in almost every engineering interview, usually treated as a formality: "Why are you looking for a new opportunity?"
The textbook answer is often vague about growth, new challenges, or expanding your skill set. But when you ask enough engineers and actually listen to what they say, a different pattern emerges. Beneath the polished phrasing, the real answer is almost always the same.
The work stopped meaning something.
The project-values problem — and what it reveals
One engineer I spoke with had built a career on careful, deliberate technical choices. They could talk fluently about architecture, mentoring, automation. What stopped them in their tracks wasn't a difficult problem or a failing team but it was a project that simply didn't sit right with them. They'd been assigned to a casino platform.
They left.
Not dramatically. They didn't storm out or refuse outright. They just quietly noted, with the kind of calm certainty that's hard to argue with, that the work didn't align with their values. So they moved on.
This might sound like a luxury. To have the ability to walk away from work that pays because it doesn't feel right. But after talking to 100's of engineers across different countries, backgrounds, and experience levels, I've come to think it's less of a luxury and more of a leading indicator. Engineers who know what they care about tend to be the ones who do their best work. And they're not willing to leave their best work at the door of a product they don't believe in.
Boredom is a warning sign
There was one engineer where the signal was subtler. They weren't working on anything unethical. The technology was fine. The team was professional. But they found themselves, somewhere around eight months in and in their manager's office saying something that took courage to admit out loud: "I'm getting bored. I'm going to start looking."
That kind of honesty, not a resignation letter, just a direct honest conversation is something I often suggest to people looking for a way to navigate distress at work. But it came from somewhere specific: a belief that work should engage you, and that pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
What's striking isn't the decision to leave. It's what they looked for next. Not the highest salary. Not the most prestigious name on a CV. They looked at the company's website, read about its mission, and asked themselves whether the work they'd be doing would matter to the people using it.
"I want to work on things that help people"
That phrase came up repeatedly across interviews. Engineers with very different backgrounds and very different technical strengths kept returning to the same fundamental question: who does this work actually benefit?
One candidate described wanting to join a team where the work had genuine reach and impact, not just for enterprise customers, but for people who might otherwise be left behind by the industry. Another talked about the draw of open source specifically: the fact that what you build is available to anyone, regardless of their budget or geography, felt like something worth getting out of bed for.
This is not to say that engineers are naive about the commercial realities of software development, they understood product roadmaps, stakeholder pressure, technical debt. But they'd each, in their own way, decided that they needed to be able to draw a line between what they were building and something that mattered in the world.
What open source offers
There's a reason why conversations about values-aligned work so often end up at open source.
It's not just the licensing. It's something more fundamental and structural. When software is open, the work is inherently accountable to users, to contributors, to the communities who depend on it. There's nowhere to hide a cynical decision behind a proprietary wall. The choices you make are visible, and that visibility creates a different kind of pressure. Not the pressure to ship at any cost, but the pressure to do things properly.
For engineers who care about their craft, that's not a burden. It's a draw.
Several of the engineers I spoke with had specifically sought out roles where they could contribute to projects they'd already been using. They weren't just looking for a job. They were looking for a place where the work they did would feed back into something they genuinely cared about and recognise.
About performance
Engineers who believe in what they're building are more likely to go the extra mile when a problem gets complicated. They're more likely to raise concerns early when something feels wrong. They're more likely to stay and to bring their best work with them when they do. Retention, engagement, and quality of output are all downstream of whether people feel that what they're doing matters.
This isn't a new to many of you, I know. But it can get lost in hiring conversations that prioritise skills matrices and technical assessments over the harder-to-measure question of fit.
The good news is that the engineers who care most about values alignment tend to do the research. They've looked at your product. They've thought about your mission. They've asked themselves, honestly, whether this is somewhere they want to spend their time.
If the answer is yes and they can articulate why that tells me something important.
Finding your signal
For engineers reading this: the discomfort you feel when you're working on something that doesn't sit right with you isn't a flaw in your professional character. It's a signal worth paying attention to.
That doesn't mean every piece of work needs to change the world. Most engineering is, at its core, unglamorous, from debugging, refactoring, documentation, the ticket status updates of keeping things running. That's fine. The question isn't whether every task is meaningful. It's whether the direction is somewhere you want to go.
For the engineers I spoke with, that question had become non-negotiable. Not because of inflexibility, but because they'd learned through experience, sometimes through difficult experience, that doing good work is much harder when you don't respect what you're building.
The casino problem, it turns out, is actually quite simple.
If you wouldn't use it, or wouldn't be proud to have built it, it's probably not where your best work will come from.
If open source and working on tools which impact and effect millions resinates with you then I invite you to come and work with me and join the Canonical Web Engineering team.