The most underrated career move is staying

In the year 2013, three years into my time at Flipkart, I almost quit.

The company was in the middle of a transformation. We were going from a small, fast-growing startup to a more organised company — which is a polite way of saying that everything that had been ad hoc was now becoming a process, and everyone who liked the ad hoc days was unhappy. Salaries got benchmarked. Reporting structures got drawn. Meetings got longer. The energy that had drawn me in 2010 was being replaced by something more grown-up, and I was not sure I wanted the grown-up version.

My colleagues were leaving every week. Recruiters were calling. The advice from everyone outside the company was the same: “Get out before it gets worse.”

I almost listened. I had a foot out of the door for a few weeks.

What kept me there was not loyalty, or salary, or any wise long-term plan. It was a single project. The company offered me a chance to move into something I had never worked on before — building the early plumbing of what would later become Ekart. It was unfamiliar, slightly terrifying, and it broke my routine completely.

I took it. And the next eleven years happened.

I am writing this for the version of you that is reading career advice on the internet right now — which is overwhelmingly telling you to switch jobs every two or three years. Don't get stuck. Don't get comfortable. Don't waste your twenties.

I will not tell you that advice is wrong. For some people, it is exactly right.

But it is not the only path. And nobody is telling you about the other one.

I spent fourteen years at one company. Four years before that, I spent at one rural retail role at ITC's Choupal Sagar in Madhya Pradesh. Twenty years of my career, then, sit inside two companies. By the LinkedIn-influencer playbook, I should have been promoted past, paid less than my peers, and stuck. None of that happened. I have ended up at the senior end of one of India's largest logistics businesses, with a foundation in supply chain that I do not think I could have built any other way.

The reason I am writing this is not that I think staying is universally better than leaving. It is that I think the case for staying is never made. Everyone who stays just stays quietly. Everyone who leaves writes a LinkedIn post about it. The data is asymmetric.

So here is the case, briefly.

Year fourteen knows things year four cannot.

When I joined Flipkart in 2010, I thought I knew supply chain. I had four years at ITC behind me. I was wrong. The supply chain knowledge I have today — the realknowledge, the kind you cannot fake when a 500,000-square-foot fulfillment centre is in trouble at midnight — was built layer by layer over fourteen years of watching the same systems get bigger, break, get rebuilt, and break in new ways.

You cannot learn that in three years anywhere. You cannot learn it in five. You can only learn it by staying long enough to see the same system grow.

Most of the people who left, came back, or wished they had.

I watched many colleagues leave in those years. A clear majority of them either rejoined Flipkart later, or landed in cultures that did not suit them and bounced through three jobs in three years trying to find their footing again. The grass-is-greener problem is real. The companies offering 50% hikes are usually buying a year of your time, not investing in a decade of your growth.

I am not saying nobody should leave. I am saying that fewer people should leave than do. And that the ones who leave are usually optimising for the next two years at the cost of the next ten.

The thing you actually want is to keep changing — not necessarily to keep moving.

This is the part I would most want a younger reader to hear. The reason I did not quit Flipkart in 2013 was not that I had decided to stay. It was that the company gave me a new role I had never done before. I changed my work without changing my context.

Over the next eleven years, I did this several more times. I moved from procurement to fulfillment, from one zone to another, from operations to network design, from scaling teams of fifty to scaling teams of fifteen thousand. I changed roles roughly every two to three years — which is exactly the cadence that career advice tells you to change companies at. I just did it inside the same company.

You get the new-energy benefit of change without paying the cost of starting from zero in a new culture. You keep your relationships, your reputation, your understanding of how the place works. And you compound on a foundation, instead of resetting.

If your current company will let you do this, that is a genuinely rare and underrated benefit. Most people throw it away because nobody told them it was valuable.

You can't earn the fourteenth year without doing the first thirteen. And the most underrated career move is staying — particularly the version of staying where you keep changing the work, even though the company stays the same.

If you are three years into a job and getting restless, the question is not “should I leave?” The question is “is there a new project here I have not yet done?”

Sometimes there isn't, and you should leave.

But often there is, and nobody has told you to ask.