Claim
An undecided exit is the most expensive position to hold
Thinking about leaving for two years is not caution. It is a decision to stay, made in a way that lets you avoid admitting you made it, and it costs you the attention you were going to use to get out.
The repair is to convert a mood into criteria with dates. Not a plan to leave. A written statement of what would have to be true for you to stay, and what you will do if it is not true by a specific date.
Action
Write your exit criteria
Three or four lines, dated today. Each one is a condition and a deadline. If I am not running my own project by the end of Q3, I start looking. If the second engineer we were promised is not hired by June, I start looking. If my pay is not inside the day 5 range at the March review, I start looking.
Then put the deadlines in your calendar. The test of a good criterion is that someone else could check it. I will leave if things do not improve is not a criterion, it is a feeling with a future tense.
Claim
Growth comes from scope changing, not from time passing
What people call career growth is mostly the accumulation of new kinds of decisions. A year in which nothing about your scope changes teaches you very little, no matter how busy it was.
So the useful question is not how long you have been somewhere. It is when your scope last changed and whether anything is scheduled to change it. Two years in a role where the work keeps expanding is fine. Two years of the same year twice is a reason to act, and it is also what makes the next interview hard, because day 4 needs artifacts you do not have.
Evidence
Check the company the way they check you
George Akerlof described the mechanism in 1970 in The Market for Lemons, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. When one side of a transaction knows the quality and the other does not, the uninformed side has to price in the risk of a bad one, and good sellers withdraw because they cannot prove they are good. Hiring is that market in both directions, and the candidate is the less informed party: the employer has your references, your test and four interviewers, and you have a job description.
The cheap correction is inspection. Talk to two people who have left, not current employees who are describing the company they are paid to describe. Ask why they left, what surprised them, and what they would want to know if they were you. Read what the company files publicly: accounts, headcount, funding, layoffs.
Caution
Leaving does not fix what you brought with you
Some things travel. If you have never raised a problem early, never built a record, never asked what your manager is measured on, the next job looks strange for four months and then looks like this one.
So run one honest check before you go: name the specific thing that is wrong, and ask whether it is a property of this company or a property of how you work in companies. Bad manager, dead product, sector with no money: those are properties of the place. Never getting credit, always being surprised by your review, work that never gets seen: those may follow you, and days 2 and 6 are cheaper than a move.
Action
Leave well, even when you are angry
When you do go: resign in writing, give the notice in your contract, offer a handover document and actually write it, and say nothing about your reasons beyond the professional minimum.
The exit interview is not a confessional. Anything you say there can reach the person you are complaining about, and it will not change the company. Your industry is smaller than it looks and references get taken informally for years. A man who leaves cleanly can come back, and coming back at a higher level is one of the more reliable ways to move up.
Aside
The case for staying that nobody makes
Job changes are the fastest way to raise pay, and the advice industry stops there. Some things only exist for people who stay: relationships deep enough that you get told things, the credibility to kill a bad project, watching a decision you made play out over five years, and the compounding effect of everyone knowing what you are good at.
Serial moving buys salary and pays for it in depth. If you are staying because you are afraid, that is worth examining. If you are staying because the work is getting harder in an interesting way and the people are worth it, that is a decision, and the criteria you wrote today are how you tell the two apart.