I learned a tough lesson when I was a 17 year old apprentice. I was very keen and started work an hour early every day. I loved my job. One day I was 15 minutes late and was called into the managers office. He said that he was going to dock 15 minutes pay for being late. I tried to explain that I had started early every day for that last year with no pay, surely this alone created some sort of balance as I had worked for free.
He went onto say that he was doing me a favour by employing me. Now, I am usually a quiet, thoughful man but this statement enraged me. I told him I was leaving immediately and told him to prepare the wages I was owed. He told me that I could not leave and that I had to work two weeks notice.
I said "Who on earth do you think you are? you don't own me, you don't control me, I am a free man and will do as I please, when I want and how I want".
Now nearly seventy and retired I realised early on that to progress through the working world it was about using the employer to get what I wanted. Not to be used by them to get what they wanted. Once I gained enough knowledge, training and experience to expand my CV I was off to a new job with more money. Sometimes I left as soon as the training I was promised at interview had finished and expanded my CV even more.
I never started a job without a letter confirming all the training promised at interview.
The word employ means to use. Employers are using us to earn them money so I decided to turn that tables and use them instead.
First job I quit was because of the terrible bosses, had a real tiny tyrant sitting in the high chair, though I cited inflexible scheduling on the next job interview.
Then there was this one, I was lied to when interviewing and there wasn't any upward mobility nor a structure to help me develop as a professional. Their idea of developing as a professional was teaching me about ergonomics and repetitive motion injuries. It was dead-end, so I left, again. I said that 'I had grown as much as I was going to in that company' during interviewing.
Another one I left because I hated what I was working on and the boss I was under said 'I was too valuable to the team and could not let me go', yet refused raises, or shorter shifts, or to pay for some certifications, or even give me a few more PTO days. I went through a period of grieving where my ambition was being fought against everywhere, I sacrificed my social life, my education, and so much more for nothing. My identity as a professional shattered irreversibly, I no longer care about work at all, it's just there to pay for rent and food, that's it.
I've since joined to be the only a small business that pays me full-time salary to be on-call, and calls me like once a week for very very basic IT support. Unprestigious? Unambitious? Dead-end? Boring and unstimulating? Yes to all, you bet, that's just the way I like it. I took up gardening and bookbinding and I put my goodwill and energy into that now.
If something is to be learnt from this post, is how to spin bad things into good ones when you want to sell yourself, or to not tie your identity to your job. I had my middle age crisis at 27, it seems.
I was in golden handcuffs for a bit. I resigned shortly after they expired.
Reasons:
1. 90% of my coworkers had resigned already.
2. Half a decade of my work was destroyed rather unceremoniously.
3. We'd been without a CFO for six months and, when we got a new one, they realized we needed to fire ~40% of people to make budget work.
4. No technical experts were still employed for the remaining codebase. Remaining engineers were asked to get in there and just start hacking at it in an attempt to ship features, but had effectively zero awareness of a decade-old codebase.
5. I'm a bit controlling and wanted to feel like I had the ability to fix things, but I did not. That sense of loss drove a lot of anxiety and burnout in me.
Not an especially compelling list of reasons to stick around. When I wasn't selected for the final round of layoffs (because they wanted me to run stuff) I decided to bail without unemployment lined up. Very much so worth it, IMO.
1. Stumbled upon a dream job in the video game industry, couldn't pass it up, and glad I didn't. I also was mainly just coasting at the previous job, nothing really needed there other than quickly resolve client requests when needed. I only really needed to work about 10 hours a week there.
2. (Next five jobs were either contractor gigs or I was laid off, so I didn't resign, but a couple I definitely should have).
3. Was there for 6 years, the team was a shell of what it used to be and was in keep the lights on mode at that point (went from a 40 person team down to a 5 person team, between layoffs and slow attrition), put up with way too much crap including them taking away benefits and bonus, a pittance of a raise for years, and didn't promote me even though I was doing my previous boss's job and then some after he left (and did so for about three years), but about half the time it wasn't too difficult or it was inconvenient to leave because of a busy personal life, and also the pandemic was right in the middle of that, so that made me hesitant to go somewhere else since it was already remote. What made me pull the trigger was constantly reading on here how white hot the tech industry was at the time, and just being sick of my situation. Got a new job with a 60% raise a month later. So yeah, definitely should have left sooner.
4. Still at my current job, been almost 2 and a half years, starting to get the itch to do other things, but there's a chance I might get promoted (have a couple people pushing for it), so I'm sticking it out a bit longer to see if that happens. Also the work I'm doing is much more current and high profile yet not too stressful, which lets me have some energy to focus on personal projects after work still, which is nice.
The reason's for resigning? They vary, but it's usually because I've stopped getting what I want out of the role.
2. Getting stuck on a boring project
3. Horrible culture fit
4. New exciting opportunity which consequently = more money
1. Lost interest in working and wanted some time to myself — ended up (by choice) being nearly 3 years lol
2. Found something better
3. Was ready to be done with it, just didn’t see any good opportunities coming
A single model file with 3000+ variables was where I drew the line, and started looking for the next venture.