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Ask Slashdot: Why Did You Quit Your Last Job?
An anonymous reader writes: Plain and simple: What motivated or pushed you to leave your last job? Did you have any colleague or friend or family who had left their job for a similar reason?
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I've left every job because I was poached with money.
It was awful
The job was a waste of my talents. I was persistently bored and not doing what I wanted to do. Left, went to grad school, and got a job that I love. Pay sucked, and boss was a micromanaging egomaniac. That certainly helped the decision.
(((dB)))
Couldn't get a visa for my wife, so took my skills and tax contributions and left.
A bad immigration policy not only deprives the country of the immigrants it needs, it drives the natives out too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The first rat to leave the sinking ship gets the primo spot on the adjacent ship.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The company went bankrupt.
Twice. Also laid off once after 3rd round of lay offs due to mismanagement. 30+ years in IT
I quit my last job due to the company being purchased by AT&T, one of the worst companies around.
not their jobs
I've never 'quit' a job as I've been contracting for 28 years.
They're either fixed-term, or I simply refuse a contract extension when I've already lined something else up.
I'm not there yet, but I'm getting close .. and it largely has to do with a shitty manager who had no experience managing people, who suddenly got promoted and now suck at managing people. Then he got promoted when his boss quit the company, and now he's two levels above his management capability (which is zero).
And, being a shitty manager, he now hides in a corner and won't interact with us, while putting in someone to be team lead who also sucks at being a manager. Apparently he's 'intimidated' by us ... that's because we won't put up with his bullshit and wishful thinking.
Inept idiots in management positions are shaping up to be why I quit this job.
It became rather clear that the administrative organization of the company was just phoning it in. Everyone else was putting in 110% but the company was sinking due to extremely poor decision-making. They went out of business two years after I left.
If your company has a separate building or another location entirely for administrative staff you should probably be looking for an exit.
Mostly boredom. Money was a factor too.
Management was also horribly PA. That wasn't an immediate concern, but it would have been a problem at the end of the year when I got my first real review in the place. I definitely felt set up to fail so the manager, ex-Army/ex-Cop triple dipping his career, could get his gold star for identifying "a problem".
Nah that's just globalism, neither party can stop that and the Democrats would prefer to increase it.
Microaggressions - they were everywhere. The way people looked. The way the did not look. The way they spoke to me. The way they did not speak to me. Unbearable. Now I am without a job and am suing the company for discrimination.
... the precipitating event was that a manager I used to work under called me up, and asked me if I'd consider going where she was now. I said yes and am super glad that I did.
I was receptive to that because of a number of factors. But the root factor to all those factors was (in my opinion) a Marketing department that couldn't stop making decisions based on "ooh, shiny!"
Parenthetically, I either have a knack or great luck at leaving places before the ship sinks.
I loved my last job. Great management, solid coworkers, and decent clients.
I only left because I was topped out on what they were willing to pay me, (it's a small business,) and I was tired of driving around DFW constantly, never knowing when I had to leave in the morning or when I'd get home in the evening, (this was intrinsic to my position.)
So no complaints, my last company was great; I just wanted to make more money and drive less.
They promised me (when I was first hired) more programming and less report writing/technical support etc. They continued to ignore me, so I moved on.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
I did consulting for many years. I loved the challenge and variety of the work but hated the travel. Nobody could give me any guarantee that I wouldn't have to travel so I found a local gig. It has its ups and downs but overall I'd rather be sleeping in my own bed every night.
I was a storage administrator for 15 years. I was tapped to join a large DevOps team and accepted the move. However, I ended up in a Junior Developer role with no possibility of impacting the architecture, strategy, or design and missed my storage admin role where I could have significant impact for the business. Thankfully my company allowed me to transition back to my original role. I'm aware of others who made a similar move and return, for similar reasons.
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Oh, I think a much more interesting question would be "why were you fired from your last job?"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Combination of burnout and no longer doing what I enjoy.
The burnout came during a really rough, 3-year development cycle. We spent three months planning with the principal team. They approved the plans and let us run in one direction for a year before dropping a bombshell on ALL the partner teams. We had to drop what we were doing and start over with a completely new (and woefully incomplete) API, tool chain, and environment. Roughest two years I've spent in software ever.
Had a former manager swoop in and rescue a number of us. Spent three years learning new stuff and enjoying my work and team. Then a big re-org came. Moved to something I'm not really enjoying and I can feel the "don't give a shit" attitude building up.
Top it off with a death in the family and it's time to go.
Fortunately, a great stock and housing market will allow me and my partner to enjoy some time off. Hopefully a year or two of doing what I want to do and exploring topics I want to learn will help clarify things. I'll find my passion for the work again or find another thing to fire my passion.
I was harassed for supporting Obama and I quit.
Supposedly in the 80s I aggressively attacked some starlet in my office and said she'd never work at my network again.
Nothing worse than having to question your integrity and morals on a day-to-day basis.
Typical big corporation that sucks employees soul. Typical soul sucking repetitive tasks that made me wanna cry every single day. Low Salary.
So, already tired of it, found a better salary in a smaller company that still slaves me, like any other job, but it is slower at sucking my soul.
I started out of school as a JR Dev making 33k in Wichita KS. Liked the work and the people. But work dried up, and and the outlook for pay raises started to look bleaker. And I was the only dev in the super small company. Pushing out applications solo after about 14 months in. They hired a guy for 55k, but he struck me as a dummy who talked smooth. I was a little put that that after being the only Dev for the prior 6 months they decided this guy, who was hired over my 'thumbs down', was worth 33% more than I was.
In addition it was a +2 hours commuting every workday though. Someone offered me 45k to do something more related to Networking cybersecurity just 10 mins from my house. COL is low herhttps://ask.slashdot.org/story/18/07/30/1429249/ask-slashdot-why-did-you-quit-your-last-job#e and 45k for starting is much easier to do than 33k +fuel for driving.
I'm 6 mos into the new position, and lots of work to do, and the business is growing. So outlook for better pay goes up. Oh and I got subsidized health insurance as well.
When I started at my last job (11 years ago), it was pretty good. Money was average for starting positions, working on interesting stuff, great place to build skills. As the years went on though the management completely ignored the changing landscape of technology, solely focused on just pushing out the next update to satisfy the people requesting it instead of pushing back. Meanwhile they ended up lagging behind in all aspects of development because they never allocated resources to bring things up to modern standards like build environments, testing, etc, basically everything was mostly manual in a mostly automated world.
This made a lot of people feel like they were missing out on a huge subset of skills by staying, not just the automation but just everything the company lagged behind in from technology, development paradigms, etc. Also during that time many more tech companies moved in to the area pushing up salaries to the point that the company which had stayed average was now at the bottom of the list paying ~15-20% below average and despite screams from middle management that they were losing people over this upper management didnt care. We even heard from middle management that during meetings upper management basically regarding engineering as replaceable, didnt care about providing a career path, and basically didnt want to hear from anyone on the tech side ever on any sort of input on projects.
So that last part, combined with most of my friends leaving (who were also the good, core, reliable development team) basically made my decision for me. Between being paid 10% below average(I still got good raises), losing fellow engineers I could rely on, a stagnant culture, and management that appeared to have no plan for the future, it was time to jump.
I wasn't allowed to perform at a level I was comfortable with. I'm a physician.
Too many people often with training that is not the same as mine (MBA vs MD or nurse admin vs MD) trying to tell me how I should to my job. Being forced to use EHRs that are just good enough for the hospital admins to okay but are nowhere close to what physicians need to perform well. There is only so much time in a day. Not completing all the task you'd like the way you feel they should be after 12-14 hours of work with no lunch or rest is very disheartening on many levels. Experiencing this nearly every day has a way of killing your spirit. After 10+ years I said no more. I had worked at an acedemic cetner and later a community non-profit.
I work in medical informatics now so I am able to solve some of the EMR problems plaguing physicians today. I only practice medicine on weekends - the hospital admins and insurance company representatives are off. Practicing medicine this way is much more enjoyable.
I was given a positive performance evaluation after helping to remotely set up IT for the company's new Pocano Mountain property in addition to my daily duties...and a $0.20 raise. I've never felt so insulted.
We got bought by a Fortune 100 Company (World Fuel Services), and they're so backwards I hated going to work most days.
I felt like I was constantly moving backwards. We had iterative development, they wanted to make us Waterfall. We had DevOps, they wanted to put in massive barriers between Development and Ops. They destroyed our business users productivity by making all operations run remotely over a 6 megabit internet connection (then didn't believe us when we said everything was slow). They separated job duties making people LESS efficient. They put in such terrible, buggy integration systems that I actually had to put auditing in for the express purpose of proving it was Corporates side, not ours. They made us hire people from India who we couldn't fire, and had NEGATIVE productivity (you put more work in to them than you got out). A lot of my job became cleaning up Corporate constantly shooting us in the foot.
The last straw was when my boss got fired for pushing too many political buttons and trying to protect his employees and our satellite office from the ravages of Corporate. For me, that was it, and I could sense the coming title wave of mediocrity. I got out, and I've been far happier since. I should have left earlier.
If you're in this situation, I urge you to quit. There's places out there that aren't toxic hell holes. Find them.
Concerns about corruption were my chief motivator.
They outsourced the work to an incompetent team overseas who constantly made mistakes.
Outsourcing is like alcoholism -- a drunk thinks another drink will solve his problems, and a manager always think another cheap offshore worker will fix the project.
In fact, it is the opposite.
10 or 20 offshore workers are worse than 2 competent people locally.
I didn't appreciate being shot out of a cannon! When they tell you that "we're hiring cannon fodder" and laugh, it's supposed to be a joke!
On second thought, maybe I should have suspected something when they told me to put on dress like a clown and put on a helmet because a circus is no place to be clowning around! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Economics. They insisted on having one of me, a team of people feeding me incomplete requests, and I was working 10-12 hour days to keep my workload level. I'd walk in with 18-25 things to do, I'd leave with 18-25 things to do. Calculating my hourly (no overtime in IT!), I was making about what I made ten years prior.
So I left. For about 20K more.
Too noisy, way too distracting. Open office plan of the newly acquired office, was terrible. I can just move to a better work environment, and I did just that.
I work for a company with more dollars than sense. Why is it that companies pay completely inept sales people ten times more than the people behind them who do literally all the work... allegedly because the sales people have "people skills". It's like, every job I've had, I felt like the company was successful in spite of its own stupidity. After five years of explaining how outlook works, I snapped and finally landed a job in sales at the same company so I can be the idiot who makes all the money. And guess what... now I'm the idiot who makes all the money.
If you get stuck in front line support for longer than a year you need to look elsewhere immediately. They are already taking you for granted so don't expect them to just cough up a new position. When the guy from outside gets hired in above you, that's resume time. I just happened to be incredibly overpaid in my support job due to my "people skills", they kept giving me raises so no promotion in a four person IT department was easier to take.
It was boring af.
When I worked for Roche I was terminated by the manager whose place I had taken while he was on vacation, after I provided a detailed explanation to a PhD who was one of my customers, on why the 28-CPU servers the manager had just ordered were not using all 28 CPUs (IE, they needed to rewrite their software to run on a parallel architecture).
When I worked for PG&E I was terminated by my manager (who was also a contractor, and an H1B, to boot) who took the instructions I had written on how to upgrade PG&E's servers to the latest version of management software, put them in the hands of another H1B, and let me go.
The problem here is the gig economy, H1Bs and the freedom managers are given to manipulate contractors' careers so as to protect themselves against the consequences of their own poor decision-making ... which is why H1Bs exist, to protect management from the consequences of poor decision making.
As someone who has been working in Silicon Valley for over three decades I have worked for better managers and so I know that integrity and competence exist ... somewhere.
Just ... not here.
I started my last job because I needed the job due to being laid off. They knew that and low-balled me so I had to take a 10% pay cut. (Yes, my own damn fault) I moved for a substantial pay bump.
It was the most hostile workplace I'd ever seen with open yelling in offices and hallways. Some might consider that normal but I hadn't seen such yelling in 35 years of working.
The place was going down the tubes. I was hired to backfill someone laid off a month before I started and there was a layoff every year I was there.
Thanks for the opportunity to vent about that awful place.
I developed this theory that corporate vice presidents are the vanguard of a carnivorous extra terrestrial invasion.
Yes, I was bitter.
(now-)Fabless semiconductor company, toxic work environment ~5-6 years ago. Petty politics, opaque leadership, undeserved promotions given as part of retention packages, crazy hours expected (60hr weeks were normal). Supposedly it's better now, for folks that stuck it out (and those retention shares are worth a small fortune), but my sanity and health was worth more than that.
I was the only semi-openly gay employee in the building, and my department was a "boys club" (no, not the kind I might've liked). One coworker in particular was an equal-opportunity offender: making sexist, racist, and homophobic comments that no one else objected to, despite it being a supposedly "Christian" organization. I'd complained to my boss, but he just stammered and made excuses. So when HR accused me of watching porn videos at work, based on log data that supposedly indicated that I was visiting a cam-girl web site (which I later figured out were hits from embedded content in spam messages my email client had previewed), and threatened to fire me, I quit. I didn't have anything better lined up. I fell back on consulting/freelance work, and I'm a crappy social-networker, so I'm barely making the rent each month. But it's worth it.
Got burnt out doing the bulk of the work, petty internal drama with teams becoming territorial rather than realizing we all work for the same company, and for what I did the pay was subpar compared to other large companies (honestly though, wasn’t the main driving factor). There also was no foreseen change coming and nothing seemed to be learned from past security incidents. etc. etc. Started feeling apathetic about my profession and decided if I am going to work like I was I should get into a consulting / contracting company and get paid well. So far, so good. Pays better, no on call rotations, in the event a engagement that is rough I know there is a end in sight. Am happy with my choice.
Trump has done more to protect your job from Indians than any president since Carter.
I worked as the System Administrator/Software Developer for a smaller company (~35 employees). I architected and built out a multi-channel eCommerce solution that synced their ancient database (inventory, pricing, etc) to a modern SQL database that could be tied into Amazon, eBay, their own webstore (which I also built). Automatic repricing to stay competitive based on our inventory costs, custom pricing for custom sizes, bin packing problems, plenty of complex stuff.
Very very negative environment. Frequent company wide meetings where we were referred to as replaceable and disposable. Cost of living raises once every 24 months if we were lucky. Any time money came up, the company owner would go into a rant about how much each employee costs to employee.
Pay wasn't keeping up nearly enough with my increased responsibilities (even though my software was responsible for several million per year *profit*).
They haven't replaced me (have tried a few times, have a few friends who work there) and none of them worked out. Amazingly my software is still running after a couple years. The first major API change to any of the eCommerce channels will break it pretty bad.
Now I'm a Software Architect (with a heavy dose of DevOps) for a multi-billion dollar company making nearly 300% of what I did there.
tl;dr - Worked well beyond my job responsibilities, made the company a lot of money, they wouldn't pay me, so I left for a company that would pay me.
I just did not get along with my manager. He made stupid decisions, he blamed me (even wrote me up) for his mistakes. My co-workers basically indicated that it's my job to get along with him, and not his job to get along with me, so that impacted my relationship with my co-workers too.
I think the final straw was that I had surgery right before my annual review was due. A week in the hospital, a week on bed rest, a week light-duty-no-driving, a week light-duty-with-driving. He asked me during my "bed rest" week to come in for my annual review. I declined. He asked if I would come in during my no-driving week, and again I declined. When he finally gave me this annual review, it had zero raise.
PostScript -- one of the co-workers I stopped getting along with over this incident -- he left six months later, citing this same manager's stupid decisions.
I left my last job because it was a hostile work environment where my boss' boss was fond of yelling and blaming folks for what ever happened to suit his fancy that day. Sometimes it was for not following his instructions. Sometimes it was because his instructions where followed but we should have known better. He was always yelling at individuals about one thing or another and often yelled at his direct reports all at the same time. We had weekly 3 hour meetings for this purpose that often went to 4 or 5 hours.
The last straw was when he demoted me during one of his fits, but didn't bother to tell me for almost 2 weeks. I found out during a meeting when he flashed up the current org chart in one of his long pointless rambling presentations and my name had moved. Say what? So I had my authority to do the work he wanted done taken away and he still wanted to hold me responsible? Sorry buddy, I'm out of here.
Folks where leaving this place in droves, so, I followed them. Now, as a group, we are all happier working for a competitor and meet as a group on a regular basis to remember all the reasons why we would never go back... I will NEVER work for him again, I'll cook burgers and fries for a living if I have too.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
And the Chamber of Commerce Party doesn't want to increase it? Stop reading Trump's twitter feed, kid.
Plain and simple: when you start neglecting mid-level workforce - those that have 2 or more years of seniority - it's a bad sign for any IT-related work. IT already has a high job-hopping rate, and not keeping your no-longer-new signings motivated is a recipe for generalized demotivation.
So when all the happy faces you see are either from management or fresh acquisitions, you know the company is abusing the lower ranks, keeping them stagnant for margins. This is especially excruciating when your company publicly states it wants to hire more high-level workers - resources that will jump the ranks straight to the top from outside - once again showing their lack of appreciation for the in-house, long-commited workforce.
I'm not saying this is why I quit my last job. It's just something I see a lot in my peers that leave tech companies around here (south Europe), including my current employer.
Company wanted to downsize.
They gave monetary incentive, essentially "get out of here, take some money, so we don't have to do lengthy negotiations".
Only problem was that the end result was this:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-...
(+ a new job waiting right outside for all the competent folks)
- No career path or growth presented (unless someone retires or dies).
- Moral destroying culture.
- No interest in improvement.
- No real consistent leadership, vision, or direction.
I pulled the ripcord after giving it a good college try.
Which causes mistakes, but corporate didn't give a fuck about mistakes or job quality... Only profits are important.
I was overqualified and the office was full of stupid cunts. I performed jobs outside of my job description successfully but was never recognized. Evidently they want me at the shit rate they were paying. Got out of there quickly.
Funny how none of the reasons given are, taking care of parents.
Nah that's just globalism, neither party can stop that and the Democrats would prefer to increase it.
You're right in that neither party can stop globalism, and I agree, the Democrats are less likely to slow down some of the affects that has on the US; however, Trump's policies on starting trade wars has driven many jobs in some industries over seas. Jobs are moving to avoid tariffs... on the flip side some jobs are moving here too... although everyside in a trade war loses... and the US is fighting trade wars on more fronts than other countries.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
There is a beautiful french expression, translated:
"When the disgusted one have gone, the disgusting ones are left."
But that was not the core reason for me. Rather a matter of earning more in an interesting environment with growth potential, and with a more healthy work-life balance than my previous job.
On August 1 I will be 20 years in my current company.
My weekly experience at my job became too much like a Dilbert cartoon. So much that we actually printed off relevant ones and stuck them to the wall:
Regarding the latter, we actually bought kilts and wore them to work. Management complained. I went to HR and proved I was part Scottish. We compromised and Friday became shorts day. It was as close as I ever got to having a William Wallace moment, but without the face paint and all of the killing.
Many reasons, lack of recognition, no fulfillment, long commute, work hours, and never really got long with the boss.
When I changed jobs, I went form working a 40 hour work week to 35, 90 minute commute each way down to 12-30 minutes depending on traffic, 4 weeks vacation from 3, a better salary, and a much for fulfilling job and environment ... I should have switched much sooner. When you don't feel like going in to work because of several factors.... you need to reconsider your job. I've been at my new job now for almost 8 years, and I love it. Getting up in the morning is not a chore to get ready to go to work, I don;t call in sick just because I'm sick and tired of the job. I'm so much better off mentally and physically. I save around 15 hours a week if I count commute and work hours..... 15 extra hours for me a week.... that's huge!
The relatively new CTO threatened to eliminated remote work and move remaining IT into "hub locations" with open offices and all that other bullshit in the name of "agile".
Was a software developer for a small startup. CEO was underpaying me and overworking me and not only refused to do anything about the situation when I said I was given too much work and was burning out. Instead he proceeded to demand I deliver even more results with absolutely no raise for the foreseeable future, and gave me a written warning containing threats about the "serious consequences" failure would bring me. He even called my father to threaten me through him. What kind of an employer does that!?
I called a lawyer and quit immediately. My lawyer told me that this was the first time in his 25 years as an employment lawyer that he had ever seen an employer threaten an employee like this in writing.
Be careful of people like that. Don't let anyone take advantage of you and abuse you. Leave if they treat you like replaceable garbage. It's not worth sacrificing your health and sanity for assholes.
I came to work naked on free-form Friday. Boss said quit or be fired. I'm serial.
... in a communications agency of 30. The novelty effect wears off quickly and the regular staying time is 3.5 years on average in agencies anyway - so no hurt feelings.
I'm somehow stuck in the agency camp these days.
It does have some upsides. Your the smartest guy on the crew when it comes to software development and deployment and you get to call some final shots. However, frustration tolerance is tested day in and day out as you get to deal with abysmally shoddy setups and dweeps who sell internet projects all year long but couldn't tell a client from a server if their life depended on it. You need lots of humor and need to learn to do your own thing lest you become jaded.
Another upside doing full-stack-web with agencies is that you get really chill.
There's little that I haven't seen and little that can shock me these days.
A regular Java guy would probably break down crying doing my work.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I was offered a better job at a better company with better pay in a much better part of the country. The offer was made by my former manager, who had left a year earlier in search of a better job at a better company with better pay in a much better part of the country.
Notably, he didn't try to recruit anyone else from his former company.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Seriously my joints were screaming in agony, and mentally I was losing it.
My IT director had to make a decision to stay or move home to take care of his parents - he chose family, rightfully so. The network admin moved on at the same time and I was left filling both rolls as best as a 20-somthing with no management experience could. I was asked to sit in on the interviews for the new IT directors and give my opinions. Three finalists were chosen, one of them was a great fit.
A day later there was an announcement of a new IT Director. A woman I never even met. She didn't know an RJ45 connector from a PS/2 port. She was spiteful, hated any of the old team and made our life a living hell. She started filling rolls with people she knew (who also were not qualified). Every Thursday they would play gold with the head master for an extended lunch. I found out that she was related to him and so were the two people she hired.
The final straw was when she asked me to put a Power Point together for training the new faculty and then provide a 2 hour training session with a 1 hour Q&A. I gave her the Power Point for approval. Never heard about a schedule so I figured the IT portion of the first day got axed like every other year. Then I go heat up my lunch and see my Power Point being being presented by one of her minions. They had the balls to replace my name with his on the slides. Then they asked me to cover the Q&A section which made it apparent that half the material was covered incorrectly.
I gave my resignation letter on a Friday. I gave them 3 weeks to transfer knowledge. I come in on Monday with my office door locks changed and all my personal property, including family photos and expensive vest in the dumpster. All the electronic stuff like phone chargers, drive docks and desk lamps were stolen. Fun times.
My boss was an asshole, setting unrealistic goals rather than negotiating them, then providing no support to achieve them. His favorite motivational advice was "You figure it out.". I went to work for a competitor with a 50% raise. He fired the next two people who took my old job until his boss figured things out and fired him. I learned a lot from him about how to not treat employees and coworkers.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The company's business strategy was "Sit around and wait for the contract fairy to drop business in our lap".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I should have done it before but waited until the last minute, when the startup was rumored to close. I guess I don't look forward at the grueling interview process we developers get subjected to.
I think you should leave as soon as the job is not rewarding anymore, I have unfortunately not seen many companies adjusting salaries and positions unless you mention it. By the time you feel like negotiating, you probably already looked elsewhere so you jump.
The companies have zero loyalty to you so you have to be ready to jump at a moments notice or better yet, keep jumping, you will usually get a better deal somewhere else.
I stopped going there once they told me I no longer had a job there. They "quit" me. However, the previous job was much more interesting. They moved me away from my family with the promises of a bigger, better life which never happened. Instead, the area they moved me into was actually declining due to the closing of the Air Force base there... but that part was "accidentally" not communicated to me. So when things didn't materialize, they wanted to move me again but I refused. And since they wanted me to move across state lines (again), I was able to refuse and collect unemployment until I found the job mentioned above that laid off all of us for India-based support (which I have nothing against - other than it cost me my job).
I've not quit a job, they all where sold, merged, or where outsourced.
I quit for religious reasons, they thought they were God, I didn't agree.
My options were to either leave the Bay, or find a job that paid six figures. Thankfully I was able to find the latter. Unfortunately around these parts you have to follow the money - not your passions - unless you're willing to skimp to an insane degree.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
got tired of dealing with clients not knowing what they're asking for and always scheming to not pay the agreed value.
...I was engaged by three Fortune 500 CEO's at the same time. Made a pile of money, and retired.
Not bad for a high-school dropout, eh?
Large company with surprisingly poor metrics and direction meant a lot of wasted effort and too many managers operating at their highest level of incompetence. That plus huge windowless cube farm, it was just too hard to get even obvious projects done. Kind of a depressing environment and any time I talk to someone still there I'm still glad I left!
It gets old really fast.
I was overworked, not being paid commensurate for my skills, had no clear career path to move beyond my position, and management did not treat the employees as subject matter experts.
2 jobs ago, engineering company. Got made redundant with a nice payout, started another job 1 week later.
Several years on, plant was closed. Got made redundant with a nice payout, started another job 2 days later.
Currently the bow is going under on this sinking ship. Another comment above says first to leave the sinking ship gets a spot on the adjacent one. Me, I prefer to wait for the bounty.
2017: Plant closure/End of Contract
2015: Laid off, no reason given
2014: End of Contract
2013: Left to be with family in different city
2010: Company had a tradition of releasing 10% of company every year
2009: Position was defunded
2007: Plant closure
$55,000 is 66.67% (SIXTY SIX PERCENT!) more than you!
If you fail that hard at such simple math, maybe you *are* only worth $33k...
...because it was there.
I quit because I got a better offer!
if that were true, i'd still be at that job.
I left my last job because of sexual harrassment. My lawyer says I should use the word alleged there, or it makes me look guilty.
That's it. I'm not american, so I worked 6 years doing a very famous in the 80s and 90s (still being used and sold) science calculator in the US, then took 1 sabbatical year, then found another offer to come back to the US, different business. Software market is huge in US.
Asshole bosses.
I've been in this game for 30 years, mostly contracting. Out of that time I've worked for some 25 clients some long term some short term. Out of those 25 odd clients I've run into about 4 serious serious assholes who just made it difficult to get out of bed in the morning.
Early in my career an old Italian-American guy told me this: "You find a good boss, stick with him or her. A good boss is like thirty grand a year extra in salary."
Except Trump thought his advisors meant Native Americans.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
I liked my job ok -- I was a sysadmin at a medium sized manufactuer and was there about 2.5 years. After about 2 years I had automated and resolved a ton of things, so when we didn't have a project to work on, i had 15 hours a week of downtime. I'd play in powershell read IT news, read up on tech we had that I couldn't leverage due to licensing or whatever.
but I had lousy co-workers, and my boss was just...painful and frustrating to work for. I had taken on a lot of random support because a coworker would hem and haw and get nothing done. My boss was terrible -- she was the boss by default because she had been there so long. But she was sort of mean, a decade or better out of practice, horrible at troubleshooting, short-sighted at planning and purchasing, had lousy day to day PC and technical skills, and i just got so tired of being there feeling like I had peaked. So i hit up a buddy at a health system nearby and he got me in for an interview. I got an offer for a 25% raise and way better benefits, so away I went.
That was two years ago -- great decision. My boss is great (not much of a people manager, but a good overall manager otherwise), I work with some really smart, hard working people, have gotten a promotion and more money, and have been able to focus what I work on and increase my skill set.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
1 year of original dev, 3 years of maintainence
also no teamwork. 700 person team. Giant pile of things to do. Pick one and do it. Not much real need for collaboration.
great company, great compensation, great perks. bored
Trump has done more to protect your job from Indians than any president since Carter.
Trump has created an environment where you are less likely to have an Indian come to the US to take your job, but more likely to have the entire department move to India.
I have never met someone in charge of hiring (whose budget is not inflated by VC money) tell me it is easy to hire software engineers and other IT staff right now. We have been at "full employment" for quite some time, and likely well over 5 years in the IT industry. The US only has 5% of the world's population but controls around 20% of the world's economy, and we won't be able to maintain the benefits that strength gives us with only 5% of the world's best and brightest working in the US.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
happened to me, 6 months salary + benefits was not that bad :)
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
In 2008, as a result of the continuing bad economy, my company's clients dropped off, so there wasn't a need for the newly-hired personnel. I left the prior company for a position with a little bit more pay, but the ability to work from home, have some international travel, and learn new technologies. I stay at my current employer because the pay is good, management is good & listens, the work is fun, and the commute isn't stressful.
I didn't fit their mold... they want someone who would rather push papers and organize picnics than do actual engineering work. Moving across the country every 3-4 years also didn't really appeal to me. Also they don't contribute to a 401k or anything like that and have a reputation for kicking people out at 16-19 years to avoid having to pay a pension.
Funny thing is, getting a job on the outside, you often end up working with a lot of the same people.
Yeah, turns out the federal government doesn't want you driving a commercial vehicle after you've crashed a truck due to an epileptic seizure from an undiagnosed brain tumor. This is doubley shitty given that I only got into driving a truck after I had to quit 3/4ths though a degree in network engineering to financially take are of my my entire remaining extended family. I can't really go back into my original chosen field at all now, given that removing the tumor damaged my Wernicke's area. Which is the part of the brain that handles speech and language processing. It really fucked up my ability to do math and read for extended periods.
I just resigned my position as a high school computer science teacher of 18 years. Before that I was a systems administrator. The current testing environment in education is simply dehumanizing and promising students/parents that their child will get employed in IT directly out of high school is criminal. School administrations and policy makers actually believe that any high school student can get A+/Network+ certified in less than a year of instruction with nothing more than theory and little hands-on. When they don't it must be the teacher that is lacking skill. I refuse to "teach to the test" and because of this I simply had to leave. We have a crisis in the U.S. when it comes to teaching information technology. It's not the teachers folks, it's the politicians and administrators.
Students today have no idea how to learn, but instead are skilled in the method of memorization, regurgitation for a test, forget what you memorized because now there is another test to memorize for, regurgitate, forget, memorize, etc... Critical thinking and learning can't exist in a testing environment and this generation is now ruined by ignorant policy. It's heart-wrenching.
I am a fan of small work environments. There are downsides, certainly, but overall I prefer the one on one interaction and the ability to really make a difference.
However, then 2008 hit and my small company job was under threat from budget cuts. Being a single parent I had to find more stable employment, so I took a stable job at a corporation.
Jesus...I always suspected Dilbert cartoons were, if anything, understating the situation, but to see it first hand was discouraging. I became so disillusioned with my field and those within it. Over 300 people in the IT division and only a handful doing any actual work; everyone else was dead weight ( at best ).
Stuck it out for 10 months, basically the amount of time it took me to find a small job ( far better pay and benefits ). Gave them the finger on the way out the door in the form of a very politically correct resignation letter.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Was a v- on an indefinite contract at MS, and happy to be there. I quit for a full time gig when they changed their rules for v- to remove indefinite terms for them.
Bad management...
I worked at a job that has seasonal crunch-times, followed by a season of long, long hours to support the released product. Think 60-80 hours a week. When I first started, the season of long hours was technically a code freeze; we only checked in critical bug fixes, and code pushes were arranged long ahead of schedule. Emergency code pushes were vetted by the chief architect. All in all, most of that time was spent killing time, waiting, and watching.
One season, everything changed. My boss (dev manager) left to go work for a competitor, and was replaced by someone from Sales. At that moment, the dev team became a boiler room. He over-promised his bosses, and expected us to deliver. Scrum become a bullshit "sign off on this estimate or else." If you tried to be conservative in your estimate, the meeting would drag on while he badgered you about why your estimate was so low ("I just don't see..." was his favorite phrase). Eventually you agreed just to put the meeting out of its misery; and you would be held to that estimate. So the crunch-time became almost unbearable. At the same time, my daughter was born. The combination of these things sent by blood pressure through the roof. My doctor warned me that I was extremely hypertensive (170/100) and that drastic action was needed. I took pills, changed my diet, I did everything but change my job.
You see, my coworkers (the ones that were all quitting around this time) used to joke and call me a "company man." I had never quit a job. Ever. I had only held two jobs before, and lost them both due to problems at the company (the first got hit by the dot-bomb, the second sold email software to ISP's [you can draw your own conclusions]).
The company owners were great; they really loved the employees, and they tried to make it the best they could. Unfortunately, they were blind to the problems with middle-management. The past year, to alleviate the work stress, they changed company policy on long hours. Basically, the new understanding was that, since we had remote capability and were on-call, it was no longer necessary for us to sit around 60-80 hours for a whole season doing nothing. For other divisions, this meant 40 hour work weeks. My manager's takeaway, however, was that the 60-80 hours could not be filled with actual work. Velocity was expected to increase by 50%-100%.
Soon after that first season ended, we had a week vacation and then geared up for another crunch period (yay! Only 40 hours, now!). One week shy of my daughter's first birthday, I woke up in the middle of a Friday night with my chest thumping. But it couldn't be a heart-attack; after all, I'm a hypochondriac, and it has never been a heart attack before. So I scheduled a same-day appointment that Saturday morning with my GP. Turns out I had had a total blockage of my lower-left ventricle for over 12 hours. Three stents, and lucky not to have permanent cardiac tissue damage. Luckier still not to be dead; my brand new cardiologist informed me that I was only hours from a catastrophic and unrecoverable cardiac event. I would not have survived the evening.
My cardiologist and GP agreed on this point: it was not diet, or exercise, or any other external factor that caused my heart attack; it was 100% stress. It should not have happened, especially at my age. They said I had to cut out the stress immediately.
So, being the company man that I am, I gave the company another season of long hours. But this time I did it right. I didn't let my boss get to me, I didn't volunteer for useless and unrewarding tasks, and all in all stopped being the jump-up-and-go guy I had been before. My manager informed me two weeks before my review that I was going to get poor marks for work throughput. I had not received a bad in 18 years, and I was not going to get one now. I put out my resume, and got hired by the first place I submitted it to (keyword search "work-life balance"). I handed in my resignation the day before my review.
Work will always be work, but it doesn't have to be terrible (and shouldn't be).
tl;dr: Don't wait until your job kills you to leave.
I quit because the customers were so abusive and hostile that there were times I wanted to either drink myself into oblivion, or just drive off a cliff.
Seriously, if you ever tell anyone to go kill themselves because you are angry, I hope you get raped with a cactus.
I had summer jobs...I left those because summer ended.
As an adult I've left my current job twice. Once because I got tired of the boss' attitude toward working me 6 days a week and not paying me for it. I went back after six months when I was having problems and he realized how badly I screwed up. Went back with a bit of a raise. The second time was because I got hurt on the job; found out the boss wasn't legally required to have insurance or workman's comp...so he didn't. I got to deal with a spinal injury with absolutely no ability to work and zero income. I only went back because the debt was piling up and people were getting upset. At least now he only works me what he's willing to pay.
The third and final reason I'll be leaving this job in about a year, according to my plan, is I'm just getting out of this god-forsaken expensive area and going to start over somewhere else. Jobs for what I do aren't common and they don't pay well; and combined with the high price of living means anything less than 70k/year isn't livable. I know the place I want to go has more affordable rent and probably more job options related to what I do that'll pay more.
I got asked in January of 2010 if I'd be willing to move from Los Angeles to a tiny rural town on the East Coast where the home office was being transferred to. I said no and started looking for a new job (the new CIO was a pompous jerk and someone I wanted nothing to do with; luckily he was back east, so I rarely encountered him). My boss knew about it; I trained a few people to take over my systems, but she was my primary backup (I was the DBA among other things; she had been at one point).
Came to work the week I was expecting the formal offer from my current job. CIO from the east coast was in town; they laid off my boss on Tuesday, then approached me on Wednesday and said, "We'll be relying on you more for the next several months." I was tempted to just keep quiet, but I decided to be honest and said, "No, you won't. I'm putting in my notice on Friday."
Best part, this was the first week of December, and I had the last two weeks off as vacation: my formal last day was 1/2, with my new job officially starting 1/3. One of the systems I managed was the HR system, and they knew about the whole thing and were actually really supportive (I'm still friends with a couple of them).
So, CIO got 1 week of cross training from me and that was that. I ended up doing some consulting for HR, but didn't lift a finger for the CIO. If he'd bothered talking to anyone, he'd have known I was leaving and could have changed his plans.
I had a job i loved, nice people to work with and easy enough that I was quite overqualified. Still, I work to be able to live, not live to be able to work.
Then management changed, several times. They introduced middle management and hired incompetent such to hide their own incompetence. The incompetent management spent fortunes on outside "experts" when we, in fact, were considered to be the experts by many in our sector. And when management actively stops listening to you and in the best of worlds listen to a consultant who say what you have been saying for words but for a salary that is three times yours, you feel devaluated. But most of the time, they were not competent enough to get a good consultant, but found the "expert" with no prior expertise in the field and only wanted to get a notch in their resume for working with a famous brand. That "expert" said nonsense that never would have panned out, yet management expected me and my colleagues to properly implement it. Then it failed, not because we made it fail, but because it was doomed from the start. Yet we were loyal to and did everything humanly possible to cushion the fall. We didn't want us to fail.
When middle management incompetence or even one case of criminal negligence was pointed out to upper management and even higher, it was brushed away! They were covering each others asses.
Before all of this, I had been there for over a decade and turnover in staff was almost 0% for that time. Only three people had left. One after her project was up. She was offered a permanent position but was pregnant and wanted to spend time with the kid when it was born. The second one got an offer to start a new business with former colleagues and it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She would go down in pay, but if she didn't try it she would have kicked herself for the rest of her life. The third one was hired for a project and it didn't work out. She wasn't a good fit. Ok, not 0% but pretty close when you consider the timeframe.
Then, within a year my the entire team I worked with is gone. Everyone resigned. And we stood for 80% of the revenue. They hired new people of course, still within a year they lost 70-80 years of experience (5 people) of having to worked at that place, developing our methods and streamlining our operation to allow for a 250% higher volume without hiring more people over that decade.
They held back my salary to balance out unjust differences. I then saw an internal memo of the salaries and I was second lowest. They held back all employee salaries to be able to give middle management a raise (themselves). On my annual job review the praise was stellar. After a lot of dealing I got a little better deal but still not anywhere close to what I wanted. So I said that I wanted a plan to get the regular raise. I was not in it for a huge raise, but if I do a great job (which both colleagues, customers and management testified to) I want at least the same raise that everyone gets on average, especially when we weren't doing bad financially. They agreed to the plan, yet nothing happened, despite me pushing for it.
I was the second last to go. By then I had serious stress issues from doing my job well but not getting listened to at all, and cleaning up the mess of everyone around me who made mistakes that eventually landed on my table. Perhaps I shouldn't have let the job get to me, but I am loyal to my workplace and my colleagues and if I can make something better I will, it is in my DNA. I am not slacking around or trying to avoid responsibility.
When I quit I got words of appreciation that was beyond this world. They had never seen such well documented and structured workflow. But then it was way too late.
It has taken me 8 months to get over that pressure over my chest every time I realize I am at risk of missing the bus or when two things pop up at the same time, small insignificant things. Luckily it was a few months ago when I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating, over an absurd nightmare ab
It's simple to find IT personnel if you set wages properly. The only ones having a hard time attracting talent are those with 1990's-level pay. That's what a booming economy is supposed to do.
My last job was with TRW. The work was interesting. My coworkers were friendly. The managers knew how to manage. The company treated me very well. Except possibly when I worked at UCLA at the beginning of my career, TRW was the most positive employment experience I had.
I was at TRW six years, during whichI had the commute from Hell. It took 2.5 hours to travel the 42 miles to home, an average speed of less than 20 miles per hour. Although I was taking not one but two prescriptions for high blood pressure, my blood pressure was out of control. Yes, going to and from a very enjoyable job was killing me.
TRW was bought up by Northrop Grumman. This meant that cashing out my pension (an option at TRW) would soon not be an option (not allowed at Northrop Grumman). However, Northrop Grumman committed to retaining TRW's benefit policies for two years. As soon as my Excel spreadsheets indicated I could afford to retire I did. I was not quite 62. Because interest rates were low (but not as low as today), my cash-out was high. My blood pressure dropped almost immediately.
Retirement is the best work of all. I have been at it 15 years. I recommend it highly.
Was one of the first employees of the business. Boss (who liked me) gave me plum assignment at a huge client. Worked there (quite successfully) for a year, made profits for the company ~20x what they'd paid me, expanded business beyond the original scope, etc.
While I was gone, power struggle at home office, my boss had his bluff called and was let go. When this project ended up at a stable point and I came back and said "ok what next interesting project can I get engaged in" his replacement said "I really don't have anything for you." We didn't get along, some of the reasons definitely my fault, so we mutually decided that I needed to find another opportunity.
That was 25 years ago, and I'm still at the firm I moved to, so I think it turned out ok.
-Styopa
My previously-large company has been reducing its presence in my small town for over a decade, slowly but surely. As a lot of my co-workers are considering retirement, and any new hiring is taking place at other sites, I bit the bullet and made a semi-lateral move to another company for the (hopefully) better long-term prospects. My roots and history runs pretty long in my small town, so don't (yet?) have the nerve to consider moving elsewhere.
was stuck in a small dead end city, had to go where the work is. I hate the new city. It's dirty and crowded and traffic sucks and the weather's worse. But there's jobs and they pay a lot better and I needed the money to get my kid through college.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They asked me to spoof PCI DSS compliance scan results... Posting AC for a reason.
To get back at university for a Master, now starting a Ph.D in Medical Science.
After 6 months I was bored as hell at the new job - I had automated most of my daily tasks - so when an interesting DevOps position at another company opened up, I jumped ship and collected another $15k pay increase.
How long will I stay here? Who knows. But in the meantime I'm learning a lot so I'll probably get another pay bump when I do jump ship.
When I hired on I was told about how much the company valued work life balance. Things started to change making the industry more competitive so the company stopped paying overtime, laid people off and then started requiring unpaid overtime. It wasn't just short term pushes either. It went on for years. They even sent out an email stating that the expectation was that salaried employees always work an average of at least 5% overtime even after the mandatory overtime was finished. It was exciting work and I enjoyed the job while I was single, but now that I have a family my priorities have changed.
See subject: So, I took a risk 11++ yrs. ago & gave it a shot. It's worked out. I'm getting older (near 54 now) & don't have the energy I used to also.
Before I was into computing STRICTLY for a job (started as a techie, then network admin, then programmer, to programmer-analyst, then software engineer titles circa 1994-2008) I used to work 2 jobs in my younger days (1 fulltime, other parttime) & when I did software engineer/programmer-analyst, I was also doing freeware/shareware on the side (harder when I was less experienced too) & I got lucky & have some commercially sold code to my name I earned monies from also.
Living a "dual identity" 2 job life?
It's a HUGE DRAIN on your time living that life but it MAKES RETIRING EARLY more likely/more POSSIBLE is all. That & some luck too admittedly.
* I'd tell ANYONE to "start your own show/business" - you try even HARDER when it's yours but it's not all "daisies & balloons" (maybe less so in ways sometimes) but you get MORE of your TIME (the most precious thing along w/ health & family imo) & more of a profit since you "set the tone & prices" there, but it's not perfect.
Nothing is.
APK
P.S.=> I am GLAD I elected to do so BUT I still do contracts if the money's right & the project interests me (why not. Most time's it's a good idea, especially near year-end when "budgets are burnt" & utilities costs rise in winters around here)... apk
I worked at my previous job for many years developing software that provided essential functionality to a certain industry. During that time I also developed entertainment themed software (games/demos/simulations) in my free time for fun.
Eventually I came to the point where I got tired of my job and thought "I've spent a good chunk of my life development software that people needed, and now I want to do what I consider fun as a full time job." So despite the job security, competitive salary and benefits, and all the good friends I worked with who really did care about their work, I changed careers to game development.
I started my new job at a lower salary than I was making before, but I'm happier than I've been in a long time and still living well within my means.
I really feel like I'm living the dream and I wish more people had the same opportunities.
A new manager came in who systematically replaced over half of the team with people from his last company. I went from having the best performance review on the team with one manager to somehow having the worst performance review on the team with the new manager.
It all worked out for the best though. I've been happily self employed since then. Teaching C++, speaking at conferences and running my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/l...
I Do C++
Quite simply: I hated every single day that I went into work.
I managed a small development team for an internal application in the mortgage industry at a global banking/mortgage company. We were in the Risk organization and not in IT, and apart from my three developers, nobody had any clue about technology or how software development works. This resulted in conversations with my peers (business owners) about how nothing worked right, and their idea of requirements was "we had a conversation about this!". They refused to document anything. My boss (a director) was even worse, a bitter old hag who admittedly liked to micromanage everything. When she would fly off the handle about something minor and demand to know why it was done that way, my developers would respond with a copy of her email requesting that exact thing. Then I would be told to talk to my team about their attitudes. It was like that EVERY DAY. My boss had multiple conversations with me about the "performance issues" of my team. They were actually fine, but had been beaten down by that witch over time. I could only shield them so much from her. I still can't believe I lasted a year and a half in that environment. I ended up taking a 9% pay cut just to get out of there, and was a couple of months away from a potential good bonus. It was worth every cent to leave.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It started out as an employment contract and grew from there. The company owns everything I do, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I write a book, they own it. I write an app in my evenings at home, they own it. My salary is too low, yet I can't moonlight. I can't even work on Open Source projects to land my next job. The breaking point came when they changed their employment contract and demanded I sign the new one, which prohibited me from working for any "competitors" for 5 years after leaving their employment. "Competitors" being any company who produces any software whatsoever, from a 2 line BASH script to Oracle or Salesforce, used by so much as a single medical institution or government agency anywhere in the world. Yeah, that won't hold up in court. But if they fire me, I'll go bankrupt & starve while the courts take years to figure that out. Which means, if they want me to work 120+ hour weeks for the next few years with no additional pay, I do it or I die.
Bastards tried (unsuccessfully) to cancel my second to last paycheck & refused to pay my final paycheck to force me to sign.
I had another job, that did not involve slavery, in 7 weeks. I was on unemployment for 6 of those weeks. It took me a year & a half of court hearings to collect it, during which I proved my employer had committed perjury to deny me unemployment benefits.
Google's decided to be a political party rather than a tech company. Firing James Damore was a wake-up call that any form of disagreement may be arbitrarily met with termination. Mouthing the Good Think of the Party is required in order to advance.
I was hired for an IT project that turned out to have no real business backing / sponsors. After a while it ran out of budget. End of story, end of position.
I had been working in mental health for a number of years, and in an inpatient unit for 3 years. It started to wear on me and I stopped caring that people around me were suffering. I went to a vocational school and changed careers entirely to manufacturing. It's a lot more challenging than I expected. I think burn out can happen to anyone in any career. I didn't realize badly I hated going to work. A small indication of that is I'm never late to work anymore and before I was chronically late.
I left my last job because of the workload. I was hired as a programmer and ended up doing all the programming during the day and all the systems administration at night. Nothing was ever done fast enough (go figure) and there was never any money to get the tools or help needed. It was leave the job or leave this life. I like living.
My new job is only some part time programming with a lot of field work. Almost zero stress and I get to travel eight states.
- We dream of the stars. Now let us return to them.
I wanted my kids to spend time with family instead of being immediately put into daycare for most of the day and then come home to tired parents who would be rushed to clean, make dinner, have a bath, and probably be irritable with such a busy routine and no time to unwind and play. When the kids are of school age, then it's back to work.
So besides a decent pay raise and a job title change I needed (Tier 2 Help Desk to Systems Administrator), I already knew who my boss was going to be. Very flexible with Telework and days off, gives us comp time off the record (company doesnt recognize it, but he lets us take extra time off or half days should we work late on others), and has the mentality of "As long as I dont hear any complaints about you guys, I do not care what you guys are doing. You're all adults and I trust you to get the work done."
The job has given me a ton of growth that I needed as well. I'm heading up out 2008R2 to 2016 and vSphere 5.5 to 6.5 migration and getting a job title change to vSphere Admin in a few weeks which comes with a 50% pay bump. Not too shabby for being with the company for less than a year so far and my real Sys Admin gig.
Retired from last job. Quit the penultimate job to go to last job.
Passionately Indifferent
Mostly I grew bored.
Also got a job offer with better salary, benefits and better collegues which was also closer to my home.
Soo, no-brainer, basically.
Hired as a server and Network Administrator.
What it REALLY was: They wanted an Accountant. Find and tag 500.000 or so mobile devices spread accross the world with only a car and Active Directory as resources. No travel budget.
Um.. No.
My great job for a Fortune 50 company went overseas... In the states they have been closing all regional offices for years, consolidating and reassigning duties. The data jobs went to India, the tech jobs to The Philippines, and anybody who is not working in one of the new "super center" locations they created is either being laid off, taking early retirement or just plain retiring.
Because the company is sending the jobs to company workers in India and The Philippines, they are not outsourcing the jobs. They are keeping the jobs in-house and are "Off Shoring" the jobs. Whatever you call it, it sucks for all of us U.S. workers.
After 33 years of among other things running the various ERP systems at the company I worked for they phased out the last one for the fancy new system that the large company that had bought us 12 years earlier had finally gotten working well enough to bring my subsidiary into the fold. The timing was nearly ideal because I was ready to retire anyway at 64 years of age. Now I'm enjoying not getting up and going to work every day and being a able to spend my time as I see fit.
Back in 1990 I left a job at a drugstore (it was called Payless drugs - a US West coast company something like a bigger Walgreen's or a smaller Walmart). I had graduated and it was time to get a real job. I've now been at that real job for 28 years. So - I left my last job because it was just a job to get me through school.
I never got a performance review from the same person twice. Quite often my reviewer had only been with the company a couple weeks. The final manager was eagerly stepping on necks to climb the ladder.
It's simple to find IT personnel if you set wages properly. The only ones having a hard time attracting talent are those with 1990's-level pay. That's what a booming economy is supposed to do.
That is a zero sum game, so even if everyone raised their salaries you wouldn't have enough workers. Or we would just start having shortages in other high skill industries if more students moved from pre-med to computer science.
A long term solution could certainly include significant increases in education funding, especially when targeting today's disadvantaged demographic groups, but that would take decades to bear fruit. Increased immigration is the only short term solution.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
On call 24x7, pager, company cell, laptop always available and required to respond. So no 'vacations' without cell service. Job description carefully written so that we were exempt from overtime laws and standby/oncall compensation. Figured out that just based on the number of hours physically at the NOC I was earning the same as a entry-level clerk at a nearby supermarket, and if I figured in the number of hours responding to issues outside the office I was making less than minimum wage.
Now I have no mandatory OT requirement, no mandatory on-call, 40 hour work week, 30+ days off per year (counting federal holidays), comp time, and a 401(k), and they pay, either in part or in whole, for a lot of my certifications and training.
Which is also why I support unionizing IT workers (and my current IT department is part of a union).
My last two job changes each nearly doubled my take-home pay. My habit of studying rather than playing Candy Crush probably had something to do with that.
I could get another big jump in pay by switching again, but I REALLY like working from home rather than dealing with traffic. I also like that we don't normally work long hours.
My next move will probably be because of two things:
A strategic move to inoculate myself from offshoring and H1B.
Evidence that I won't be able to continue in my current position because either my job is being sent overseas or the company isn't doing well.
I've identified two companies near where I live in Dallas which will be my next destination, hopefully. Now I need to carefully read their want ads and make sure I become familiar with the skills they'll need.
The company laid off half the team which increased the work load of those left.
Our oncall was horrible, you were guaranteed to be woken up and work on weekends.
With less staff oncall was more frequent.
Senior Leadership refused to spend money or allocate time to fix the root causes of the issues.
I worked at a chocolate factory as a line tech (ran the molding line, managed people, maintained equipment) for 11 years in P.A. Hourly pay was good $22/hour with doubletime sunday and triple time holidays. Place was not too bad when I started, but the founder of the company was aging and started up with a board of directors and all that. Place was really going downhill. Besides working 7 days a week (which was in place for decades), to make more money for the company each year benefits were being taken away and employees were slowly being replaced with temps. Backshifts would leave messes and first shift would have to pick up the slack without being given any extra time. Management acknowledges this; however it got to the point that the backshifts could not be punished because if they left the company who would do the work (temps were not trained and often came/go). At one point the supervisor had a moment when he left his guard down and honestly told me that he has been noticing that the regulars (who where there 20-30 years) are just not caring anymore its so bad.
Well it got so bad I left and went to the local college and enrolled (after I opened up 3 credit cards to pay for this). Its to the point they broke me and I dont care about debit. Best decision I ever made. Getting mostly A's and will have a good opportunity to get a better job and pay off the debit.
One side note about the industry; co manufacturing is very common. Hersey, mars, dove, ect.. do not mold/package most of their own candy. Its farmed out to the lowest bidder.
or if it is a general trend. It seems that management is more interested in messing with people than in getting work done. And if they can't cow you completely done then they get rid of you. When unemployment was 8% they had a freer hand to do so but it has become a habit and they can't stop. It is the same with not giving raises.
I was doing the workload of 2+ people (and had the numbers to prove it). They weren't adding new hires to the oncall rotation quickly enough. They agreed it was a problem, but didn't act to correct it. When I gave notice, they sighed and said they knew I would soon leave. At least I left on good terms.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
...and snapped their fingers.
No rhyme or reason for selection other than it's suspected they had a target budgetary amount and a workforce percentage limit -- no consideration to the value/performance of any individual, no consideration any strategic initiatives already in flight.
I am APK the great "LORD of HOSTS", a.k.a. AlecStaar or Alexander Peter Kowalski.
See subject & APK Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux h t t p : / / I . a m . a . f u c k i n g / a s s h o l e . r e t a r d . z i p (remove spaces between characters & download).
I am the godlike creator of various GUI front-ends for other people's configuration files.
Calling people ne'er-do-wells or Jealous JOWIEs is how I think I win every argument
When people state the truth about me I get really mad and accuse them of projecting which is something I do all the time.
Don't call me out on anything unless you are willing to prove you too can write some strings to a file programmatically
Spamming and being a general pain in the ass is what I do
Listen as I relive my glory days of being a college athlete in the early 80s
You must be conspiring with the Jews and Soros if you disagree with me
Bask in my greatness as I can do a ping as a non root user.
Watch as I whine about my work being flagged as malware by anti-virus software.
Witness my descent into madness
APK
But then I wanted to go back in time and work with real hardware that glows in the dark (vacuum tubes).
So I left Intel Jones Farm in Hillsboro Oregon to retire to Bellingham Washington and volunteer full time at the Spark Museum, where they have antique radios and electroncis.
So, I pirouetted off.
Here is a video of myself pirouetting out of Intel! Dancing at Intel
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
3 reasons:
A) I was able to cut down my commute from 2+ hours a day to 30 mins a day round trip
B) Our project was bogged down with lack of management/focus. Development came to a halt and things got very very boring
C) The next company offered 20% more pay
I worked as a contractor for IBM for 2 years. They had a "duck-duck-goose" style of reducing headcount. You were a cog in the machine with no way of showing the team that reduced headcount your value. Within a couple of weeks of starting there, some guy I'd never seen before walked around the cubicles and tapped the guy across from me, "you're out. have your stuff gone by Wednesday".
When the contract ended, I was fortunate enough to be placed on a new contract. The offers for me at the time was to move to Tennessee to work on building out a Data center, be a Web Developer, or be a backup and storage admin for a remote contract. In order to get the contract, I paid $6,000 out of pocket for a class (yes, contractor so IBM wouldn't pay for it).
In that year a couple of people were tapped to depart including our customer interface who had to transition all her documentation and contract stuff over to another member of the team before she left.
The apparent randomness of the selection process was pretty uncomfortable for me so I found another position and changed jobs. The pay was a bit more but the position was full time employee. Been here for almost 11 years now.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
How does the saying go? Employees don't leave bad companies. They leave bad managers.
The company hired a bad manager. I tried to make it work but it became clear that the new manager was a monster.
I left about half way through the nearly complete departure of the department.
I'm a consultant, and shifted what I was working on for two big reasons - no commute, and a change in what I was working on. I had been working on my previous project for about three years and thought I was starting to get a little too comfortable just doing very similar work over time... It's great to become proficient in a system and a subject but it's dangerous (carrier wise) to let yourself linger there too long.
Full time working remote was absolutely a great change to make, I recommend it highly and it would be a huge consideration in potential future work I consider.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wanted to retire and start enjoy have time to do what I want to do. I had been working since I was 10 YO always in school or work. Spent many years in music business (many aspects) and most of the last 30 plus years in programming and then SysAdmin. So situations came together to make it work so I left. Actually the last job was the worst run and managed place of any and that was a motivation. They begged me to stay another six months, but I knew it was so they could fire others that needed the job and dump their work on me, so I said no. I'm five years later I'm the happiest I've ever been.
My dad offered me this advice, years ago: "In life, you don't get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate." You might say that it's a philosophical variation on the old adage, "You have to move out to move up," because the two frequently lead to the same end result. After all, if you stay in a job year after year, than there's a halfway decent chance that you're not negotiating -- or at least, not negotiating hard -- which almost certainly means that you're not getting what you deserve. Thus, in order to get the pay that you think you deserve, you have to interview with other employers and negotiate with them for a better paycheck and/or benefits than whatever you're currently getting. That may mean leaving an otherwise "comfortable" job with a window office, in favor of a cubicle in Dilbert's world and a much bigger paycheck... but that's just part of the negotiation; sometimes it requires both sides to give something up.
And frankly, that roughly sums up why I've left each of my last four jobs. (I figure I'll work my way back to a window seat, eventually.)
We burned through N CEO's in 3 months (don't want to say how many) and have fired double digits percentage of engineers (don't want to say the percentage but its over 25%). So, it seems like co is not doing too well.
No it isn't. You don't understand what a zero sum game is.
I was hired as a developer and Interim Project Manager. It would be better described as Scrum Master but the company leadership had no idea what Agile development was. Everytime I objected to something because that's how the team felt about it, I was looked down upon as some kind of problematic child. They proceeded to hire a guy with no software development experience and made him the new PM. He just said yes to everything they asked him and then bullied the team to do it.
But the more interesting time was when I quit on github over my company moving to vagrant. I'm probably one of the only people who have ever quit on github. * I won't utilize github either since Microsoft bought them.. not that I was using them before that due to other actions the company took. Decentralize everything!
What it would do is focus technology resources on companies doing something worthwhile with technoloy, rather than having dozens of firms in every city that suck up all the talent converting marketing materials into websites, because marketing companies have the most money to throw around.
We need a contraction in software development. Most of it's worthless derivative shit.
I had just finished my M.S. in Information Assurance to add to my 10 years of IT Security experience and CISSP. I got offered a job that paid 40% more than an already good salary. As a bonus, no more on-call work.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
I don't discuss professional issues with the public at large. Only fools who think they're untraceable do.
My company had two overnight guys quit unexpectedly. My boss says, AC, we need you to cover for them until we get replacements. I say sure boss, short term, right? Yes, he said.
One year later they finally hired a new guy and used him to move one of the existing night guys to days. I started shopping my resume around that very day and found a place two miles away that wanted me to work days at a 20% higher salary.
So... virtue signalling then?
I've been laid off a couple times now. One caught me completely by surprise. So now I pay a lot more attention to the health of the company and just how important my job is to the company. My last job move I noticed the critical customer I was supporting was winding down their usage of our software, which would make me unneeded baggage. The time before, I noticed my manager wasn't fond of me and was unlikely to renew my contract. I've found I can make much better jumps when I'm still employed rather than needing to take the first thing that comes along that pays the bills.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
Getting micromanaged by a manager who was on PTO was the last straw.
1st bad boss started good, but turned bad when it turned out he had no backbone and let everyone push him (and by proximity, me) around. 2nd bad boss was just bad. 3rd - layoff. 'nuff said.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
I spent 7 years in a big nasty company that ate our small happy (but slowly failing) company, and most of the opportunities that came around were contract, narrow, and not the leadership position I'd been in.
Then I got a phone call from the CEO of a company -- a guy I knew and respected. He wanted me for thought leadership and technology I was one of only a few dozen people who really knew it; was willing to give me the salary and bonus I deserved. No resume, no HR hoops. I said yes.
Now a year later we've been bought by a big company that doesn't seem nasty... I'm holding my breath.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I left because I was bored, the company I was working for last had some long term employees, basically we used to call the furniture. They were also very stingy with system knowledge, trying to get any information out of them was practically impossible unless you went and stood at their desks and bugged them until they helped. So I didn't - I would dig into the code and figure it out for myself, but that meant that it would take me twice as long to complete certain tasks and they started complaining about that. Left shortly afterwards. To be honest that was a pain, but I could have just put in a couple more hours and everything would have been fine, but I didn't want to. Code might be code, but I am heartily sick of financial code, I've been doing it for the majority of my career, and as one BA (who used to code) said to me about financial software and why she changed to being a BA, financial code is all the same, you read some data, you change some of it, and then write it back again. Boring ass shit. I was once tasked to finding a 2 cent discrepancy in a balance of a trillion - took me two fucking weeks (no one else had been able to find it) if I ever have to do that again I will resign on the spot. Life is too short for that shit. Now I work for a huge company in one of their teams doing IoT stuff, love it. I work overtime not because it's required of me, but because I am having so much fun.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Go to Oracle
I come to Slashdot only to read sigs. One you are reading is mine.
See subject & You WISH you were me (since you impersonate me) & since you SAY so? A a "portrait" of me https://365songsblog.files.wor... (lol, FITS ME MORE THAN YOU KNOW actually).
* This is what you PUT UP WITH when you're "World-Class" (like ME): STALKERS stalking you by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts (everyone sees THAT constantly happening to me, & I suspect it's INFERIOR competitors, webmasters & advertisers (primarily/mostly) & lastly, quite possibly malware makers (as my hosts engine affects them all adversely BUT gives users of it more SPEED/SECURITY/RELIABILITY & more anonymity online)).
APK
P.S.=> 3 things tell me I am doing it well & doing it right:
1st = User praise of my hosts engine https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
2nd "ATTACKS" I GET (from UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous fools, just like Elon Musk got https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... )
3rd BEING IMITATED as "Imitation IS the sincerest form of flattery" https://linux.slashdot.org/com... ... apk
I ran the Quality Lab and was being asked to change test parameters from the industry standards so more product would pass and could be shipped. I would have been fine if they had gotten approval from the customer for the deviation but they also wanted to hide the change from the customer.
I thought I was tough and could take anything they threw at me, but when they put Windows 10 on my computer...
I'm sorry, I don't think I'm emotionally ready to talk about it yet. I think I need an emergency appointment with my therapist.
I was caught sexually harassing myself in the server room.
My position was outsourced to TCS along with most of the rest of IT Operations Before I was actually let go, TCS figured out that they didn't have anyone who could do what I did, so they hired me. That began the worst year of my life in terms of satisfaction and work/life balance. As soon as I found a suitable position elsewhere, I left and never looked back.
but the moral is, small companies are not necessarily better than big ones.
also, beware of small companies run by owners with attention deficit disorder.
Absolute statements are never true
I worked for a startup. They hired me as a firmware expert, asked me to do hardware design shortly after when they broke their relationship with a partner hardware startup. I have significant hardware design experience but told them Iâ(TM)d only take the job if they agreed to certain commitments, they agreed but then ignored all of my recommendations and failed to follow thru on those commitments. I felt like we were robbing our VCs - burning through their money with nothing to show for it due to clueless decisions that had almost not chance of succeeding and marginal return if they did. I steered them to a hardware vendor I knew could reliably deliver what they wanted, then I gave them an ultimatum which they agreed to. They again they failed to meet those commitments. I gave them a reasonable exit plan so I could pass on what they needed to finish the project, but they rejected it and tried to bind me to a contract extension with terms that could be easily manipulated to screw me. They still owed me about 2K for travel expenses and were bound to pay them due to my original employment contract, but they tried to make it contingent on my signing the new contract despite telling me they would pay them regardless. So I walked out on them with a voice recording of them saying they would reimburse me and a hard copy of the unsigned new contract. I had a signed copy of my employment contract which I had demanded at hiring time. Sent all of that to an attorney more than six months later, after they failed to repay my expenses, and received payment a month later at no cost to myself.
The guy that hired me, and CEO of the company at that time, had been expelled from university for running a music sharing service that violated many copyrights, and had been prosecuted, but his father managed to have his record sealed so it didnâ(TM)t show up when I did a background search on him before taking the job. He was the one who told me about it, and seemed to be proud of it.
The cool startup I worked for couldn't make enough money selling to scientists. "The money" insisted we try selling to the military. This went fabulously well: we got bought by a defense contractor. I walked out on moral grounds.
I haven't quit yet but I'm looking - and the bathroom situation is a big part of it. The building has enough bathroom facilities to accommodate 10 men using the bathrooms simultaneously. But the bathrooms are locked (because the lawyer with the little yippy dog and the Tesla doesn't like delivery people using "his" bathroom). And our office manager has decided that the eight men in our little software development company all have to share one bathroom key.
I left a job I loved working with awesome people and a not-terrible commute in exchange for a nearly 50% increase in take-home pay.
(That was a ~%30 increase in actual pay, plus decreased cost of insurance and increased employer contributions to retirement.)
I love my new gig, but I miss the camaraderie of the old one. It's a little lonely.
Boss opened a store that they're managing into the ground. Outstanding quality of product, but no general framework, no training, no set breaks, bad communication all around. 2 years open and everything is unchanged. Couldnt take it anymore.
I left my position as computer admin in 1997 when I found out about a EU-sponsored marketing course. For half a year the EU paid me about 700 Euros just for attending. Learned a lot. Even spend 2 months abroad at a british company (I'm German).
During this time I started working as freelancer author for several computer magazines. After that I went full time as a freelancer computer book author. This is the thing I'm still doing today.
I was lucky - I was over 50 when Carly subsumed Compaq, so I grabbed the bronze parachute in June, 2002.
Watched from afar as my old group was dissipated, the 2000+ person facility sold off and a lot of friends saw
their jobs shipped to south-central Asia.
At least my wife and I were able to make use of the availability of the group health insurance, despite the price.
Sysadmin in a clinic location owned by a corporate health system. Corporate had me locked down where I couldn't do anything without their permission (Example: They wouldn't let me have access to Group Policy for my own OU.) and they were anywhere from unresponsive to obstructionist when I begged for help with anything. The local I.T. crew in the clinic had a 'one team, work together, the patient comes first' work ethic and our corporate overlords had that 'we're the big boys and you're just a pathetic remote office in the sticks, screw you that's not my job, protecting my job comes first' attitude.
It's a complicated story and I don't want to get too far into the weeds, so this is a compressed summary:
I was an unofficial lead for a team for about 3 years, building out a system. When they finally made the lead job a real job, I didn't get the job. I accepted that (they had multiple good, solid people) reasonably well considering I was told I was not succeeding as a lead based upon a gut feeling, with no backing data. Yes, I was told by my manager he just had a gut feeling, he had no evidence.
The new lead didn't actually provide leadership, instead his personal nature was tinkering and exploring on his own. We also just butted heads from personality. He eventually stepped down, in part because of me asking for leadership, and another lead was chosen. That lead simply ignored me, effectively 'routing around damage' since he saw the problems with the last lead.
At the same time I noticed how the CTO was unable to transition from being a doer to a strategist, guiding the company. Much of the company was sort of lost, with individuals off doing their own thing rather than a cohesive whole. During my last few years, while I was mostly being ignored by my team, I started looking at the overall structure of the company and realized that much of my issues in my own team were issues the entire company faced.
I concluded I couldn't accomplish what was needed to move the organization forward and trust was broken on both sides. I may have been part of the failure, maybe if I had simply kept silent and let things blow up on their own it would have worked out better, but that's not in my nature. Instead I moved on where I could contribute in a more leadership related role.
company was bought out and I had to personally take the computer equipment from about 2000 "Laid Off" employees. Then when I requesting details on completing tasks in the new companies systems on our slack channels, my supervisor got a call, telling me to stop asking questions, because it was making the IT management look bad for not having any knowledge articles or written down policies. I found a new position making a little bit more and made sure my last day was the week before they started moving 1500 people to the new building
How fucking Rude..
MSMASH, please stop this nonsense..
while I wish no harm to ANYONE,
Your actions are really pushing the limits.
Is there some level of fuck-tard-ation involved with this situation?
I mean,, are you so hopped up on drugs that you just dont realize?
There's no possible way we can lose any "trade war" harder than we're already losing at trade. ANY change will be an improvement over the status quo.
Interesting. Will Bitcoin / Ethereum or it's ilk ever displace cash to become the incentive for job change? Are there any legal ramifications? Some cryptocurrencies are anonymous, so this could become a way to shuffle money "under-the-table" to facilitate employment shifts.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I could not ethically stomach building software for MIB, and other 'law enforcement' agencies that for example jailed so many (blacks) for smoking a joint. Etc. What can I say? My ex-employer acquired customers of ill-repute over the years, after I started working there.
I was making excellent money and technically I liked the work but we all need to take take responsibility for the consequences of our work.
My life became much worse financially but I can live with that.
Money, industry, the work and location. OK, more details, very big pay bump. I am back in the gaming industry, my last place was not a software company and didn't want to do what it takes to be one (claimed it couldn't find software engineers in Seattle :-O ) and my last company was in a place was becoming overrun with homeless camps. I got tired of the feces on the sidewalk every morning.
Bullshit. Lots of talented people left the software industry due to wage stagnation while real cost of living skyrocketed.
Lots more talented people are moping away at worthless "startup" jobs - because no "real" company is willing to offer a "real" wage. So better to take a shitty wage plus a lottery ticket, rather than just a shitty wage. Do you really think a skilled programmer WANTS to waste his life creating yet another social surveillance app to satisfy the ego of some rando inbred venture capitalist?
They stopped paying our health benefits and didn't tell us until we started getting retroactive bills from our healthcare providers.
I was terrible at the job. It was a total mismatch in skills and aptitude. I hated every second at the job and couldn't be motivated to do it. I should have quit but I think I just got depressed an unmotivated. Got divorced while at the job. I had a few amazing co-workers and a good boss so I really can't blame anyone but me. I'm working for myself now, a million times happier and no regrets about the divorce.
Was contractor. I was bored with what I was doing.
Another company came along and promised an exciting project to work on. Salary was comparable, but they promised great benefits plus a MUCH better retirement plan. I accepted the offer.
A month after I started they cut the retirement plan by over 60%. This kind of thing doesn't happen overnight or in a vacuum. The HR people knew this was coming when we negotiated salary. I felt betrayed, so I quit as soon as I had another job lined up.
I got sick of being an engineer. It wasn't because I don't like engineering. I love it. It was rather because of the way engineers have come to be treated in the US.
So, I quit engineering and became a high school math and science teacher at a private Christian school. The pay is quite a bit less but it is far more rewarding, and I get summers off.
First time I was out for seven months. Second time, was the charm.
The last job I quit was over money. I worked for a small family-owned business. I was one of 2 employees not a member of the family. I believed in the company and the product, but all raises were directly tied to cost of living increases (4 years there and I had the same buying power). I jumped ship to get a 20% pay increase.
The choice of company was not the best decision I made. Within a year there was a hostile takeover with some majorly bad changes. Paid holidays cut in half. PTO cut in half. Dress code went from t-shirt / shorts to suit coat and tie (TBH, I always wore business casual prior to the change). Went from my own cubicle to 18 linear inches on a shared table. Went from 4-10s to 5-10s. All this with no compensation. My position was eliminated before I had the chance to quit. All the other engineers quit at the same time so development was outsourced. The company has since contacted me offering double salary, but the work environment has not changed.
I'm now celebrating 6 years at my current company. My pay is 30% higher than the previous company. My benefits are next to none. There is a real year-end bonus instead of a $5 gift card to Starbucks. Raises are a mix of cost of living increasing and performance based. Unlimited paid-time-off (assuming supervisor approval) is another great perk.
In 2001, was working as sr. engineer for a billion-dollar company, a new female boss was parachuted to our group. A month or so later, one Saturday late afternoon, I was reading a book at home when I got a call from her, asking if I'd like to have a drink as she was close by. How the fuck did she have my home address? Obviously she looked up my emergency contact info. There was no good cafe so I took her to a nearby bar. After 2 beers, she said she was dizzy, so I offered to drive her home, gentleman as I was. After she got in her car, she caught me by surprise by pulling me onto her. I knew her dizziness was fake, so I fucked her hard in that parking lot, then drove her home and did her again at her apartment. From then on, I fucked her 3 times a week on average. A year later, the company issued some kinda policy regarding zero tolerance for sexual harassment, with explicit example that looked quite similar to my case. I got scared, if she turned around and sued me for raping her, I'm fucked, so I quit. Since then, never dare to fuck my boss anymore.
They were shilling IBM Jazz SCM. Management bought everything that they were selling hook, line and sinker.
We were looking at replacing ClearCase and Git had to be bad because it was free.
Moved to industry when the project was completed. Funding was renewed for a follow up so other people still work on it.
(posting anon so that you won't find out how fricking old I really am.
Found a real job. Had been contracting / consulting. Healthcare costs were killing me (my wife actually).
Being shown the door due to background check finding 40 yr old MJ possession conviction.
Being shown the door due to company downsizing.
Better offer
Being shown the door due to company downsizing
Company tanked
Company tanked
Better offer
I am APK the great "LORD of HOSTS", a.k.a. AlecStaar or Alexander Peter Kowalski.
See subject & APK Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux h t t p : / / I . a m . a . f u c k i n g / a s s h o l e . r e t a r d . z i p (remove spaces between characters & download).
I am the godlike creator of various GUI front-ends for other people's configuration files.
One person stalks me as I shitpost and I dusted them on another site but in reality I am widely hated.
When people state the truth about me I get really mad and accuse them of projecting which is something I do all the time.
Don't call me out on anything as I will state that you are a webmaster and that I cut off your revenue stream.
You must be conspiring with the Jews and Soros if you disagree with me.
Mistaking mockery and parody for impersonation is how I think people flatter me because I can't possibly understand that they detest me.
See me lash out at one person for 2 weeks straight and claim everyone who mocks my retarded ass is actually them.
Bask in my greatness as I post my advertisements in discussions where they don't belong, by the way this is every discussion I post in.
I demand your age sex and location so that I can threaten to show up and kick your ass and will call you a pussycake but am actually too scared to actually do anything but be a keyboard warrior.
Watch as I claim I am world class and a winner but in reality I am a fucking loser.
Witness my descent into madness
APK
I was a pilot, but began developing a medical problem that I knew would ultimately lead to loss of my medical certificate in a few years. So I quit.
Anyone else?
I was earning $20/hr with no raise in sight (in addition to multiple broken promises that I would be working on bigger projects and learning new things) and found an opportunity earning more like $25/hr.
Earned enough. Invested it. Now instead of programming for money, I perform and teach music and program for fun.
If you can afford to live on a little less each month, especially when you are under 20, start investing a little each month.
Even if it is just $20 each month. The dividends after 35 years are worth it.
Left San Francisco to return to NYC. Probably not an exception.
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
I knew I was done when I had to fill out a form to schedule a meeting to form a committee to train people how to fill out the form to schedule meetings. I wish I was making this up.
Another time we had a "Design for Six Sigma" meeting to determine the best option for a component. When we came up with the best option, the person in charge of the meeting said we had to start all over again since that's not the outcome sought by upper management. So I said, why don't we add a column for "What bossman wants" weight it higher than any other requirement? Did not go over well.
Also money.
You already know the short answer: you can rarely get a raise equal to what they will pay your replacement. And even if you get a seemingly good counter offer, it will be held over your head and you'll be stuck working for a company that knew they were underpaying you doing whatever they want you to do, instead of the job description that interested you elsewhere.
I left for a job with overall compensation in the neighborhood of 200% what I was making. My former boss, to add insult to injury, apparently had forgotten how little they were paying me (despite always telling me I was receiving one off the bigger pay increases each year and to be grateful). When I came into his office so he could try to counter, he said, "...you make, what, about XX..." and it was about 10% higher than they were paying me. I like my former boss, I think he was just willfully ignorant of how crappy the compensation was, because he wanted to think he was taking care of his employees. I am so blessed by God to be where I am now and I pray that he is learning to be more honest with his team, his own manager, and himself.
My boss couldn't be trusted with a match at the bottom of the ocean, he enjoyed starting political fires so much. and he aggressively picked on and bullied members of the engineering team despite his technical incompetence despite him being a CTO.. I quit and then the rest followed.
The last place was unbelievable. All machines were referred to by numeric IP addresses. The database was an also-ran that was last updated 8 years ago. No source control. No tests. They hired me to get "new ideas" and "best practices". But they ignored anything like a new idea or best practice. I did write one tool that saved them from totally flunking their only customer's requirement. Then I left ASAP. Did I mention that the company president never said a word, and spent most of his time moving furniture? Ot that they moved a 12-person company to occupy a open-plan, bright, noisy 7th floor and with enough space for 70+ people?
Pay isn't everything, but it is the real reason we work.
I approached upper management 2 years prior to my leaving. Asked to have my salary aligned with other companies in town (~26,000 population). I was about $25K behind the average of the other IT directors that managed a staff like mine, which were making $90k+. Even city and county government employees were making more than I was for far smaller setups. I asked for a plan to gradually bring me up, offering several fair options. After about a year I was given a 6% raise and was told that was all they could do. I was gracious for the change, but I knew that this was it, and that I had no future with the company after 13 years.
Later that year I became aware of an opening that would be posted for a state government position. It was a lead position for network/security, so no management roles. I took the job that ended up paying me 50% more for less responsibilities. I offered to help assess potential replacements, and also to meet with them after they were hired to bring them up to speed. Neither offer was taken up.
My former employer didn't fill my director position. They hired a "senior network admin" instead with far less experience. And then they paid him more money than I made....for less work.....and less experience. Former coworkers told me that they were told that the new guy came from a very similar environment. It turns out that it wasn't true. No experience with WAN/MPLS, no experience with virtualization, no experience with layer 7 firewalls, no IP voice experience, and on and on... I feel bad for my former coworkers and friends.
So now I'm working 40 hours a week instead of 60+. I'm making 50% more in pay. My benefits are magnitudes better. Stress levels are far lower. Quality of life is better. That's why I quit/moved on.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I as not in IT, I was in R&D. But in a company founded by a college dropout, I was told that I wasn't educated enough to move up, nor sideways, nor to even have the job I did have. And I'd been there for 14 years. Other people were turning down promotions and telling the promoters I should have the job. Nothing doing.
Ex-boss was quite a trip. He never quite got over selling the company he founded. And he was very good at running talent out of the company. His stroke actually improved his personality, though it impaired his memory.
It's too bad. I liked my peers. I liked the stuff we made. I liked the actual work.
So my under-educated self went to work for a place with more than 50% PhDs. After the first year, my boss said apologetically that raises weren't too god that year. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was 30 years worth of raises at my old job. And when the retirement plan kicked in, it was like a 10% raise for nothing.
Sure, I went from being a star to being the bumbling step-child (>everything is different here). But that's fine, I'm getting older. I contribute, I get stuff done, and I own parts of our stuff. And the timesheet program gets upset if I try to work overtime.
I left due to a new manager for our team, who was not only inexperienced, he allowed his insecurity to translate into aggression and blame, even to the point of lying. After discovering that HR would simply accept whatever he said, I decided it was high time to leave. So, it wasn't the job, it was very poor management.
Every job I have left has come down to a single factor: management above me was bad, therefore my time was being wasted or results were not being recognized.
There are a lot of good managers out there, no doubt. If you get one, feel lucky because you are. There are also a lot of over-educated people who really should be working in cell phone stores on the sales floor, but instead have made their way into the ranks of the self-important, but have no idea what they are doing.
Further, they are rarely discovered because if they got hired, the people above them are usually clueless too.
Bad employees are easy to spot. Bad managers are harder, but removing them has an even wider effect (especially since a good manager fires all the idiots, freeloaders, bullies, etc. eventually).
Alternative Right.
One day I'm an itinerant trader, and having a rousing time at the bar near the waterfront late that evening. Next day I wake up with a massive headache and am in the British navy sailing the high seas.
I did it for the money.
Fuck Ajit Pai
The 8am - 12pm multiple times a week with no OT pay + 2 hour daily commute started to get to me. Waking up with a numb face due to stress was the sign that I needed to find employment elsewhere. They even offered me more money to stay, but I just couldn't do it anymore. It took me about 2 and a half years but I finally feel like I've worked that stress out of my system. It really did a number on my mental state.
I got sick and tired of the long commute and my co-workers were as dumb as bricks. Well, not really... but the average programmer in this company was definitely sub-par. I got annoying at pushing best practices at a company where the majority pushed in the opposite direction. And office politics... Tons and tons of bullshit office politics. Gawd.
2 Reasons: -- Lack of growth opportunities in a family run business -- Boys club mentality that wouldn't promote any women into leadership roles
I was hired by a colleague of mine, a director I respected. He had been hired as the VP of Technology of a newly formed U.S. engineering team (there was an existing engineering team in another lower-cost country) in order to try to pivot the company from being purely lead generation to having a product. I was brought on as effectively the first hire, and I'd be responsible for hiring the small team that would help us do this pivot.
One thing I haven't mentioned: I was hired in the Spring of 2016, to work on a health insurance product. Think TaxCut for healthcare. The company was already profitable, but there was the belief it could make even more money by building user trust, rather than being a purely PPC + SEO move. I asked the question "how much money are we willing to sacrifice while we build brand trust?" and I didn't get an answer.
We had a major rewrite to try to deal with literally a decade worth of technical debt, and since we made almost all of our money selling people's information to health insurance brokers for Obamacare in particular, I was tasked with helping streamline the code so that future development would be faster. I thought the business was still distasteful, but at least the CEO still talked a good talk about wanting to be proud of the product. I asked the question "how much money are we willing to sacrifice while we build brand trust?" and I didn't get an answer.
We managed to get a completely front-end redesign built in two months. By now the team had three members, including a number of the offshore team helping us. We introduced testing (didn't exist before), push button deploys (didn't exist before), and could consistently deploy the whole site without a blip. This wasn't true three months ago, but was true now. Given we did A/B testing for everything, I again pestered, "how much money are we willing to sacrifice while we build brand trust?" and I didn't get an answer.
November, 2016. Trump won the election, and suddenly the idea of helping people select the correct health insurance plan seemed maybe even more relevant. We did fairly reasonably in the open enrollment period, and by this point we were working on some more integration work to begin prepping for the next phase of the project. My boss pulled me into a conference room shortly before the holiday break, and said, "look, I think I was sold a bill of goods. I know I promised I'd tell you if we weren't actually dedicated to building this product. I think we're getting strung along."
I gave my notice a month later. Didn't have a job lined up, but I was privileged enough to not need employment, especially not something which was actively evil.
Oh, and as it turns out, the answer was "zero." The company wasn't willing to sacrifice a single dollar to become a site people would want to return to, rather than being inundated with tens of calls per day from health insurance sales people.
135k average yeah that seems about right. Underpaid? Well, that depends on the role.
When I do not have time to eat healthy and go to the gym my mental health gets compromised. Working long hours as salaried exempt or having to travel to do consulting work was really taking a toll on my ability to be in the moment. I take my work very seriously & am very sensitive to criticism.
I find most other people to be insufferable. "Fields of Idiots" is often how I describe my coworkers or clients. Honestly, I like AWS & Python more than I like people. Agile & Scrum are insufferable. Tired of being more Ops than Dev when Devs can not even build a pipeline. Tools are important often more than code.
Oh and the arrogance of some IT folks these days. Watching geeks treating other geeks badly i.e.: not being "neck-beard enough", not being "overweight enough", or being sexually harassed (Stop staring at my ass. God only gives with one hand, right?) The whole, I know VI & Linux better than you: the same folks who struggle going cloud or cross platform.
I my last job after 6 months because: "fuck it, I can get another DevOps job for the same money" (unemployment helps me detox from the toxicity.)
I quit the job before after 9 months that because: "Y'all are some racist Open Source geeks in your fancy tower in Raleigh & BTW OpenShift sucks!"
I quit the job before that after 2 years because: "I was tired of watching Devs protect each other in sprint planning, over-weighting their story tasks & velocity, just so Dude A can allow Dude B to read his Kindle online at the bottom of his screen... and being the whipping boy for anything Ops related."
Have I every stayed in a position more than 2 years? No.
Why do I keep doing the same thing & expecting different results?
The good news is, I just sold all of my property in California & a getting ready to leave the US before idiot #45 drive the economy off a cliff, I am tarred & feathered for being gay, or watching this country slide back into the 50's.
I'm not sure if this counts as quitting, but the last regular job I worked prior to the one I have now was for a financial conglomerate. Apparently, the guys over in investing had some very shady dealings and the company was shut down by the SEC. I helped wind down their websites and export all their data for the investigation, and then I went back to grad school.
Honestly, I'm much happier as a professor. So in a way, I suppose I should thank securities fraud for my current career! :-D
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
Was this in 1995? My wife works as a secretary at a non-profit and makes 45K. We also live in the Midwest. You're getting screwed man.
I left $JOB_1 because I found an absolutely fabulous position at $JOB_2 doing exactly what I wanted to do.
$JOB_2 left me because the bottom fell out of the market and they went out of business along with pretty much the entire industry. (But dammit, we made the *BEST* buggy whips available!)
Left $JOB_3 because it was a soul-sucking company where everything was on a need to know basis, and if you weren't Japanese you didn't need to know.
$JOB_4 left me when I accidentally crossed an HR zero-tolerance policy. No warnings, no chance to apologize or make amends, just out on my rear.
$JOB_5 left me when they went out of business. They tried to prematurely optimize the manufacturing process before actually having a product to manufacture. That, and the sales person was only interested in the multi-million dollar customers and actively shunned anyone smaller.
Still at $JOB_6 and I have been for a long while. I'm getting a little bored with the work but it's a good company and I have some sweet perqs I'd be unlikely to find elsewhere.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
See subject & You WISH you were me (since you impersonate me) & since you SAY so? A "portrait" of me https://365songsblog.files.wor... (lol, FITS ME MORE THAN YOU KNOW actually).
This is what you PUT UP WITH when you're "World-Class" (like ME): STALKERS stalking you by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts (everyone sees THAT constantly happening to me, & I suspect it's INFERIOR competitors, webmasters & advertisers (primarily/mostly) & lastly, quite possibly malware makers (as my hosts engine affects them all adversely BUT gives users of it more SPEED/SECURITY/RELIABILITY & more anonymity online)).
* Hey Satan? GET THEE BEHIND ME!
APK
P.S.=> 3 things tell me I do it right:
1st = User praise of my hosts engine https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
2nd "ATTACKS" I GET (from UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous fools, just like Elon Musk got https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... )
3rd BEING IMITATED as "Imitation IS the sincerest form of flattery" https://linux.slashdot.org/com... ... apk
They were sucking my blood, so despite the large paycheck I thought I'd rather be alive than rich.
I left my last job because I actually wanted to see my family more than 4 days a month. Granted the pay and benefits were great. I worked for two years for a company that bounced us all over the country at the drop of a hat and we would be shipped out to all manner of new builds/prison retrofits with little to no knowledge about what we needed to do when we got there or even what tools we would need to complete the work. So on my lunch breaks I started cold calling businesses in my home town to try and get something that would let me sleep in my own bed.
My last boss was a combination of a micromanager and scatterbrain. Our contract coder never listened to business analysts and just did what he wanted or what the manager wanted. The manager would change direction of our shop on a moment's notice, ignoring commitments to clients, understanding of the law or corporate policies. Employees who left were not replaced. Promises to promote and backfill were forgotten. I got tired of fighting to stay on course or having the feeling that we're completing anything. For a supposed agile shop, we were lucky to release an iteration once a quarter. Going home from work demoralised an exhausted was not the way I want to spend my last decade in the workforce.
Both parties lose in a trade war, it's just basic macro-economics. The right way to deal with countries like China would be to create laws that impose high environmental standards and high worker's protection standards on all products and all subcontractors, whether domestic or imported. Then the countries can compete on an equal footing. No US politician will do that because it's US companies that are producing dirt cheap crap products under slave conditions in countries like China, India, Bangladesh. Americans want their ultra-cheap clothes...
From the last 2 companies I worked for.
Nathan
I had been laid off (hourly job) and was working at a contract job (also hourly).
When called back, it was obvious that the location I was at was going under. I worked for a couple of days to qualify for a contract signing bonus and went back to the contract job (which I had never quit).
Sure enough, the plant closed about a year later. The company was bought out shortly after that.
Me? I became a permanent employee a month later and steadily moved up at my new company.
I started with a company in 2005 that had been around since the 60s. It was well established, plenty of regular clients and new work coming in but not at a stupid (read: greedy) pace and growing at a reasonable rate so as not to overstretch things. The people at the top seemed to actually care about the company and they empowered us all to do great things as client consultants (gave decision making powers to the people on the ground? Unpossible!) we were very successful, so successful that a capitol investment firm swooped in like a plague and bought up the company, things went to shit very quickly:
1. Systematically removed existing management
2. Hired cheap-o whip crackin' style managers
3. Created new workflows that added bottlenecks by design
4. Bid on more work than we were capable of handling
5. When not enough bids came back laid off several long term employees ("redundancies" created by braindead managers who can't math)
6. Set unreasonable quarterly goals
7. Bought and merged us with a useless consulting company just to get the contracts - slowly removed employees of that company (I'm pretty sure that's illegal but nobody cared then so I'm guessing nobody cares now)
8. Changed the benefits plan 3 weeks before I was eligible (it went to 7 years rather than 5)
9. Didn't hand out raises to devs after 2008 (they were a US company and getting slammed by the recession while business continued as usual in Canada RIP)
All these things plus putting me on a contract I told management I didn't want to work on, having that project bleed people until I was the core leader / developer / support person, having to work overtime and not attend my 5 year anniversary while my coworkers fucked off and attended it was absolutely galling (your cake tasted great - SERIOUSLY?? fuck u) I mention that because it is emblematic of the kinds of shit they got up to. That is to say the ritual was more important than the purpose.
I got the app stable in just under a year to the point where we went from an avg of 9 trouble tickets a week to 1 every two weeks, I gutted the app another company wrote that we were maintaining and re-wrote the majority of it and fixed accounting errors that had been prevalent from the first month of activation (at first they didn't believe I had fixed it and did a manual audit, turns out they were used to seeing a specific imbalance in all their reporting... for a decade *sigh*)
Long story short, the company started out awesome (some of my favourite memories working in IT really) but got bought by some dunderheaded capitol investment firm and turned into a standard consulting shit-show.
Most of the good people were gone by the time my friend rang me up with an actually interesting sounding job opportunity. I threw them a number I figured I should be at (as a highball number I was sure we'd negotiate) and it turned out that was slightly below avg and so they accepted my offer.
And I've been working here for 8 years without much looking back, well, none really. The old place I worked at is a shadow of its former self, only occupying one office space now and people slowly swirling around the bowl, too valuable to make redundant but nothing new or interesting coming down the pipe anymore.
I still like the work I'm doing here after 8 years, it's always interesting and I feel I'm compensated well for it. The main thing is they treat me like a human being and to me that counts for a lot these days.
crazy dynamite monkey
I was hired by a small IT company that supported small Mom and Pop shops, small dental offices and retail stores of various types. I was hired to streamline support and create documentation to make support more uniform. I was soon tasked with a list of quick and dirty patch jobs for various clients. The owner regularly promised more than could be provided by the small team. This created mass amounts of stress and lots of angry calls from customers.
The second issue was the boss's temper. He would often come into the office in a rage over something that happened outside the office. He would then yell and scream at the people in the office for minor delays or mistakes. Often the delays he was yelling about were delays he caused. Either by telling someone to wait or not getting his portion of the task done in time.
I quit as soon as I found another job. Actually, a week or so prior till the other job was official but stress was just too high.
WTF?
I got fired, because I stopped doing the work I was supposed to. In fact I stopped doing any word.
I quit because they had promissed me I would be working with Linux but in the end they needed a Windows admin and like 2% of my time was actually on linux.. so I changed and now im a full fledged Linux admin and I dont touch windows much anymore. YAY
I left my previous job (about 2 decades ago) because my employer at the time was slowly going under. As soon as they even suggested that payroll would be late one month, I started looking. They even tried to stiff me on my final paycheck by saying "you didn't work those last two days of the month" (it was a weekend and not normal work days) so I think I got out just in time. They did hold on for another year or so but eventually tanked and their assets were bought out by another company that tanked a few years later itself. Within a few years, my take home had close to doubled (to within the industry average at the time once you exclude the unreasonable outliers that skewed the average substantially upward).
My current job probably won't last until I retire (because reasons that make sense), but the past couple decades have been far better than the 18 months at the previous job.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
this was all the way back in 1997. I worked for a Sears auto Center replacing people's tires (better than the usual high school McJob) I Posted my Two weeks notice because I was Leaving for university in two weeks. Never had to quit a job sense
Corporate buzzword-happy-hats moved our good, but not perfect, but mostly-successful dev shop to Agile. Suits hired an evangelist consultant. In kickoff meeting, evangelist stated there was no development project in existence that would work better without Agile than with. When things began to fail and processes broke down, we were told we weren't doing it right.
I really couldn't bear to stay after that.
Technical debt beyond belief and a lack of interest in listening to what IT needed to do to stop the hemorrhaging. New CIO has the right mindset for the future, but failed to realize the effect of the past limiting the present operations inside the walls of the company.
And that led to, literally, 24/7 work for me with a lackluster IT services provider in tow.
Too few people trying to unravel a hellish mess.
Simply not worth the anguish and frustration for an average paycheck.
Rather than just read the wanted ads, why not write to them speculatively? I've had jobs by doing that before. Saves them the hassle of advertising the position or paying a recruitment agency.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
My boss pushed my out of the door.
Back in 2005 got word from contacts in the accounting department that there would be massive layoffs at the dot-com division of the entertainment company I worked, "25% or higher staff cuts" was the warning, and decided the risk to my family was too high. Left dot-com for healthcare that year.
Sure enough, one year later most of the LI contacts I knew that used to work there, didn't work there anymore.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
The first claim is definitely false in any free-market economy or reasonable approximation thereof; the second claim I'm skeptical of.
Just hit my 20 year benchmark.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I have left a few jobs for a few reasons:
Company #1:
- being trolled and pushed over the edge with people asking me every day when I would quit;
- loosing my faith in the chain of command;
- no prospect of future as outsourcing was the only way for me;
- being referred to as 'cheap labor'
- got 'fight or flight' response too often which led to panic attacks
Company #2:
- finding out by the client that I was 'outsourced'
- failing to fullfil a deadline because no one cared about this one virtualisation system that was required to be operational so I could deliver my project
Company #3:
- hired as systems administrator to perform glorified secretary tasks;
- supervisor delaying my analysis/reports so he could send them with his name;
- supervisors made my life a nightmare including spending regurlarly 2 hours waiting after my shift was over because most likely I got holidays in christmas and new year and they didn't (at least it was too much of a coincidence);
- working with devops who couldn't do a stack trace, didn't knew how to kill a process, etc etc etc...
I also got fired once because I tried to refuse that 1/4 of my salary would be payed on a meal card and they tried to force me to accept the card with conditions that were not in my best interest. I asked for advice to the National Comittee for Data Protection and explained the situation. They said wanted to take the company to court. A few weeks later, goodbye.
My advice for people out there is to be careful with what you say as it can be taken out of context and turned against you. Careful with claiming your rights or antagonizing some people, usually those who have a lot of cash to spend in out-source and the outsourcing market is like 80% of the positions available.
I have to say that not all people are bad, as some people actually tried to help me and warned me that I could be labeled as a 'problematic person' for defending some of my rights. They were right all the way.
Nowadays I end up doing poor freelance jobs for the adult industry less known players to barely survive. Keyword for a successful career seems to be 'submission'.
PHB lied to the workforce during an unpopular HQ relocation which was of dubious benefit, leaving them demoralized, then decided to stop providing a service to customers and expected us to lie to them by pretending no such decision had been made.
Someone had to do it.
Sprint bought Nextel. Sprint dissolved my department. End of story.
He liked winding people up to see them flail.
Well, I quit my last good job because there was a five year pay freeze for non-union workers (it was during the 2008 recession so I was patient at first) and I literally could not afford to stay.
I quit several bad jobs after that because of retarded people. There was the micromanager (I didn't give any direction but decided I don't like these 10 things so let me call you to my office 10 times), then the space cadets (I'll provide no tools or objectives and then get mad when no progress on whatever it is we're doing doesn't get done), then the high school cafeteria clique (none of us can write code but, like, omg, Billy likes Burger King better than McDonalds, what a spaz I hate him now), then the government malaise (let's keep guessing and struggling and ignoring the end user and pretend contractor churn is why we never accomplish anything), then another round of space cadets, and now I'm ready to leave another job because of responsibility without authority plus a very (un)healthy mix of "our vendor is our boss" (oh, "Pennsylvania" is spelled wrong on a PA state government website? well, the vendor doesn't want to spend 10 seconds correcting it so there's nothing we can do. here's another million lines of code to review that they won't fix).
I'm ready to just go be a bank teller or something. There's no room in software development for anybody that knows anything about computers.
When I was a kid, I delivered the paper for about 2 years. I quit because I didn't realize what a good thing I had.
That was about 40 years ago. I have had numerous jobs since then, but have never voluntarily left one.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But the CMAKE was a lie.
Check your premises.
Mid 1980's I heard the new head of the Small Business Administration being interviewed on the radio. The issue was:why do so many small businesses fail? Something 95% last less than 2 years (at that time, IIRC). He said a lot research had been done on why the high failure rare. But under his leadership (chest thumping pride, he was a politician) they were the first to research: why do people start a small business. The most common reason, like over 80%, was to get away from the a**hole boss.
But once they start a business they discover they don't know how to start a business (get it off the ground; most are undercapitalized and over-spend on non-essentials), or keep it running and profitable, and discover the demands of time and effort are much higher, etc. (And a lot become an a**hole boss!)
I leaped ship from an assh**e boss as an employee to a private contractor position, but discovered the new boss was just a different a**hole. After a few months quit, counting on my handsome face and savings, found a job teaching in my field, and then was recruited to work by someone else who was not an a**hole. And then bought that business out.
I want to start work there roughly June 2019 or maybe a little sooner. (I have to get an old house ready to sell.) If something happens at my current job, that could of course accelerate my timeline. I'm not looking at the ads in order to apply for the current openings, I'm looking in order to know how to be the perfect candidate for similar openings a year from now.
Looking at their ads, I see many mentions of Solaris and of Oracle database. I don't have much experience in those in particular, though I'm very good at SQL databases generally and at Linux. When I contact them, I'd prefer to answer "yes, I do have the experience you're looking for". My current job allows me flexibility in what I work on, so I'll try to work on some Solaris or Oracle DB over the next few months.
One item they want I can't put on my resume. That's a box I can't check off. So I want to be able to check off all of the other boxes, have everything else they want.
Two months before I'm ready to move, I'll either reach out proactively outside of any specific job listing, or apply for existing listings. They have a LOT of positions here that fit my background, so there will likely be advertied openings.
I did sign up for their email list of people interested in working for them. If it was a company that didn't employ so many people, so they didn't have multiple relevant listings at any given time, I would probably reach out. I'm also alert to side channels that may come up, such as meeting people who work there when I attend meetings of organizations related to the industry.
You may as well ask me why I dumped my last girlfriend.
So I was working in one of the top-10 banks in my country. The pay was below average in IT, but the job was interesting - automation, devops, improving and modernising bank's processes and infrastructure management.
Our corporate owner decided to quit financial services, so the bank was sold. It went downward from there. New owner (another bank) shutdown almost every one of our systems, broke everything we were working on for last few years. They dismantled infrastructure. They had no clue when it came to anything: app servers, storage arrays, networking. The purchases were not technically sound, it went down to politics and quid-pro-quo.
At last the CEO promised payrise to match industry standard. But then Polish politics got into play and the CEO left. Payrise never materialised.
Few months later new owners decided that the bank needs stuff we have done previously (infra automation, CI/CD for developers etc). Yet, despite having experienced devops team on payroll, they constantly denied us access to any servers.
After almost a year of twiddling thumbs, my team collectively resigned. We got jobs in better companies, with avg 50% payrises.
Now the "acquisitor" bank is going to be acquired by another. I really look forward for _their_ systems and work to be plowed into dust.
Doing winter overs in Antarctica was great, but after 15 years, with difficulty finding jobs between missions, and not wanting to lose a very nice wife, I stopped and found a desk job. Plenty of memories and pictures on my website though. I even did a slashdot interview about it a decade ago.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
My coworkers were all dead and they were stinking up the place. I didn't feel like burying them so I quit. No big loss, I never liked them.
subject says it all. Last job didn't like brown people, so we left.
Trump has done more to protect your job from Indians than any president since Carter.
And from Canadians. British, Germans, French, Asians, Africans, Australians... But Russians and Nokos are welcome. Oh, about your job. Sorry the hats are made in China now.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Nothing interesting to do.
Management lies and incompetence.
Unfortunately, the position I went to was also a lie and run by incompetents. At this point, I'm just following money because that's the only thing that isn't a lie from management and business people. Those bastards are all just liars, in every company, at every level.
man, I feel like mold.
Everything that I designed ended up becoming vaporware, and our CEO thought he was Steve Jobs and ignored his employee's opinions while stepping over their areas of expertise. My direct manager was consistently unavailable to provide direction, and I had no idea was I was going to be working on for any given day. I ended up making up a lot of my own work just to keep from going crazy.
I recently had my 2nd child, and I have been living in a large-ish 1 bedroom apartment with my wife and first child because the rent was damn good and the location excellent. I live in the greater Vancouver area, and housing prices are stupid. Getting a 2 bedroom place is very likely to double my rent for a lesser location and an overall smaller square footage unless I am willing to increase my commute from 'less than 30 minutes by transit' to 'about an hour and requires a car'.
A conversation with a friend indicated an opportunity at his workplace, and I took a shot at it and got it. I managed a 20% pay increase too.
END COMMUNICATION
Seriously, some companies attract sociopaths. They hide themselves well, but look out for the knife in your back. Especially from HR. Found a nice family-run business that'd been around a while. Much more sane.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
The lying, the dishonesty, the shouting and violence .... they just couldn't take it anymore.
Hostile management, 99% of the reason I left. Union contract had been up for renegotiation for 2 years. Company fouled up the schedule then blamed the union for an illegal work slowdown, a completely fabricated charge, and sued us. The judge ruled while the union lawyer was still en-route to the courtroom, more proof it was a setup.
3 months later the company realized how horrible a mistake they had made when they lost 40 million dollars (or more) and had to report to the shareholders that they couldn't follow company growth plans because guess what - they didn't have a contract after 2 years. Almost immediately the company agreed to the union proposed payscale but by that time it was far too little too late, the company had already proven itself utterly untrustworthy and hostile.
My new job required an initial pay cut, has nearly identical long-term income potential, and is harder work. But my new company isn't suing me over a pretend "illegal work action" so it's much better.
The money isn't everything.
I was the sole responsible for product planning and development in a nice, small cloud software provider. About 20 developers, roughly the same amount of other staff, and huge growth year-by-year. Any decision, no matter how large, could be made in hours by the people present in the office, as 100% of the company was owned by a small group of people still working there full time.
So, inevitably, the company was sold to a huge player, immediately putting a lot of committees, bosses, plans, competing-but-not-competing products, etc.
I agreed to go to one meeting to see if I was willing to stay, lasted 10 minutes, and handed in my resignation via email while still in the meeting.
I was tasked with writing communications on a Linux workstation that NFS mounted the source repository. The workstation had dual Ethernet ports, but the site security restrictions did not allow me to connect it simultaneously to both the engineering network (where the code was stored) and my test network (which went through a WiFi Access Point to send commands to the device under test. In other words, company security rules made doing my assigned job a fireable offense! And I'll bet HP is still wondering why they can't retain good engineers anymore...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I and my co-workers left for the same reason a lot of IT professionals do...
The entire department was outsourced! Apparently a handful of dedicated full-time individuals can be replaced by a single person that covers multiple companies in a given area.
It's been years now and I still hear complaints from employees and customers alike. It always brings me joy!!
Without going into details - management handled their responsibilities badly and then tried to offload the problem on my back.
Stupid move when you're working in IT security and get regular calls from headhunters.
Top-level boss saved the situation, now I'm still working for him, but in another one of his companies. Examples of terrible and great management side-by-side. Oh yes, the CEO of that company, the guy who made this mess, doesn't work there anymore. Would be interesting to hear his version of the story.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They made me use Windows and blocked giphy.com
The last one?
- The immediate boss and director had sat on a USD $2 million grant for at least two years and planned to turn it over to me and one other developer with six months left to deliver the unstarted software before he quit, having produced nothing other than word documents and omnigraffle diagrams.
- The actual manager who was going to be promoted to director was blatantly hostile to developers ("I hate programmers"), to open source, and to any system she couldn't have her interns manage with a mouse. Fun story, the main website was hacked twice within a year of her getting the new position. The same person also didn't understand that software and IT required patching over time, and was quoted as "Microsoft never has bugs."
- Bullshit academic environment -- I was told I'd have to wait another 4 years for a promotion despite outperforming two senior peers in every metric other than presentations given.
- There was a 7 year waiting list for a nearby parking space. 5 years for 'closer'.
- The state kept moving the age to get my pension further back.
- I watched several colleagues get laid off - some of whom were suspiciously *near* getting a full pension
- I watched some of the people who were laid off get brought back due to friends in high places in other departments. One of the "Systems Analyst 2"s couldn't even write a for-loop in the language he was supposedly an expert in.
- Told to keep my mouth shut when I encountered overwhelming signs of data falsification consistently among certain grant recipients.
- They kept recycling me into the same project every single year without any chances to ever learn or do new things (Hence the last year was me retraining myself while paid). The future director of IT literally didn't understand the difference between software and configuration.
- I was able to get a 250% raise and relocation based off of initiatives undertaken in my own free time as a result of the above.
Working for a largish, reputable SMB market Managed Service Provider. Worked in MSPs for 5+ years before getting this job. In the interview, they say "We don't like the tiered support model, we only hire the equivalent of Tier 2 and 3." The job was for a "Network Administrator".
What this really meant was that the Network Administrators were the ones answering the phones. Which is great, except that, the company did nothing to try and reduce call volume. For months I tried to get my boss to look at some strategies at encouraging customer use of the ticket system to submit tickets, all smiles and nods and then nothing ever happened. It wasn't a problem until I started getting trusted with more and more projects, but I was still expected to answer the phones. This wouldn't have been a huge deal except that my phone rang on average between 25 and 35 times a day. At other MSPs this number was much lower since the customers were trained to use the ticket system. I quit because basically their opinion was 'well when you have projects you just need to put in more time and maybe stay late to finish them.' Was already doing 5 ten hour days a week with normal support. Noped on out of there after my 1 year mark, got a cool 20k raise and a job where my time is expected to be 80% projects 20% support.
And the phone hardly ever rings :-D
Internet killed our [primary] business. Thanks guys. :)
Primary business back in the day was newspaper presses. Installing, moving, upgrading, repairing, etc.
Guess how the newspaper business is doing today?
They're barely fixing what they have, no big moves or expansions anymore. All the web-width reductions are were done long ago -- notice how all the papers around the world got skinnier and skinnier? You're welcome - my patent. DOA today.
I laid off every friend I had hired and the whole fam-damily. Then closed and locked the doors myself and literally handed the keys to the bank. Walked away.
Fired as CEO of SF-based recently acquired (2018) company fired staff on 1/2 month intervals so employees would never get a chance for options to vest. Thus, company would hold said options to further enrich execs while providing only a portion of initial negotiated total compensation knowing the employee would be over-worked and options would return back to the company.
Was working as a US military contractor in Iraq. US was pulling out and the base I was on had a couple months left on it, so I didn't extend my contract or go to Afghanistan.
Got tired of working on government contracts with government micromanagement and reporting requirements.
We need a contraction in marketing. Most of it's worthless derivative shit.
fixed
No
The CEO would rejoice in tricking clients to pay more than warranted. She called that "taking a surprising leap in the last moment" and in a weird twist would compare this strategy to a rabbit escaping its perpetrator. Sometimes she also argued that attacking the client from a submerged position, like a submarine, was the best opportunity to get a deal. Good fun if watched from afar, up close, not so much. And ethics, you know.
Hearing every speakerphone conversation, chatty intern, clap-out at meetings, every youtube video for within thirty feet and feeling like I was in a fish-bowl with people whose qualifications differed from mine made it impossible to do focused coding at work in the few hours between meetings. Eventually, bringing the work home wasn't enough.
A while back, I was working for a software company in an administrative role but was interested in a technical role. I wanted to transfer to their software development department but was told something about it being under another vice president and too difficult to facilitate. They offered me a transfer to IT with zero pay raise (So still $28k in Texas) and exclusively late working hours.
It was SO much easier to leave the company than to apply for an internal position at the same company. Much better now, thanks.
My last job I left because they paid me to leave.
Prior to that I left because my manager was a douchbag with unreasonable expectations.
Before that it was unreasonable ongoing changes to my scheduling that was extremely unhealthy.
Pay has never been a reason for me to leave a job, but if the pay was that bad I wouldn't have taken the job to begin with.
Hello! I was actually fired from my last job, but to give a little background, I must go into my job before that.
First, I want to explain that I live in Arkansas, USA. It is a red state, and things work differently out here.
The first job I worked at was for a document management company. I had actually worked there once before, left, and came back out of necessity. Two years, my second go around, at this company had me lower than low. I was working long hours, asked to develop impossible projects with little-to-no information from the sales team, and worst of all I wasn't paid overtime as an hourly worker. The owners of this company were complete racists, one of them regularly used coke, and let's just say the entire company was morally ambiguous. The final straw was when the owner told me, to my face, that I didn't do shit. I ended up leaving the company shortly there after, and took him to court over lost wages.
The job after that was the same deal. I was Tier 2 support for a company that did managed IT for small businesses. The boss here was the "oooo shiny" type. Always getting distracted by new ways to make money, and the very reason I will never work for an 'entrepreneur' again. Our tier 3 technician had left the company about a year and a half into my employment there (because of changing goals, etc... it was too much), and I was again being asked to work long hours. Come to find out, they never switched me to salary. I had found out, and put my foot down with the boss. I was fired a couple of days later.
I will never, ever work for small business again.
was promised a pension, started, 3 years in changed it to vest at 25 years with the company, just a lot of dishonesty. Lots of people fled
my manager at a large 3-letter company confiscated the singular piece of mission-critical customer-owned development equipment, thus preventing me from continuing my work. so i quit, and the customer is not pleased (still, several months later) as i was literally the only person who knew how to implement the contract for the customer, and a whole new team had to be assembled to pretend like they could somehow do it despite knowing zero. this is costing them millions, and they still might be sued by the customer for breach of contract. allegedly, my manager did this to force me to do my tps report, which was clearly much more important to management. oops.
The Obama administration pushed me out of my last job. Although most often documented by the firearms and marijuana industries, the "Do Not Bank" list is a very real thing. My previous employer (lending company) got on the list; and could not find a single bank in the country that would allow them to keep an account. A profitable and very functional business with ~50 employees disappeared over the inability to retain banking.
I retired because I was turning 70. There have been comments about age discrimination in "resource actions" at the company where I worked for over 34 years, but my impression was that it was more "senior employee discrimination". I.e. the longer you work in a place, the more connections you have and therefore the more "dotted line" or "implicit" obligations you have that never show up on performance plans/evaluations or at least are more difficult to quantify. Anyway, I had held on long enough.
I realized bettering technology without bettering people and solving deep rooted injustices isn't gonna cut it.
So I cut all of it, enjoy with your web kiddos and for the money programmers.
High turnover of terrible Managers (three in 6 years) and IT Directors (four in 6 years), and a string of CIOs (a new one every year for 6 years) with no direction, vision, communication, or coordination. My final manager, at his first meeting with my team, said that because we were all unmarried, we were all incapable of understanding what normal human interaction was, and thus we were the problem. (It left the team dumbfounded because were were all married, except one guy who had been dating the same woman for 7 years.)
I have too many stories of how bad it was, but the very last day there summarizes the experience perfectly. I bought a catered lunch for my co-workers on my last day. I spent a lot of my own money and bought enough for the entire floor in our building to eat. After I gathered up everyone to the conference room where the food was spread out, my boss turns to me in front of the crowd and says, "I guess this is a good moment to walk you out."
I didn't get to touch any of the food I bought, nor was I allowed to actually say good-bye to anyone.
Went back to grad school as a research assistant. They paid 75% of what the âreal jobâ(TM) paid plus tuition. Much more rewarding.
Got another âreal jobâ(TM) after graduating and been there ever since. More than a decade.
I got bored with the job.
In fact that's why I have left all my previous jobs, with the exception of a University teaching job. I left that one because I couldn't be bothered playing the petty political games within the faculty.
Depends on who you ask. Some might say "pursuing new opportunity."
Others might say "indictment."
I say, 3 square meals a day and endless recreation opportunities.
Corporate hired new management that started sinking the ship thought bad decisions and not trying to retain talent. A former manager threw me an offer from another, more stable place and I took it. Better pay, better benefits, no on call, management it local and cares about the staff, and no commute.
Wife was going in and out of Area hospitals due to mental health issues. I needed to take Family Medical Leave to watch her at home for a couple of weeks. Manager considered not working and getting paid stealing from the company. Was shown the door.
Once I casually mentioned to my boss that I heard the guy across the corridor who was a complete goof off was making more than I was. He said "This is intolerable", headed upstairs, and came back down with a raise.
This is one of those reasons that companies don't normally want employees to know their coworkers' salaries.
Why is every post getting modded zero in this thread today? Weird.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Long story short the best talker wins.
The best talker isn't always qualified, nor always representative of the shareholder.
I have come to understand.
There are politicians that get into politics to change the world for the better.
There are politicians that get into politics because their skill is manipulation of other people.
We all wish we could work with the former, but usually end up having to deal with the later.
This is the same in office and out of office.
Best solution: Go independent, undermine cheap 3rd world slave labor.
Company wanted to downsize.
They gave monetary incentive, essentially "get out of here, take some money, so we don't have to do lengthy negotiations".
Only problem was that the end result was this:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-...
When I worked in power plant construction the company I worked for decided to downsize. All the very senior staff were told they could get a very generous severance package plus retirement; so the all bailed. Not surprising - they were engineers and good at math. Trouble was none of us had any clue how the turbine control system worked, none of us worked for the turbine division. So when the client came to our office and said "we have a problem with the turbine" all we could do is say, "Sorry, there are no turbine engineers on staff." They wound up getting consulting gigs making more than they did before plus had full retirement benefits such as medical.
It's not just companies, I had a friend that left the Navy when they offered a bonus to leave active duty, then went back a few years later when they were offering pilots bonuses to return, and keep the original bonus as well.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
LMAO!!! You may be right. OMG
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"if more students moved from pre-med to computer science"
We need people who can think...not robots.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The company blatantly and overtly showed favoritism to their buddies from their prior company for hiring and promotions and they also were directed by the CEO to hire and promote women over men and to hire and promote "diversity" groups over non-diversity groups. And any combination of the above. The CEO even said in open forums "if you don't like it TOUGH!". He also made it clear that anyone that spoke out against these practices would be CRUSHED. "quite" blacklists were started to blacklist ANYONE who spoke out against these practices.
While attempting to have a fact-based discussion with my boss about why a 1% raise was, factoring in inflation, mathematically amounting to giving me a pay cut year-over-year, his response was "Maybe I paid you too much last year." Left and never looked back.
Tried to force me to be an employee. I was contracting there for 8 yrs and they decided I had to become an employee.
I don't like office politics.
Had my "FU" money, so I made plans to travel for about a year beginning the following week. My last day, the boss came by all excited that they'd gotten a 2 month exception and I wouldn't need to leave. I explained I'd already made plans, but could be available for telephone consulting at double my rate.
That was in 2007. I've lived in SE Asia, Central Asia, South America, and South Africa for a few months each. Changed my life for the better.
Around 2013, I got bored and started my own consulting company. After 18 months, I gave up re-retired.
I miss coding.
I miss being useful.
I've maintained Linux admin skills, but not my coding stuff. C/C++ standards are compeltely different now. Ruby is 2 versions ahead and they finally released Perl6.
Worked as a technology director for a school authority. Most of the people I served were great. Many didn't understand the balancing act I had getting the necessary work done with the resources I had. A few selfish idiots were always complaining. Long hours. A tech department that was too small. Unhelpful management. The work was interesting but the politics were not. The usual story. But I was successful at building robust systems for a pittance. Over a couple of years, my department pulled the entire school authority out of the stone age.
Two years in I felt I would burn out in five.
Then we got a new top dog who was a micro-manager and intent on showing that he was in complete control. This was disappointing, but not all that foreign to me. Unfortunately, the fellow was pretty dim, didn't understand privacy laws, and brought along his entire working directory from his previous school authority, including a bunch of staff and students' personal information. This made the act of moving it from one school authority to another illegal. Long story short: I chose to politely and quietly let on that I understood that the issue needed to be dealt with, a simple matter that would only put a bit of egg on his face. I was fully aware that he might see this as an attack and choose to retaliate rather than admit any fault. Sure enough, I was done a few days later. I then reported the problem to the appropriate authorities. Again, he chose to retaliate. Lawyers were involved. It dragged on for more than a year and was quite stressful, but I ultimately emerged mentally intact and financially unscathed.
The unfortunate lesson I learned was not to care so much about my work. I now view the systems and relationships I build like sand castles built below the high-tide line.
Having talked to quite a few other whistle-blowers, I'm pretty wary of the public sector as well. There are plenty of sharks in those waters.
I took a leave (and look for new job). But the economy had crunch about the time I went looking for work and ended up taking another year off.
During that year I bought a business that I was going to use as a base then do more consulting contracts. The economy continued to be tight.
The business started to eat up a lot of my time and I got ill. Finally ending up selling the business at a loss & a tried to get healthy.
Ended up with a diagnosis of fibronmyalgia. Social security wont give me a disabilty (witch I am fighting for) and now I am living distributions from my retirement. I really needed to be employed the last 10 years. I always signed up for the long term disabilty insurance. I think between diet, work hours & bad management stress somewhere is the cause of my case of fibro. be fiscally responsable & have better insurance, the government wont help you.
He had the money, he was just too cheap to spend it.
That led the staff to wonder if he was going to let us work, and "forget" to pay us.
One guy got burned that way. The rest of us ejected en masse.
Was too good to refuse. Took a couple of years time out, travelled, cleared up any and all debts, spent actual quality time with the kids, studied..Best time I ever spent, and was fortunate to have the funds behind me to do it.
You're exactly the sort of person who will be replaced with an AI as soon as utterly possible. You are a sunk cost to your employer and I have no doubt that they wish to get rid of you, but because of the BS you create, they can't.
Stop thinking you're smarter than everyone else and start doing useful productive work that no one else can.
Success in life really is that simple.
It was the right choice.
You only have one life. If you *love* your job and gain your self worth from it- then please work!
I never did. I worked for money. Once I had enough, I quit.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Box was chaotic, open floor plan, really loud, no one could concentrate.
The SRE job is really just devops, or super admin. Not at all interesting and waaay detour for my 30+ year career as computer scientist and embedded systems developer.
I lasted about 9 months, clearly was thrashing (at the same time I wasdivorcing a witch with borderline personality disorder). So HR offered short term disability, which turned in to long term disability.
Bottom line, disability covered expenses, vested the box stock after 4 years, they went public, I walked away with 6 figures and didn't have to work there!!!
Today, work is a 4 letter word. I won't take a job just because I have to or something like that.
Company laid off my boss of 8 years, and put a genuine asshole in his place.
After a few months, I was on a call with the guy and got an alert saying the company stock was at an all time high.
Cashed out then and there, during the call and resigned shortly after.
Haven't worked since.
My field: aviation.
My company sold, scrapped, or parked the entire fleet in which I work (i.e. just shy of 30 hulls). Lots of reasons for it including: *pilot shortage* (the economist's definition, not the media's), poorly timed union tactics, bad management, tons of backstabbing and buck-passing.
Finding work is easy. Finding work that pays the bills isn't.
Combination of factors. The suits at the top, where the air is rare, were trading companies and expertise like commodities. There was also age discrimination in the workforce, but I felt trapped, as though I could do nothing about it.
I had survived a series of mergers at the bottom of the ladder, where the air is not rare. My suits were trading companies, and we couldn't do anything about it. Then there was the wholesale export of American expertise offshore, not just in my company. It was all around, and my colleagues were forced to train offshore pirates to do their jobs, or else. Threats, threats, subtle threats, and more threats. I could easily see why the suits above us were afraid of their jobs, too, with all the mergers going on.
I left as it was the most poisonous environment I have ever worked in. A true culture of bullying, blame laying and lying.
On a small friendly team, it turns out the lead didn't like being embarrassed by his own incompetence. He and others acted like friends, but buried and killed any progress.
I'm sure they've still done nothing but make things worse. They'll be gone soon enough. By the time people realize lots of things are changing, but nothing is getting better, they'll have migrated to other positions.
2 layoffs (2.26 yrs. of dotcom + 12.84 years with a big security company)
1.5 yrs. of remote contract job.
Since then, I have been unemployed for over 1.62 yrs. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Going out for drinks isn't about drinking. It's about social interaction and being friendly. If you don't want to do it, then don't - that's fine. But most people don't care if you're drinking whiskey or water. They just want some socializing. Though it sounds like if that's the promotion criteria you're in the wrong place regardless.
Bad management.
That is also true.
I'd been working nearly two years at a contract government job. The contracts came up for renegotiation and it was made clear that everyone would be "encouraged" to relocate to a consolidated office in another city. Had my wife and I been younger we might have considered it. Instead I decided it was a good cue to retire.
Well, the first few jobs was me giving my self raises. It's faster and easier to cut your teeth hopping around instead of staying at one place for five years.
However, money alone isn't enough anymore.
Work doesn't always have to provoke thought but it's a hell of a lot more satisfying than doing the same operational tasks every day. If myself or an organization falls into the stagnation zone, I'll leave in fairly short order (and have done this the previous two jobs). Considering work consumes a large portion of the average person's life, I think it's worth protecting your own sanity in the process. Not to mention, this also ensures you stay relevant and change with the market.
He was a thief. Under the table deals, theft of company property, etc. It was confirmed later when he got arrested for it. Don't know if he was convicted; don't care.
Hired with my current employer on a handshake on the basis of character only. Money was better, too but not that much; more due to moving from deep south to north east us.
2
I worked for 1,5 years for a service comparing finansiel solutions on the European market (https://moneybanker.dk/), which was great since I arrived just after having graduate from my Master and the unemployment line was the next step at that time. At the beginning everything was fine and I had the time to learn my tasks and my colleagues. But then the unpredictable happened, as the company was sold to a private equity fund. They agreed upon a solution, where a part of the payment was based on the performance the two following years, as my boss continued this period. The incentive for kicking ass these two years was naturally high as fuc..., but me and my colleagues felt the pressure form day one! Suddenly we should run 3-4 times faster then before, which eventually caused stress and a sick note from my doctor. When I returned to my job nothing had changed, so I had no other option but to quit!
>I gave my resignation letter on a Friday. I gave them 3 weeks to transfer knowledge. I come in on Monday with my office door locks changed and all my personal property, including family photos and expensive vest in the dumpster. All the electronic stuff like phone chargers, drive docks and desk lamps were stolen. Fun times.
Yeah, that's why you take everything home ahead of time. At many jobs, giving notice is rewarded with immediately being walked to the parking lot by security, so better to pack up your things yourself than by some oaf who will break or mangle things. Don't take everything at once, as that's obvious; just take a few things every day.
When people notice your desk looking sparse, tell them something about spring cleaning or minimalism or redecorating. You can have plenty of stuff on your desk - just make sure it's the company's stuff.
My first wife divorced me and later my girlfriend miscarried the baby we had. I was excellent at work, but I needed to get away from this place. Far, far, far away and still make money to support myself. It's been loneliness from there on, but at least I've got Allah and my job.
My British company was being sucked dry by US bean-counters. Last straw was closing the UK offices and making us all work from home.
I've worked for 5 companies over a 33 year career. Quit 1st job after 9 years to get away from dated technology and make more money. Quit 2nd job after 6 years to get away from a dying company and make more money. Laid off from 3rd job after 12 months because the company was dying (went from 1000 employees to 50 over the span of 3 months). Laid off from 4rd job after 18 months because the boss hated me (and the company was dying). Been at my current company for 16 years and plan to retire in the next year.
Babymomma a dentist.
>Fortunately, a great stock and housing market
Yeah, uhhh, about that...
VIX is down to 2006 levels. 10 year treasuries are below 2 year treasuries. You have 6-14 months before a 20-30% stock market dip. Forget FB dropping 20% due to sector cycling/fund rebalancing. Think BOA, Goldman, etc. dropping.
Worked for 13+ years at a small, 80Million year in sales, aerospace company. The owner retired and sold it to a 2.8Billion year conglomerate in which the ONLY chart that mattered was the sales per employee metric. Saw the writing on the wall and left about a year ago. Very glad I did. The IT staff went from 5 down to 1 with no developers left on staff. That's okay because I'm very happy at my new job and my old company is more then willing to pay me $225/hr to consult and fix issues.
My last job had unlimited paid time off, company outings, and I was making $95k. I quit because my managers ask me to accomplish two conflicting goals, integrate myself with other departments to earn trust, and do what my boss says (feature branching in git, wait to QA a feature until it is all done).
Eventually the department I was supposed to make friends with asked for a feature that my boss did not care to implement. This created conflict that extends beyond me. Either they were colluding behind the scenes to make me look bad or they disagrees with each other so strongly that I would not be able to resolve the company's problems.
One day my boss said "why don't you do this? It will be good for you." I am the only one who knows what's good for me. I quit the same day.
I left my last job after the two siblings that owned the company ran it into the ground by using it as a piggy bank. They were both taking fancy trips, driving expensive cars, living in multiple houses, all while the employees weren't sure if their paycheck was going to bounce... First time my paycheck bounced and so did I.
About 14 years ago, the company I worked for had a major upheaval; the owner of the company (who wasn't very tech-savvy) had a falling out with his senior programmers, and they all left. I was in tech training. When the owner started bringing in dozens of Indian and Chinese programmers who were trying to figure out how the company worked, it became clear that the company was no longer viable, and I started looking for something more stable.
I'm sure my departure had nothing to do with the fact that the company collapsed, and was purchased by a larger tech services company about 8 months later.
I was hurt on the job, and my former employer told the worker's compensation board that they would not accommodate me. This was shortly after the birth of my 3rd child, and after they told me not to worry because my job would be safe.
...upside is old job enabled me to work with my current company so I was a shoe in for my current job.
After giving up multiple family vacations (they went without me - even one Christmas) because we had some major ERP or warehouse system development/testing/implementation to do...that ended up never going in...I finally decided that management from director on up (I was management) was incompetent. Multiple CIO's came and left. We didn't get bonuses or raises anymore because we didn't make plan, even though the company was a license to print money. How much money could we all have made had the place not been run by idiots? Who thinks that 25% growth year over year is a plausible plan? I finally got tired of being one of the losers. I'm better than that and I have skills in demand that mean I don't have to work for losers. It was easy to find a new job, all I did was update my resume on monster. I never applied for a single job, the phone starting ringing and three years later still rings even though I haven't touched the resume.
Short story, often repeated: They took too much and gave too little.
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Actually my last paying job. I liked the company, my manager and the people I was working with. The office was in San Francisco next to the Embarcadero Center and there was space in the basement where I could park my motorcycle for free and the commute was 30 minutes tops and the money was OK. So after many years I was where I always had wanted to be. Then my boss’s boss decided to move the group from S.F. to Mtn. View so they would be closer to other engineering staff and his living situation. At first I and another engineer were allowed to remain behind in S.F. for 6 months but then we got the word we needed to move as well. So my commute went from 30 minutes across the Bay Bridge to 1+hours down I-880, a road I hated for reason. And to make it better my wife and I had finally agreed to separate (she had been working as a Park Ranger in the high sierra and living away from me in a national park for the past 8 years). So to be honest I wasn’t exactly being upbeat. I’d started my career in Silicon Valley working in Mtn. View so it wasn’t all that much of a stretch, still. And then there were several (5+) incidents where I was close to incidents of road rage individuals including one where a fellow in a BMW barely managed to avoid the line of stopped traffic I was in on the freeway. A few milli-seconds slower reflex and his engine would have been in my console. So when my manager, a really nice Russian lady, dropped by one day and said we need to have a conversation. You don’t seem happy. I looked up at her for a couple of milli-seconds and replied “you’re right”. “Would you please terminate me?”. Sort of like that expression “They shoot horses, don’t they?”. She asked if I was serious, (I was 64 years old and although age discrimination was not yet as bad as it’s become lately it was a sensible question) and it took me a couple of seconds to realize that I was. So we set a date for me to finish up and arrange for a transfer of my projects. On my last day I brought in a Bar-B-Que lunch for the entire group, explained what I had been doing (frankly very little left) and passed that over to the other engineering staff. I remember getting only two phone calls later to clarify minor issues. My thought at the time was that if they would terminate me then I would be eligible for six months of unemployment (US standard at the time) and I would have time get my shit/head together and find another job. The timing though was fortuitous. The six months turned into a year and six months due to recession and extensions of unemployment. Among things that happened was that I became eligible for medicare and then as I owned my own home (paid off the mortgage a few years previously by putting everything I could afford into the monthly note) found I was living very nicely on unemployment. It paid for food, utilities and minor medical. When the unemployment finally ran out it was only a month until I became eligible for standard social security which I believe pays a little more than unemployment. So I had a WTF moment and asked myself why was I working for others and began my second career as an athlete (fencer, another story for another time). Actually I really liked my job, the folks I was working with, my manager, the environment in general but that commute and I was in need of rejuvenation and realignment.
So if you had asked me that morning if I was going to quit, I would have said no. If you had asked me if I was contemplating going into retirement I would have said “no way”. But it was a snap call and as it turns out a reasonable one.
Figured 30 years with Apple was enough⦠;-)
The only time I ever quit a job was due to being yelled at for things I didn't do. It didn't matter what evidence I put up in my defense, I wasn't listened to. Then management would later find out that someone else had caused the problem. I would get a nice card, flowers and chocolate or a paid for dinner at a nice restaurant.
I mentioned once that if they would just hold off on jumping to conclusions, they would have to buy stuff to apologize. I had to go to therapy to cope and the therapist said, "You are in an abusive relationship." After listening to a 40 minute tirade directed at me one afternoon, I cleaned out my office, left my keys on the manager's desk with a note that said "No one ever talks to me this way."
Heart Attack, small company no health care.
I left my last job right after a meltdown at work that followed a week and a half of mini meltdowns at work. The previous year, this same job caused me to end up in a mental hospital, twice. To say it was unnecessarily stressful is an understatement. And most of it was preventable. Inefficient systems that were not allowed to be replaced, a boss that liked to seeing by and disrupt your work, and not being allowed to do your job all made the whole place more stressful for everyone. At least i want the one who came in and started waving a gun around. Fortunately, that was before i started working there.
They bought my employer and spent a daced mismanaging the division, until they were laying off good people to save enough money to goose the quarterly results
What was said in the interview, was completely different than 1st day.
I was replaced by three offshore programmers from India.
I'm going to paraphrase a story I heard about a U.S. branch of a French company:
The French management came to visit the Americans, and were horrified that the engineering department did not wear suits and ties. Word came down from the C-suite: "Everyone must wear suits, like we do in France."
The department rebelled, and their supervisor went back to the C-suite with this message: "Okay, we'll wear suits... if we can have the month of August off, just like you do in France."
The dress code directive was abandoned.
Last job i quit, there was this owner-manager who thought that keeping me on the phone for 2+ hours every day and complaining that things don't get done faster would get things done faster.
I was polite and kept at it for at least 6 months more than I should have. Then I said good bye.
Funny enough, I heard that his partner bought him out and no one calls anyone for more than necessary any more in that company after I resigned. So at least I improved the work conditions for the other people.