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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
not their jobs
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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
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)
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!
... 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.
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've not quit a job, they all where sold, merged, or where outsourced.
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
...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?
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.
I quit because I got a better offer!
This, this is america 100%. Why and how Fortune100/500 company still exist and operate like this is beyond me.
This AC story is the story about everyone will live in his life especially in software development.
If you got bought by a F100/500 company, you will endure this.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
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.
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
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!
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.
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
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/
With asshole colleagues with your attitude to different opinions, indeed good that he left.
Or maybe leave your politics at home? Nobody is paying you to be a political activist in the office on their clock.
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.
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.
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.
...because it was there.
It was. Literally just up the road and they had been bugging me to join them for a while.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
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.
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 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
As soon as you feel unhappy at a job, you should start spending every working hour looking for a new job.
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
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!
If there's no overtime, why were you working 12 hour days? Just go home. Instead, you continued to get the work done, so OF COURSE they're not going to hire anyone else.
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.)
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.
So... virtue signalling then?
Did they take your red stapler, too?
#DeleteFacebook
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Expressing support for a candidate isn't the same as being an activist.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
(stands and applauds) I salute you.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
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.
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.
No kidding. Scanning the first 2/3, it's almost all more money or bad work environments. Very little health, no family, no changing life plans, no dreams, none of that other stuff.
I quit my last job because my wife and I decided to move. She'd just finished grad school and didn't want to stay in the same town where she'd been studying for the past 6 years (undergrad + Master's). She had a lead and then an offer in a town that we both liked when we visited, so we decided to move. I didn't mind my old job, and did take advantage of the move to get a moderate raise, but those were more incidental to the greater plan.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
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.
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.
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
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.
I did it for the money.
Fuck Ajit Pai
2 Reasons: -- Lack of growth opportunities in a family run business -- Boys club mentality that wouldn't promote any women into leadership roles
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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
Classic. Shitty team lead is dragging me down. I like him but he is being lazy and generally sucks at being a lead. Manager sticks by him because he is basically being held hostage. Lead seeks to maintain the hostage situation by "architecting" everything and laying hands on every single project. And they complain because none of the other engineers are able to handle stuff. Wonder why.
Fuck. This.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
Just hit my 20 year benchmark.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
"storage admin role where I could have significant impact for the business"
LMFAO!!! Storage admin impacting the business. Holy shit...the only way you can impact the business is by frying all the data and backups.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
Yeah...don't do any of it you beef headed moron.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
subject says it all. Last job didn't like brown people, so we left.
Purchased by one...yes, this is an exact description of the way things played out.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
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.
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.
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
Pity, the pink slip looked FABULOUS on you!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
They made me use Windows and blocked giphy.com
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.
No
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.
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.
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.
But no one wants this at work. No matter where you work there will be difference of political opinion. Just like you don't talk religion at work, it's stupid to talk about politics as well. Especially with times being so vitriolic it's best to just keep your head down and get back to work.
LOL....you quit because of that!? Special kind of autistic there.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
The data jobs will come back. Guarantee that much.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Why is every post getting modded zero in this thread today? Weird.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
But now you are the fall guy for their shitty security.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Figured 30 years with Apple was enough⦠;-)
Heart Attack, small company no health care.
He should have been architecting the system. Based on his experience as a backup monkey...or something.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
What was said in the interview, was completely different than 1st day.
I was replaced by three offshore programmers from India.