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?

Comments

Poached with money

[Anonymous Coward]

I've left every job because I was poached with money.

Re:Poached with money

[Oswald McWeany]

I've left every job because I was poached with money.

Always with money, never poached using water?

Re:Poached with money

[Drethon]

I've left every job because I was poached with money.

Roughly the same for me. Lost my job due to the great economy crap and the only alternate I found was a contracting position. Said contracting position offered me pretty much the same hourly I was making at my full time job with no benefits. A month later they gave everyone a job cut across the board. A year later I asked for at least cost of living increase, pointing out that from the 12 engineers hired with me, I was one of only two the customer kept on, and was turned down. Found another company with benefits and told them they just needed to match my current hourly and they happily said yes.

If you don't want to pay benefits, at least compensate with sufficient hourly wage...

Immigration

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Immigration

[magusxxx]

Yeah, we'd rather grow our own.

Re:Immigration

[AmiMoJo]

Indeed, the UK is one of the worst in the world for family visas.

Several years ago the government made a most unwise promise to reduce immigration to the "tens of thousands" (net). At the moment it's about +230,000 net which is actually down quite a bit from a peak of around +330,000 due to Brexit.

There are about 85,000 family reunions a year. The rest is skilled workers, foreign students who keep the university system going and fees for British students down, and EU workers exercising their freedom of movement rights.

The government could have stopped about 60% of immigration any time it liked (40% is EU freedom of movement), but obviously didn't because it would be economic suicide. So the squeeze is being put on families, particularly British people with foreign spouses and children. They don't have commercial interests backing them, and they don't have money to pay the ever increasing fees or fight decisions in court.

This will probably only get worse after Brexit, as the demand for falling immigration increases. Some Brexiteers like Rees-Mogg promised that it would get easier, but they were lying. The worst part is that most people don't realize. Literally every single person, 100% no exceptions, that I told I was getting married followed up with something like "oh, and then she is coming here?" Most people assume that if you are married and a British citizen you have a right to unite your family here, but in reality it's extremely difficult and the Home Office will resist in every way possible.

When people talk about having a guest worker system that doesn't allow families to come they are being delusional. No skilled worker who isn't fresh out of university and free from all attachments is going to want to move to another country by themselves and abandon their spouse and children. If you want skilled labour you have to accept the family of skilled labour. Most countries are fine with this, except for the ones in the grip of populism and anti-immigrant scaremongering/scapegoating.

The company was going to fail.

[TechyImmigrant]

The first rat to leave the sinking ship gets the primo spot on the adjacent ship.

Laid off after corporate merger/acquisition

[gti_guy]

Twice. Also laid off once after 3rd round of lay offs due to mismanagement. 30+ years in IT

Microaggressions

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Unfulfilled Promises

[cmeans]

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.

Burnout, Re-orgs, and Death. Oh My!

[Karnak23]

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.

Health care isn't about doing a good job

[puck01]

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.

Open office plans suck

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Negative environment, poor pay

[tnok85]

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.

Hostile Work Environment

[bobbied]

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.

Expression

[Camembert]

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.

straight out of Dilbert

[Jaegs]

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:

• micromanagement bordering on obsessiveness
• incompetent marketing and (some) management
• being passed over for raises
• not being interviewed for internal positions for which I was qualified, because:
  1. they did not want to rehire my position, or
  2. nepotism, or
  3. both
• asinine dress code (women could wear skorts in the summer, but men could not wear shorts, even when working in non air-conditioned areas)

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.

I quit the boss, not the company

[xSauronx]

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.

I had a heart attack

[halivar]

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.