If so, what lead to this decision?
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If so, what lead to this decision?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
ispmanager.com -
Akash Joshi -
Yan Levin -
Vinish Bhaskar -
Top comments (57)
This is how I (eventually) got into software development. Finished my degree, worked in a library. Realised I was stuck in a deadend job in the countryside at the age of 25. So, quit the library and moved to London with nothing lined up. At the beginning of the financial crash. That was hard.
Eventually found work writing copy which sort of turned into a career in marketing. Changed companies and found myself in a bad place. Hated my boss, hated the company, was desperately unhappy - so I quit without anything lined up.
Did a bit of temping, found a lovely company who took good care of me and for whom I enjoyed working. But I wanted to change careers entirely - I didn't enjoy marketing and I wanted to be more satisfied with my work. So took the plunge and went to a twelve week bootcamp.
It was hard; no money, no security, no idea what was going to happen next. I got lucky and found work about a month or so after I left. That was about four years ago. Haven't looked back.
What led to these decisions? Necessity. It was necessary for me to escape from these things or else I would be miserable, and there was no time like the present to do it.
I couldn't have done it without my wife to be honest. Both financially and emotionally she kept me afloat.
That's critical. A supportive partner truly can make a monumental difference in terms of career/life path in this regard.
Yes. Hated the job.
Was burnt out due to poor management and technical processes that led to a lot of late night deployments, testing, last-minute fixes. (That's how I became so obsessed with automating testing.)
Not to mention, no code reviews, no feedback from senior engineer, miserable pay raises, no bonuses, little transparency from executive management about the company's health.
My departure was preluded by a exodus of the engineering team. Sad to say that within two years, I was the most senior in my team. The final straw was when the technical lead role was given to an arrogant prick who just joined the company but didn't want to be onboarded to the project by someone who knows the entire codebase (and that of the crummy underlying frameworks too) even in her sleep.
Oh did I mentioned that I was conned into joining the company thinking I'd work on analytics but ended up doing front end work most of the time? To be fair, I enjoyed front end engineering, and making things not just beautiful, but also blazing fast before everyone started talking about progressive asset loading and virtual DOM.
I just quit.
But at the back of my mind, I was pretty confident that I have very employable technical and people skills!
I spent some time off afterwards doing gardening for my mom, studying @addyosmani 's JavaScript Design Patterns, and learning Unity in a attempt to build a strategic resource game for fun. Planned to do Masters, but ended up complaining to @picocreator too often about front-end testing (oh hey, wonder where did all these rants about front-end and testing come from), so we founded UI-licious to build a super awesome UI testing tool for the busy developers.
I've just had a very similar experience in my first development job. Hired straight from bootcamp as a full stack dev to work on a chat bot, promised all the training and support I'd need, only for them to try and put me on an app support admin role instead (which I refused and they then tried to make out it was a misunderstanding).
I was thrown into a load of random dev work with absolutely no support or introduction to the massive legacy codebase and never touched the chat bot (which turned out not to be a chat bot at all). Dept Manager was clueless and left halfway through the year, the senior dev was an arrogant, aggressive idiot with no respect and I strongly suspected he didn't know how to write good code (several months after he left they're discovering an ever increasing stack of problems he caused). No testing, pushing straight to production, out of hours deployment, constantly crashing apps and no respect for employees all pushed me to look for a new job.
The place is a shambles and people leave every day. I was close to walking out without anything lined up but was very lucky to get a new job, starting in the New Year, in an exciting company with much better pay and training. Friday is my last day in this job and I can't wait!
It's great to see you founded a company to build UI testing tools, I'll have to check it out. I'm always looking for good testing tools!
I'm glad you left the toxic workplace and found a better place, congrats!
Thanks, I'm happy you've discovered UI-licious! Feel free to leave me feedback on the tool. :D
Twice as an employee (2010 and 2013) and once as a freelancer (September 2018).
First time because I saw no career prospects though I loved my colleagues and learned a lot from them (first full time job!). Second time I was "forced" to quit because the startup went bust, wasn't a great period, personally and professionally. Third time I quit one of those never ending consultancy gigs because after the acquisition of the agency I collaborated with and a year at the new company I felt everything was going nowhere and my managers were shuffled around too, I opted to quit instead of the risk of growing bitterness. I gave them three times the agreed notice to help with the transition and both parties were satisfied.
I've never thought about this in the past but having free universal health care was (unconsciously) a factor in my freedom (and privilege) to make these choices.
I'm really close to doing so. Some day, I'm going to make an amazing manager because I have seen every possible combinatorial of what NOT to do. I read about workplaces where there's mutual trust and it sounds like a fairly tale.
And it is. In 6 years of work I've changed 11 clients/companies (freelancing about 2-3 of those and rest fulltime jobs). Each had their own problems but ones mutual. There's always a thing/girl/guy that thinks You're(development team or part of it) stupid or a child at least that's how they treat you. And in big companies it's always someone from inside. Small teams or companies can get well together but then you'll probably end up with at least 1 arrogant client. You can't escape people if you wish to earn money but at least try to find a team which will be a good fit. But not to stay too negative there's also amazing people out there and maybe there's just a couple of workplaces where this fairly tale is actually true.
There is hope indeed! Since writing this, I have managed to become a team lead. Still figuring out how to do this whole management thing, but now I get to help set the rules and contribute to an inclusive culture. It's consulting though, so clients are definitely going to be the challenge.
Congrats! It's not a fairy tale... it's more like a unicorn. :-)
My last team was that rare unicorn where the manager had deep technical know-how combined with excellent people skills, and the entire team were smart, hard-working, respectful, nice people. We got a ton of work done and had a good time doing it, and then... layoffs. :-(
So, it can happen (rare though it may be). If you have it, enjoy it while it lasts!
It didn't last long :( Between 80 hour weeks and micromanagement I lost all the enthusiasm and well-being I had started off with (I had previously worked for this firm for 3 years and had recurring issues with being overworked and feeling taken advantage of on a regular basis).
Took some time off to figure out what I want out of my next job and it was awesome, or would have been, had I been able to do it for longer. My financial situation is not that great right now, nor has it ever been, so I went through all of my savings very quickly. But if all goes well, I will have secured my dream job by next week! There's a lot of jobs out there and I don't have to say yes to the very first one I come across.
Best of luck!
2008 was a bad time to work at a startup focused on commercial real estate lending. The founder took out a second mortgage, we started doing more and more general consulting on the side, but it just wasn't enough to keep the lights on or make payroll consistently (especially when our biggest side client started ignoring invoices). Eventually I quit to job hunt full time because I couldn't afford to come to work.
Yep, the first time was right before I got into software development. I had been working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and just couldn't take it anymore. The worst part was I spent all that time developing skills (sales & customer service) that I did not feel were a good fit for me. This was still the height of the recession so there were few jobs for people with soft skills, no less soft skills that I didn't want to cultivate as a long-term career. Looking backward I find that I use those skills every day as a developer. I look back on it as the best, worst experience of my life.
I have done this a few times since becoming a developer but because I had a hard skill in a field that I enjoyed overall it would never be as scary as that first time. Taking that leap all those years ago stripped the fear out of it each subsequent time. I also found that the discomfort of imposter syndrome as a developer is nothing compared to trying to sell someone rental car insurance 30 times a day (or collecting their $1000 deductible after returning the car with damage).
Two years ago I quit my job as a contractor for the US Coast Guard. I had some vague business ideas I wanted to try, but mainly I left to take control over my own life. In that respect it's a failure, but I've learned a lot about my ability, or rather inability, to function outside of certain environments, and disproved my theory that the reason my side projects never got off the ground was because my job was sapping all my energy. (Turns out the problem was me all along. 😬👍)
A year or two before I left, I had tallied up my expenses and determined that I could survive for a while without an income. When certain things started to go south at the local facility where I worked, I looked around and said to myself that I was done with this, and set a date when I would give notice. When the time came, that was a hard e-mail to send, and it took me about a day to actually do it.
I consider it the best decision I've ever made, even though I haven't quite figured out how to move on from here.
I think I've only quit jobs without anything else lined up. I tend to work at a place until it's no longer the right fit, then don't try to stay longer.
yes, and while I told them it was because of my thesis...
the truth was that we had no projects and I was bored out of my mind. Since I was a student I think it didn't matter too much, nowadays it might be a terrible idea for me to just quit for whatever reason, not only career wise but my visaa D:
I think if it wasn't for the visa I'd be a job hopper but, forcing myself to stay in a place that I "didn't like" has taught me a lot of valuable lessons and I think I've grown a lot as a professional and as a person.
Sometimes things happen for a reason :3
Currently in this situation and the first three months has been rewarding while scary. The timing in my life worked out well as I needed a break from burnout and to spend time with family on hospice. I've since been able to catch up on all the things in life that were on the back of my mind; I've re-established an LLC contracting business and have been able to invest in that, I've pruned and polished all of my online accounts and resumes, I've spread out my income opportunities to places like upwork and patreon, and now I feel like I'm just sitting back in my chair waiting for the next big thing to come my way.
I think it's really important to have side projects or passion projects that keep you on your game. I took a 2-month burnout recovery break from coding and spent my time being productive in other ways. I've been able to make time for practising interviews and meeting with low potential employers to get a feel for where I'm at and what has changed since the last time I was looking for work -- ahead of the more important interviews. And I've been able to travel and enjoy myself as well during this time, which is an absolute miracle.
I think it all comes down to timing and the time had come, the universe decided. I am lucky that I had savings to carry me through the first couple of months instead of feeling frantic to get work by next week to pay the bills. If I had left my job and had no options, feeling felt pressured to make ends meet more than I currently do, I know that would make things more challenging.
Ultimately, the biggest factor that lead me to this situation was the salary. I just wasn't being paid enough to be on-call 24/7, working the long hours and weekends that I was working, and feeling like I wasn't being valued at the end of the week. Inevitable burnout is something I charge extra for, but there are a lot of places out there that will underpay and overwork you. Nice desks and monitors, unlimited snacks, company outings with free booze, and a foosball table are awesome but if I can't pay rent can I sleep on the couch at work? No. My time was worth more than I was being offered, it turned out.