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.
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!
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.
Versatile software engineer with a background in .NET consulting and CMS development. Working on regaining my embedded development skills to get more involved with IoT opportunities.
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.
Versatile software engineer with a background in .NET consulting and CMS development. Working on regaining my embedded development skills to get more involved with IoT opportunities.
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!
Versatile software engineer with a background in .NET consulting and CMS development. Working on regaining my embedded development skills to get more involved with IoT opportunities.
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.
It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
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.
I am a full stack web developer, classically trained in object-oriented programming, who likes to write universal javascript, with extensive experience building the backend of web-connected properties
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.
I guess that the final reason why someone can even think about taking this decision is to have passive earnings or enough savings to survive some months without income.
I did this in the past. I had a good amount of savings and I was in my 20's, so I didn't mind so live frugally. Also, worst case scenario, I could go back at my parents and eat and sleep for free until finding a new job.
My reason was that I wanted to travel. I went to London and found a job there. It was a really nice experience, that leaded me to more travel and better jobs. Now, in my 40's and with a familly, I would not be able to do it again.
The position was impossible to work in, it was advertised as a "professional work environment with exceptional developers" biggest amount of bs I've ever read. Hired as a network developer no one worked until a few days before the deadline, we were given a project that had to be done within 3 months. Okay wasn't impossible so I got straight to it designing the architecture, writing our requirements for the company to buy, specifications etc. My colleagues, on the other hand, were working on the UI, 2 and a half months in all they had done was watched Netflix, YouTube and some days didn't even come in leaving me in the office alone. When it finally came round to them getting their work done I was bombarded with questions, basic questions that any "exceptional developer" should know. Me as a network dev I didn't touch UIs, in all honesty, I don't like making them, they're just not for me. To get this project finished I had to write 90% of the UI system for them as they didn't know what they were doing, it became very obvious that they had either faked their degrees (or past experience) and followed some tutorials online. Once it came to handing over the Git repo the company asked why I had written the majority of the code, they tried to say that because I merged branches it shown up as I had written all of it...Not really how Git works.
The company we did the project for said that it was clear that I had written the entire project and gave me a huge bonus alongside my payment. Left the company I was working for after that with no plans where I was going to go next. I was just glad that I was out of that place, I don't mind if people need a little downtime every now and again but when you're just watching Netflix for 2 and a half months and doing no work entirely that just took the piss.
Yes, I did this last year, after much agonizing about how quitting a job without something else lined up is the last thing you should do. I was working as support staff at a hospital where I had been since 2004. I had gone through some college for web development, quickly switched to self-study after I saw how out-of-date the curriculum was and core classes I needed to finish my AS weren't being offered. My hours at work shifted from 11-7 to 9-5:30, which doubled my commute to a whopping 3 hours a day and reduced my paycheck thanks to the loss of evening differential. I had reached the point where I knew I was good enough to work professionally as a developer, but it's hard to apply to things and schedule interviews when your time is completely monopolized from 6:30am-7:30pm.
This completely broke me: i had low energy, and was miserable and cross with friends and family. It soon dawned on me that if I was going to be underemployed, I needed to do so in a manner that would let me move forward more quickly career-wise. I had a healthy amount of earned time, so I formulated a plan to quit my job, focus on the job search, and get local barista work if I didn't find dev work over the summer, and this was exactly how things played out. I work evenings, so I can go to interviews with little to no schedule wrangling. Getting to work is 20 minutes of walking a day instead of a 3 hour slog on public transportation, and I have more time to write, code, apply to jobs, and sleep.
My day to day is hard (but nowhere near as hard as it used to be), and I am so grateful literally every day that I made a choice that might not read as the correct thing to do to some people, but paid off for me professionally, and in terms of mental and emotional health.
It's crazy that I see this pop article pop up on my feed now, because I just quit less than a week ago, and not have anything lined up, for the first time.
For me, it's been a weird emotional ride. I've second-guessed my decision to quit several times, but I ultimately committed. I wanted to make a decision based on courage instead of fear. I basically just want to see if I'm cut out for making it on my own without a security blanket (although I have a good financial cushion saved up for a while). My job was quite stressful at times, which also pushed the decision. I wanted to leave in the best graces possible, before burnout became an issue.
Right now, I'm taking a bit of a vacation, but I have some side projects and ideas lined up that I'm going to try and foster on a full-time schedule, which is an opportunity I might not always have. I figure I'll either succeed, or learn something (or many things, ideally).
I'll probably write post about this after a while, and let you know how it goes. Wish me luck!
Decided not to renew my last contract as things had been going for a while and the work was becoming less fulfilling. It didn't help that I was in Dubai at the time taking a break for a few weeks when my contract expired. It felt too good to just not go back unfortunately.
Spent a few weeks doing not much, didn't worry me but picked up 2 new clients after a month. Stuff always works out, it has to.
Yes, in fact, I did exactly this about a month ago.
I worked for a company and we were all a 100% remote team, I had been there for 3 1/2 years and I did have a great time working there. However, company culture changed massively, as when I started there was a handful of us (8 people maybe), but on the day that I left there were around 30 of us.
For me, it was just the growing pains, poor decisions further up the tree and people trying to micromanage other people, etc, it just became unbearable.
I quit on Monday morning with literally no plan other than "I will go freelance for a bit"
Well, here I am after working my notice period and a couple of weeks into freelancing and I am much happier, much less stressed and still alive!
At the end of the day, I have been a software developer since 1996, and I just put a little faith in myself and knew that faced with a challenge of finding some kind of work, that I would just be OK.
Not sure I would recommend it though, I do have a family and a house etc, so it's not without risk, but for me, the risk was far less stressful than tolerating the issues that had been bothering me for a while.
Where did you find your clients? I'm pretty much in the same situation as you. Quit my job, moved to a different city to live with my partner and no plans except that "I will go freelance for a bit"
In late 2016 I resigned from my job, without anything lined up except just a plan.
The thing that lead to that decision were 2 reasons:
I felt like I was not growing in my career and as a good human being.
and very month I was worried about my finances and making the ends meet, and every month I ended up going on the negative side.
I made a promise to myself I am going to work harder, smarter and a lot to get out of this rat race. I promised myself to retire before 40. The first step was to resign from my job.
And within 4 months I was out with my wife on our mini world tour, everyday I am glad I made that decision.
In past couple of years I have grown 3-4x in every aspect of life. I am going to repeat the same thing again because I am still not close to retiring at 40.
Ruby on Rails developer - Maker of ✨ things on the Internet. O(🐌^n) kind of guy. Alumni @lewagonparis (batch 145). Builds wooden furniture on his balcony.
I quit my stained-glass job in 2007 to go back to university.
I quit my librarian job (like @DavidWickes) in 2010 to move to London (during the financial crash) to work in the art market (didn't pan out as you could expect).
I quit my marketing job in 2018 to learn web development.
France makes it easier than the US to do so. When you work long enough, you can apply to some kind of basic assistance. It's really useful to make transitions work between jobs.
Since I've moved from stained-glass to libraries, to art galleries, to startups... the market demand is more in my favor each time. So I feel confidant I'll be able to land on my feet (or maybe I'm just nuts).
I did it twice: the first time I was tired of editing the spaghetti php code without seeing any improvement. That way I could focus on my graduation work and improve my Ruby skills.
The next time (a year later), I was thinking about quitting and starting working remotely (+ change my primary programming language). Then I was moved to another project which I hadn't much interest to work on, and I quit.
These decisions seemed so hard to me at that time, but now I think they were relatively easy, cause I had much less financial responsibilities then. The next decision to quit was much harder, and I had to find the job first.
Where I was working had just made some people redundant, so I wasn't feeling particularly loyal. My boss had left (for personal reasons), so I was the only developer. On top of that I found the work environment frustrating, due to having to sit next to someone whose job was to be loud on the phone (I don't mean that disparagingly, I accepted that he was doing his job and not just annoying), and I was suffering with massive imposter syndrome. I'd just inherited some money (enough to get by for six months) after my granddad died, then my shoelace broke as I was tying my shoe.
Silicon Forest Developer/hacker. I write about Generative AI, DevOps, and Linux mostly.
Once held the world record for being the youngest person alive.
I walked away from a very high paying job with great benefits, that was incredibly toxic. I'll spare the details and the company name.
It wasn't really things that were happening to me personally, but certain people around me. After attempts at rectifying issues, I decided I could not change the situation, so I made a plan. I had some savings aside but I tightened my finances down to save even more, for my "escape". I didn't have a specific time planned, I just figured I would know the right point.
I didn't start "looking" for anything I just focused on making my time there as bearable as possible. I did my job, and tried to help those around me.
I reached my breaking point during a meeting when I witnessed something that made me decide I could no longer be part of the organization in any way. I put in my two weeks notice immediately. This caused such commotion and verbal abuse I ended up leaving a few days later. Something I'd never done before.
I had nothing lined up or even in the works. I decided to take the summer off. I was fortunate to have enough saved that I could do this. I didn't look, and I turned down interviews. I spent 3 months focusing on my family, building up skills, and doing volunteer work. It was the greatest way to decompress and re-center.
I am lucky to have been able to do this. At many points in my career I was not able to and had to "stick it out" at some terrible places. This is why when I had a chance to walk I took it.
Since then, I now have pretty rigid standards for a work environment, and I stick to it. I am the squeaky wheel and do not tolerate deviance from my expectations. I don't care if others see this as being "high maintenance". I've been a member of many organizations since that have no problems with it. They share my values.
Mental health is important. From that point forward I considered it more seriously when a coworker or someone reporting to me shared they were having stress/mental wellness concerns. If I can help them, I will.
I’m a developer with 15-years of experience in the .Net stack as well as an interest in Angular.I’m known for taking legacy projects and updating them so they can be maintainable and have new features
My supervisor was harrasing me and his manager nor my staffing agency cared.
I called the recruiter and left them a voicemail that I quit. A week later I got a call from the agency asking why I quit without any notice. Turns out the recruiter was fired and no one informed me.
Yes! After two years at an agency things got serious. My g/f and I both quit our jobs and blew our saving on 7.5 months traveling. Now we live in a new country and I work for a pretty dope company, so things have worked out 😁
Yes. Did not want to be associated with an organization that blatantly disregarded customer privacy / security AND promoted blatant copyright abuse (stripping copyright notices, making ownership claims). Didn't take long to line up a new role. Staying active in the local community is almost always worth it.
Yes. After first job which was remote and more like freelancing I thought if I apply to company and get in that's the best way to learn and become expert. Code quality was horrible. Deadlines were "yesterday" so everyone worried about deadlines and not quality as it required more time to change the structure than to just patch the stuff. A lot of overtime at the end and no way to get more money unless you get different degree of diploma like if you're bsc you need msc or even msc -> phd. I just quit hating the job hating every morning I woke up and had to work and had to work 3 months if I quit so I said I better quit now then look for another job because no one will wait for me 3 months. Luckily got the offer month after that and this company which I was quitting hired 2 new juniors and gave me option to leave after 2 months of notice period.
It was related to a long term desire to shift careers from a data/business analyst role to something in software development.
However, a recent assignment as lead to a project I had serious concerns around led me to find an exit quickly from a company I was with for 8 years. Of course having decent savings was also an important factor in taking the sudden leap with a huge doubts about when I'd be able to handle monthly living expenses with whatever came next.
Went from grad school to my first full-time job. A couple of years there and worked on a AAA game from start to finish. Went straight to another AAA project and after about a year was just "finished". Totally burned out. Quit.
Spent a couple of months traveling through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia. Did a ton of scuba diving and read a lot of books. Went off to Qingdao University to "study Chinese". Did that more seriously than I intended, but also learned Verilog and played a lot Zelda: Wind Waker, etc.
A friend coaxed me out of soft-retirement and I came back a better software engineer and especially a better manager than I would have been otherwise.
Not sure if it's the best decision I ever made, but it's a contender. I highly recommend it.
Max is a life enhancer for tech & entrepreneurship. Which seeks to blend both to build innovative products or services for the world that solves hard problems.
Quit a job because it wasn't what I signed up for as they had a job advertisement for entry-level software engineers.
But it was only when I'm was in the job that they told me that it requires 3 years in knowledge with python plus 6 mths training on the software they had to do development for that piece of software thus I was reassigned to do business development role.
Plus being in a remote team, they have a software that records your activities based upon clicks and screenshots of what is on your computer which made me paranoid in my activities in working while I turn it on during office hours.
So I just say I quit and went on my merry way to look for opportunities and found an internship in the startup I'm currently in.
Yes. This is actually how I got started learning development. In September, I found out my wife and I were having a baby. At the time, I made my money playing and coaching poker.
About a month later, I was playing and something completely changed me. This guy came in, under heavy influence of some kind of drug. He sat right next to me. I could see his cards, and it was clear to me that he had no idea what he was doing. He lost $2k in an hour before the poker manager threw him out. Seeing that made me realize that this is how I make a living. Taking money from people who are under the influence, who don't have time to study like I do. It wasn't a life I wanted to explain to my kid, it's not honorable.
A week later, someone contacted me (I kept a blog on my progress) letting me know about Web Development and how he started his journey being self taught. I looked into it and was hooked. It was amazing being able to type these characters and having different formats pop up on the screen.
After a couple of weeks, I decided to stop playing poker and put all my time into learning.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
I've had a lifelong need for expensive medications, so, voluntarily moving to an uninsured status has been a non-starter. That said, propensity to jump was a lot higher when I was unencumbered by marriage, mortgage and pets. Since becoming responsible for others, the whole "is the money/benefits worth the anguish" equation has had a few more variables added to it.
Serial podcast creator and .NET Core maniac.
Can often be found talking about everything and nothing on one of the many podcasts that he produces (only one of them is about .NET Core, honest)
Location
Leeds, UK
Education
Computer Science with Games Development - BSc
Work
.NET Development Contractor; Podcast host, producer and editor
It was due to a lack of support from immidate management, overwork (I ended up taking on enough work to keep three employees busy full time), and under pay.
I left without a plan, because I was unhappy and incredibly stressed. Those around me noticed an immidate upswing in my mood, the day that I handed my notice in. I was even told that I was my old self again, by the time that my notice period had ended.
Finding a new gig to move to was a piece of cake, as it's an employees market, not an employers one (i.e there is a huge demand for tech workers who can prove that they have the skills), and I had my pick of about 5 possible roles.
I feel incredibly privileged to be in a position, and a market, which allowed me the opportunity to walk away and take care of my own mental health. Where I not a developer, I don't think I'd have been able to do that so easily.
I did that at my first job. I was working at a startup and one of the cofounders had recently left due to some fight between them. The work atmosphere was charged, my best friend had quit soon after due to big office drama. I was young, naive, and under a weird kind of pressure. I decided to quit very haphazardly.
In hindsight, it was a terrible move and I wasted many months (possibly years) of my life because of that one mistake.
Grew up in Russia, lived in the States, moved to Germany, sometimes live in Spain. I program since I was 13. I used to program games, maps and now I reverse engineer password managers and other stuff
Location
Berlin and Málaga
Education
MS in CS from State Polytechnic University of St. Petersburg
Twice. I once quite a job in the US to move back home and go travel around the world. Another time I quit a job to become a freelancer, stay home with the kids and live a life away from the office on the beach.
Trouble maker and Problem solver ⚙️🔧
Loves simplicity, hates bullshit 💩.
Productivity obsessed, avid learner 🖥🚀
Sport and outdoor freak 🧗⛰
Metalhead 🎸🤘 Father of 2 👨👩👦👦
Opinions are my own
2001 I left my job as Team Lead in the Customer Support at a national phone company and went for a sabbatical in New Zealand. When back I started learning programming and after some hard months ( hard because I was studying hard and working almost for free) I got a full-time job and since then I switched companies almost regularly every 2-3 years. ( my current company is the exception but since I changed teams/projects and languages many times it feels like it anyway).
Everybody said I was crazy quitting my job like that - but that was what I wanted, just travel, explore new possibilities and rebuild my professional life. In the end it paid off :-)
Sure multiple times :) Most memorable was first time of course. I was out of 2 successive engineering schools and MBA training, I wasn't very motivated because it was all theories :D and I wasn't also very motivated to become a Manager though I was accepted in a very big corp for that, I preferred to take a job as quality engineer in a factory of another big corp instead 15 min by walking from my home. That's how I really got into programming because no IT folks were able to code complex statistical algorithms so I decided to do it myself on a PC. But it was only the beginning of personal computer era and still the reign of mainframes and Vax. One day the CTO of big corp came to the factory and decided to get rid off of every applications on PC to port them back to Vax because PC would have no future: a guy really lacking vision of the future after insight :) So sure I decided to quit with nothing next in mind!
Yes I have. There was a job available close to my home in Chicago. They had another in the western suburbs they wanted me to manage. They said no so I quit that instance. Turned out it was a two year gig. Hindsight is 20/20 they say.
Yep. It was my first job. I started there as a intern and slowly became a full web dev. The company had around 3 products. All using old stack. After some time, the problems I was solving were all the same. I wasn't moving forward.
I tryed to do some interviews while employed, but I still had a sense of gratitude (I still do) and didn't seem right.
After talking with my manager I decided it was time to go. I gave them the option to choose a date for me to leave (so I wouldnt cause more disturbance than necessary ).
But in the end, I still think they got mad at me. For leaving them without having a job lined up
Was traveling consultant for Red Hat. I had enough of being in Plano, Tx or Branson, MO. I quit bought a new game called Skyrim and nice bottle of bourbon. I didn't start looking for jobs for a month.
Yes, my bosses lied me at the beginning of the recruitment about work conditions at the first renewal. They ensure me better salary and projects but they never arrived...
In 2011 trying to finish my graduation degree (but I did not completed it :)
and 2 years ago because I got burnout after working for a Financial Startup.
One of the most salient features of our Tech Hiring culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.
He/Him/His
I'm a Software Engineer and a teacher.
There's no feeling quite like the one you get when you watch someone's eyes light up learning something they didn't know.
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.
I guess that the final reason why someone can even think about taking this decision is to have passive earnings or enough savings to survive some months without income.
I did this in the past. I had a good amount of savings and I was in my 20's, so I didn't mind so live frugally. Also, worst case scenario, I could go back at my parents and eat and sleep for free until finding a new job.
My reason was that I wanted to travel. I went to London and found a job there. It was a really nice experience, that leaded me to more travel and better jobs. Now, in my 40's and with a familly, I would not be able to do it again.
The position was impossible to work in, it was advertised as a "professional work environment with exceptional developers" biggest amount of bs I've ever read. Hired as a network developer no one worked until a few days before the deadline, we were given a project that had to be done within 3 months. Okay wasn't impossible so I got straight to it designing the architecture, writing our requirements for the company to buy, specifications etc. My colleagues, on the other hand, were working on the UI, 2 and a half months in all they had done was watched Netflix, YouTube and some days didn't even come in leaving me in the office alone. When it finally came round to them getting their work done I was bombarded with questions, basic questions that any "exceptional developer" should know. Me as a network dev I didn't touch UIs, in all honesty, I don't like making them, they're just not for me. To get this project finished I had to write 90% of the UI system for them as they didn't know what they were doing, it became very obvious that they had either faked their degrees (or past experience) and followed some tutorials online. Once it came to handing over the Git repo the company asked why I had written the majority of the code, they tried to say that because I merged branches it shown up as I had written all of it...Not really how Git works.
The company we did the project for said that it was clear that I had written the entire project and gave me a huge bonus alongside my payment. Left the company I was working for after that with no plans where I was going to go next. I was just glad that I was out of that place, I don't mind if people need a little downtime every now and again but when you're just watching Netflix for 2 and a half months and doing no work entirely that just took the piss.
Yes, I did this last year, after much agonizing about how quitting a job without something else lined up is the last thing you should do. I was working as support staff at a hospital where I had been since 2004. I had gone through some college for web development, quickly switched to self-study after I saw how out-of-date the curriculum was and core classes I needed to finish my AS weren't being offered. My hours at work shifted from 11-7 to 9-5:30, which doubled my commute to a whopping 3 hours a day and reduced my paycheck thanks to the loss of evening differential. I had reached the point where I knew I was good enough to work professionally as a developer, but it's hard to apply to things and schedule interviews when your time is completely monopolized from 6:30am-7:30pm.
This completely broke me: i had low energy, and was miserable and cross with friends and family. It soon dawned on me that if I was going to be underemployed, I needed to do so in a manner that would let me move forward more quickly career-wise. I had a healthy amount of earned time, so I formulated a plan to quit my job, focus on the job search, and get local barista work if I didn't find dev work over the summer, and this was exactly how things played out. I work evenings, so I can go to interviews with little to no schedule wrangling. Getting to work is 20 minutes of walking a day instead of a 3 hour slog on public transportation, and I have more time to write, code, apply to jobs, and sleep.
My day to day is hard (but nowhere near as hard as it used to be), and I am so grateful literally every day that I made a choice that might not read as the correct thing to do to some people, but paid off for me professionally, and in terms of mental and emotional health.
It's crazy that I see this pop article pop up on my feed now, because I just quit less than a week ago, and not have anything lined up, for the first time.
For me, it's been a weird emotional ride. I've second-guessed my decision to quit several times, but I ultimately committed. I wanted to make a decision based on courage instead of fear. I basically just want to see if I'm cut out for making it on my own without a security blanket (although I have a good financial cushion saved up for a while). My job was quite stressful at times, which also pushed the decision. I wanted to leave in the best graces possible, before burnout became an issue.
Right now, I'm taking a bit of a vacation, but I have some side projects and ideas lined up that I'm going to try and foster on a full-time schedule, which is an opportunity I might not always have. I figure I'll either succeed, or learn something (or many things, ideally).
I'll probably write post about this after a while, and let you know how it goes. Wish me luck!
Decided not to renew my last contract as things had been going for a while and the work was becoming less fulfilling. It didn't help that I was in Dubai at the time taking a break for a few weeks when my contract expired. It felt too good to just not go back unfortunately.
Spent a few weeks doing not much, didn't worry me but picked up 2 new clients after a month. Stuff always works out, it has to.
Yes, in fact, I did exactly this about a month ago.
I worked for a company and we were all a 100% remote team, I had been there for 3 1/2 years and I did have a great time working there. However, company culture changed massively, as when I started there was a handful of us (8 people maybe), but on the day that I left there were around 30 of us.
For me, it was just the growing pains, poor decisions further up the tree and people trying to micromanage other people, etc, it just became unbearable.
I quit on Monday morning with literally no plan other than "I will go freelance for a bit"
Well, here I am after working my notice period and a couple of weeks into freelancing and I am much happier, much less stressed and still alive!
At the end of the day, I have been a software developer since 1996, and I just put a little faith in myself and knew that faced with a challenge of finding some kind of work, that I would just be OK.
Not sure I would recommend it though, I do have a family and a house etc, so it's not without risk, but for me, the risk was far less stressful than tolerating the issues that had been bothering me for a while.
Where did you find your clients? I'm pretty much in the same situation as you. Quit my job, moved to a different city to live with my partner and no plans except that "I will go freelance for a bit"
In late 2016 I resigned from my job, without anything lined up except just a plan.
The thing that lead to that decision were 2 reasons:
I made a promise to myself I am going to work harder, smarter and a lot to get out of this rat race. I promised myself to retire before 40. The first step was to resign from my job.
And within 4 months I was out with my wife on our mini world tour, everyday I am glad I made that decision.
In past couple of years I have grown 3-4x in every aspect of life. I am going to repeat the same thing again because I am still not close to retiring at 40.
Over and over again.
I quit my stained-glass job in 2007 to go back to university.
I quit my librarian job (like @DavidWickes) in 2010 to move to London (during the financial crash) to work in the art market (didn't pan out as you could expect).
I quit my marketing job in 2018 to learn web development.
France makes it easier than the US to do so. When you work long enough, you can apply to some kind of basic assistance. It's really useful to make transitions work between jobs.
Since I've moved from stained-glass to libraries, to art galleries, to startups... the market demand is more in my favor each time. So I feel confidant I'll be able to land on my feet (or maybe I'm just nuts).
I did it twice: the first time I was tired of editing the spaghetti php code without seeing any improvement. That way I could focus on my graduation work and improve my Ruby skills.
The next time (a year later), I was thinking about quitting and starting working remotely (+ change my primary programming language). Then I was moved to another project which I hadn't much interest to work on, and I quit.
These decisions seemed so hard to me at that time, but now I think they were relatively easy, cause I had much less financial responsibilities then. The next decision to quit was much harder, and I had to find the job first.
Yes.
Where I was working had just made some people redundant, so I wasn't feeling particularly loyal. My boss had left (for personal reasons), so I was the only developer. On top of that I found the work environment frustrating, due to having to sit next to someone whose job was to be loud on the phone (I don't mean that disparagingly, I accepted that he was doing his job and not just annoying), and I was suffering with massive imposter syndrome. I'd just inherited some money (enough to get by for six months) after my granddad died, then my shoelace broke as I was tying my shoe.
I walked away from a very high paying job with great benefits, that was incredibly toxic. I'll spare the details and the company name.
It wasn't really things that were happening to me personally, but certain people around me. After attempts at rectifying issues, I decided I could not change the situation, so I made a plan. I had some savings aside but I tightened my finances down to save even more, for my "escape". I didn't have a specific time planned, I just figured I would know the right point.
I didn't start "looking" for anything I just focused on making my time there as bearable as possible. I did my job, and tried to help those around me.
I reached my breaking point during a meeting when I witnessed something that made me decide I could no longer be part of the organization in any way. I put in my two weeks notice immediately. This caused such commotion and verbal abuse I ended up leaving a few days later. Something I'd never done before.
I had nothing lined up or even in the works. I decided to take the summer off. I was fortunate to have enough saved that I could do this. I didn't look, and I turned down interviews. I spent 3 months focusing on my family, building up skills, and doing volunteer work. It was the greatest way to decompress and re-center.
I am lucky to have been able to do this. At many points in my career I was not able to and had to "stick it out" at some terrible places. This is why when I had a chance to walk I took it.
Since then, I now have pretty rigid standards for a work environment, and I stick to it. I am the squeaky wheel and do not tolerate deviance from my expectations. I don't care if others see this as being "high maintenance". I've been a member of many organizations since that have no problems with it. They share my values.
Mental health is important. From that point forward I considered it more seriously when a coworker or someone reporting to me shared they were having stress/mental wellness concerns. If I can help them, I will.
My supervisor was harrasing me and his manager nor my staffing agency cared.
I called the recruiter and left them a voicemail that I quit. A week later I got a call from the agency asking why I quit without any notice. Turns out the recruiter was fired and no one informed me.
Yes, and this is why
After quitting, I became serious about giving software development and other things I enjoy doing a chance
Guess what, I am a happy software dev
Learning so nothing new each day
Yes, it was last year, I've published here on dev.to:
dev.to/mateus_vahl/i-think-i-will-...
It was the best decision in the year, fortunately, it took me only one month to find a new job.
Yes! After two years at an agency things got serious. My g/f and I both quit our jobs and blew our saving on 7.5 months traveling. Now we live in a new country and I work for a pretty dope company, so things have worked out 😁
Yes. Did not want to be associated with an organization that blatantly disregarded customer privacy / security AND promoted blatant copyright abuse (stripping copyright notices, making ownership claims). Didn't take long to line up a new role. Staying active in the local community is almost always worth it.
Yes. After first job which was remote and more like freelancing I thought if I apply to company and get in that's the best way to learn and become expert. Code quality was horrible. Deadlines were "yesterday" so everyone worried about deadlines and not quality as it required more time to change the structure than to just patch the stuff. A lot of overtime at the end and no way to get more money unless you get different degree of diploma like if you're bsc you need msc or even msc -> phd. I just quit hating the job hating every morning I woke up and had to work and had to work 3 months if I quit so I said I better quit now then look for another job because no one will wait for me 3 months. Luckily got the offer month after that and this company which I was quitting hired 2 new juniors and gave me option to leave after 2 months of notice period.
Yes! Actually just recently - Feb 2019.
It was related to a long term desire to shift careers from a data/business analyst role to something in software development.
However, a recent assignment as lead to a project I had serious concerns around led me to find an exit quickly from a company I was with for 8 years. Of course having decent savings was also an important factor in taking the sudden leap with a huge doubts about when I'd be able to handle monthly living expenses with whatever came next.
Went from grad school to my first full-time job. A couple of years there and worked on a AAA game from start to finish. Went straight to another AAA project and after about a year was just "finished". Totally burned out. Quit.
Spent a couple of months traveling through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia. Did a ton of scuba diving and read a lot of books. Went off to Qingdao University to "study Chinese". Did that more seriously than I intended, but also learned Verilog and played a lot Zelda: Wind Waker, etc.
A friend coaxed me out of soft-retirement and I came back a better software engineer and especially a better manager than I would have been otherwise.
Not sure if it's the best decision I ever made, but it's a contender. I highly recommend it.
Quit a job because it wasn't what I signed up for as they had a job advertisement for entry-level software engineers.
But it was only when I'm was in the job that they told me that it requires 3 years in knowledge with python plus 6 mths training on the software they had to do development for that piece of software thus I was reassigned to do business development role.
Plus being in a remote team, they have a software that records your activities based upon clicks and screenshots of what is on your computer which made me paranoid in my activities in working while I turn it on during office hours.
So I just say I quit and went on my merry way to look for opportunities and found an internship in the startup I'm currently in.
Yes. This is actually how I got started learning development. In September, I found out my wife and I were having a baby. At the time, I made my money playing and coaching poker.
About a month later, I was playing and something completely changed me. This guy came in, under heavy influence of some kind of drug. He sat right next to me. I could see his cards, and it was clear to me that he had no idea what he was doing. He lost $2k in an hour before the poker manager threw him out. Seeing that made me realize that this is how I make a living. Taking money from people who are under the influence, who don't have time to study like I do. It wasn't a life I wanted to explain to my kid, it's not honorable.
A week later, someone contacted me (I kept a blog on my progress) letting me know about Web Development and how he started his journey being self taught. I looked into it and was hooked. It was amazing being able to type these characters and having different formats pop up on the screen.
After a couple of weeks, I decided to stop playing poker and put all my time into learning.
I've had a lifelong need for expensive medications, so, voluntarily moving to an uninsured status has been a non-starter. That said, propensity to jump was a lot higher when I was unencumbered by marriage, mortgage and pets. Since becoming responsible for others, the whole "is the money/benefits worth the anguish" equation has had a few more variables added to it.
Yes.
It was due to a lack of support from immidate management, overwork (I ended up taking on enough work to keep three employees busy full time), and under pay.
I left without a plan, because I was unhappy and incredibly stressed. Those around me noticed an immidate upswing in my mood, the day that I handed my notice in. I was even told that I was my old self again, by the time that my notice period had ended.
Finding a new gig to move to was a piece of cake, as it's an employees market, not an employers one (i.e there is a huge demand for tech workers who can prove that they have the skills), and I had my pick of about 5 possible roles.
I feel incredibly privileged to be in a position, and a market, which allowed me the opportunity to walk away and take care of my own mental health. Where I not a developer, I don't think I'd have been able to do that so easily.
I did that at my first job. I was working at a startup and one of the cofounders had recently left due to some fight between them. The work atmosphere was charged, my best friend had quit soon after due to big office drama. I was young, naive, and under a weird kind of pressure. I decided to quit very haphazardly.
In hindsight, it was a terrible move and I wasted many months (possibly years) of my life because of that one mistake.
Twice. I once quite a job in the US to move back home and go travel around the world. Another time I quit a job to become a freelancer, stay home with the kids and live a life away from the office on the beach.
2001 I left my job as Team Lead in the Customer Support at a national phone company and went for a sabbatical in New Zealand. When back I started learning programming and after some hard months ( hard because I was studying hard and working almost for free) I got a full-time job and since then I switched companies almost regularly every 2-3 years. ( my current company is the exception but since I changed teams/projects and languages many times it feels like it anyway).
Everybody said I was crazy quitting my job like that - but that was what I wanted, just travel, explore new possibilities and rebuild my professional life. In the end it paid off :-)
Sure multiple times :) Most memorable was first time of course. I was out of 2 successive engineering schools and MBA training, I wasn't very motivated because it was all theories :D and I wasn't also very motivated to become a Manager though I was accepted in a very big corp for that, I preferred to take a job as quality engineer in a factory of another big corp instead 15 min by walking from my home. That's how I really got into programming because no IT folks were able to code complex statistical algorithms so I decided to do it myself on a PC. But it was only the beginning of personal computer era and still the reign of mainframes and Vax. One day the CTO of big corp came to the factory and decided to get rid off of every applications on PC to port them back to Vax because PC would have no future: a guy really lacking vision of the future after insight :) So sure I decided to quit with nothing next in mind!
Yes I have. There was a job available close to my home in Chicago. They had another in the western suburbs they wanted me to manage. They said no so I quit that instance. Turned out it was a two year gig. Hindsight is 20/20 they say.
Yep. It was my first job. I started there as a intern and slowly became a full web dev. The company had around 3 products. All using old stack. After some time, the problems I was solving were all the same. I wasn't moving forward.
I tryed to do some interviews while employed, but I still had a sense of gratitude (I still do) and didn't seem right.
After talking with my manager I decided it was time to go. I gave them the option to choose a date for me to leave (so I wouldnt cause more disturbance than necessary ).
But in the end, I still think they got mad at me. For leaving them without having a job lined up
Nope, but one of my bosses did. He failed something with investors, didn't hired team, and disapeared with my salary.
Before my marriage this was a common practice.
And about lead part it was always better...
Was traveling consultant for Red Hat. I had enough of being in Plano, Tx or Branson, MO. I quit bought a new game called Skyrim and nice bottle of bourbon. I didn't start looking for jobs for a month.
Yes, my bosses lied me at the beginning of the recruitment about work conditions at the first renewal. They ensure me better salary and projects but they never arrived...
Twice for me.
In 2011 trying to finish my graduation degree (but I did not completed it :)
and 2 years ago because I got burnout after working for a Financial Startup.
yes, often, in the middle of a dépression crisis...
Always. Twice. I feel like hopping from one job to another is not good idea anyway. So I intentionally take several months off.
I did, i hated my job and my boss. I was in love with my team, but i cannot have everything.
No, but I definitely wanted to.
My first financial goal once I got a job that allowed me to stop living paycheck-to-paycheck was save up a fund that would allow me to do just that.