I'm curious, do you have experience quitting a job? What was it that made you realize it was the right choice, and what might be something you're better off pushing through with?
I have no interest in quitting my current job, for the record. ðŸ˜
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Top comments (42)
Being manipulated instead of being led: When your boss is manipulating you to get the job done, instead leading you, you're in the wrong place. Odd thing is that everyone want to hire smartest developers out there, but at the same time some of them try to manipulate these same smart developers like they are chimps. From my experience this includes withholding information about the project and long term goals, giving false deadlines to speed things up, meddling with personal relationships (turning developers against each other) and in general not being honest with you and your colleagues. One of the weirdest things I experienced is when they try to affect actual implementation (without any programming knowledge) with specs manipulation.
Steve Jobs once said:
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
You shouldn't hire smart people to manipulate them. It's waste of time for everyone.
Blame culture: When bad things happen if your boss asks "Who's fault is this?" instead of "Who can fix this?", you should consider quitting. It's needless to say it's impossible to do anything creative or inspiring in these places.
Brown nose syndrome: If it makes it easier to get promoted or it makes your everyday at work easier by kissing your bosses ass, you're again in the wrong place. You will never reach your full potential there, and probably become very frustrated.
Inconclusive reward system (or not having one): For example promotions and bonuses are very different across teams, even though there are no obvious reasons for that. Either you're not being recognized, or not being valued enough. Also if your bonuses consist of praises and thank you it's time to move on.
Incompetent people evaluate your work: If your code is being evaluated in weird ways it's time to move on. My experience include: counting how many bugs each developer made and then reducing their salaries by some calculation based on number of bugs, using SCRUM backlog as time and attendance system.
When management starts overriding technical decisions made by the technical staff. It inevitably leads to bad software and shows a total disrespect for people who make software.
1) if you are miserable going to work every day 2) the environment is a bad fit for you personally 3) toxic environments
I have a ton of experience with this! Past signs that I should quit my job:
"talented people come and go, average/below-average people are the ones with longevity" - I've had that particular alarm go off a couple of times
Yes, it's good to pay attention to what type of behavior actually gets rewarded (hint: it's often NOT what's stated in the official corporate values statement).
Yes, I used to have Dilbert comics printed by my desk. After I left I realise I was telling myself subliminally that I was working in an ongoing joke!
Best career decision ever.
Yeeeesssss dilbert cartoon environment == gtho!!!
My signs include:
growth plateauing
teams have stopped celebrating each their own wins and the wins of other teams (morale is tanking)
management suggestions of building skills in a particular area you have no interest in growing in
lack of respect for time. Meetings are routinely missed or canceled. Extra hours are expected while personal time is scoffed at.
By the time these indicators ring true, my frustration levels are on high alert. What is important when considering these things for me is to base my decisions on what I am moving towards and not what I'm moving away from. It's easy to get into an "I need to GTFO"-mode but I take my time so I am not rushing into a similar situation at my next gig.
That seems like a great indicator! Definitely keeping this in mind as a leader.
Pay attention on how frequently you get into LinkedIn. A good sign is when that rate goes up.
Losing the option of thinking and making decisions could be another sign.
Working in projects you either don't enjoy or you don't consider they add value to your career.
I also know I don't want to quit my current job, but I think you should quit when you begin to dread going into work. If it starts to feel like your job is more of a chore and a burden, then leave. If you start to notice that your mental and physical health are being negatively impacted as a direct result of on-the-job stress then leave. There are far to many companies out there that know how to treat their employees to just sit and endure toxic environments.
When you've recognized you're in a toxic culture and you will be leaving. What's the game plan at that point? How do you set yourself up to make the current situation work best for your future?
I tend to err on the side of burning as few bridges as possible, but it really depends on the situation and why it's toxic. In my particular case, I didn't quit my job, but moved to a different team within the same company. I think that was only possible because I continued to do good work and tuned out the trigger to the toxic situation (a person and their comments on gender and masculinity).
I once quit because I didn't like where I would have gone (less and less technical stuffs) if I had continued doing it, even though the team was, in general, great. 2 years after I am really glad I made this choice as I really enjoy, more and more, learning about computer science fundamentals (thanks to the great articles published on dev.to!) to be able to understand how works (data-intensive AKA big data :p) frameworks under the hood.
Also, have you ever encountered the annoying "don't tell to anybody" policy when you talk to your manager about it? Especially in France, where we have almost all the time a 3-months notice for engineers.
You have to give a 3-month's notice to quit in France?
It depends on your company policy, the most of the time is 3 months for engineers, sometimes is 1 month.
That must be tough trying to keep productivity up if you know for sure you are going to leave for such a long duration.
The main idea is to respect your colleagues by getting sure that everything you know is written down in a documentation and train your substitute.
ah, I'm impressed and am at awe at that gesture.
I think 3-months notice is pretty common in Europe. The same goes for Germany. In Poland, where I leave we have 1-month notice unlesss we have more than 3 years experience. It's probably due to training of people who are going to move into your place or for the employer to find someone to take your place...
Some place at least here in Brazil ask 1 year without even work with same tec
Various reasons I've quit previous jobs/teams are
Not being challenged enough
Company morals became more and more corrupt, environment became cliquey and un-welcoming.
Once a safety concern forced me to quickly find another team
No manager support to grow and expand and reach my career goals
Continually being lied to about being able to take time off/ WFH when I needed to / BENEFITS / PAYDAY. Once my paycheck was a week late. My loan payments were not happy.
I think that's all the big things. My first job I was on 4 teams in under 2 years, and my second job I only lasted a year. Not a good track record thus far. lol.
Number 1) is hitting me hard at the moment. But I've only been there for 6 months! I'm not sure what to do about this situation at the moment, my CV would look bad.
First thing would be to talk to your manager and see if there’s anything you can do or another team that would be a better fit.
For me its all about Culture and Passion.
You work on average 40 hours per week so you want to spend that time doing something you're passionate about and be surrounded by a motivating culture.
As a front-end dev, I'm passionate about learning new skills, following industry news and making a difference in people's experiences. I couldn't work in a team where the people around me don't share the same enthusiasm about their chosen profession and treat their job as just a means to pay the bills.
For many people a job is just a job and come 5:30pm they don't give a damn about whether they've grown as a person that day or not, but for me, every day where I didn't take a step forward in my career I may as well have taken a step backwards.
Don't become a developer if you don't have a passion for developing.
Verbal abuse (to anyone), Delaying an agreed upon thing to the point of not doing it.
Mismanagement, passing blame. Underpaying. Sexism.
Gaslighting. Yes, I'm amazed that I even had to add this here, but it's very common for businesses to behave like abusive spouses who should be in jail.
Many potential signs:
You find yourself finding excuses to not go to work, to take days off, or just overall don't like going to work.
If you constantly feel like the smartest guy in the room - i.e. you don't anymore learn from the others. Your own progress will be stunted if you allow yourself in a situation like that.
If you're talented enough to build applications from the ground up yourself, but the company doesn't reward you highly enough - you can potentially get a good amount of shares if you join an early stage startup
If you work on the same kind of problems all the time - being an expert on one subject might be fine for some, but I generally recommend against it as it also means that when that one technology expires you will be useless
If the company seems to be falling apart - leadership, core team members are leaving or being fired
Poor team morale for an extended period of time - if nobody cares to fix the morale issues that's not a healthy sign, find a more motivated team in another company
Culture of micromanagement - being told exactly how to spend every hour of every day, and tracking your work with Scrum poker velocity etc. useless junk intended only to make old fashioned managers feel better
Having little to no ability to impact your own work - if you can't give feedback, feature suggestions, etc. or nobody listens to your ideas
If you're being paid unfairly (other people make more without a good reason) or overall not compensated well enough (other companies pay much more)
Lots of things along that theme can be good triggers to decide to leave a company.
Anyway, never just quit - start looking for other jobs, interview for as long as it takes to find the perfect next step for you, and only after you've signed the contract to start at the new place do you quit.
I once heard a quote that said, in effect:
I can't figure out who said it (might've been Peter Thiel? My Google skills are failing me here) but for people who have options--and technical people usually do--it's a decent starting point for the long and difficult decision-making process around leaving a job.
I usually work at a place because of good technical leadership. Most places have enough interesting things to work on, but solid technical leadership is hard to find. I leave when good technical leaders and colleagues leave.