Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12901849

by introvertmac • 10 years ago

39 53 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Was money the only issue? or You got bored?

thinkTank1• 10 years ago

- Salary was slashed by less than 50% because of little/no revenue. (is this normal?)

- Startup has 2-5 customers after running for almost 2 years.

- I build apps that no one seems to use. Coincidentally I'm informing my boss them about my resignation during standup tomorrow :)

adamcw• 10 years ago

Laying off employees due to revenue concerns has been something I've seen, but I've never seen an individuals salary cut. I would leave somewhere that did that in a hurry, if I had the option.

eonw2• 10 years ago

agreed, always time to jump ship when they are cutting salaries in addition to cutting staff.

karmajunkie• 10 years ago

Unless you're looking to burn bridges, I wouldn't resign in a standup. Always talk to your superior about it privately first. After that all bets are off, but doing it publicly in front of your entire team gives no one much wiggle room, including yourself.

eonw2• 10 years ago

i left my last job due to lack of any tansparency from upper management, bad management in general, bad culture and knowing that in the sector i was working in(non-profit healthcare), I would always be income capped well below the going rate for my skillset. and honestly it just wasnt very interesting to work in a place that was allergic to anything even remotely cutting edge and decisions were usually made by people that had no idea what the outcome would be, and based the decisions on how much they liked the sales people. ugg.

i felt like it was a bad fit after only two weeks, stayed for 18 months because my mom worked there.

holycode• 10 years ago

I'm still in the job, but I'm looking for a new one. My reasons are stagnation, no proper training and mentoring (I'm a junior web developer with no prior experience), an extremely low salary (borderline minimum wage), among other reasons. If only I had enough saved-up money to survive for a couple of months, I'd have quit a long time ago.

dozzie• 10 years ago

I'm always wondering what people who want "mentoring" expect from a mentor.

cstoner• 10 years ago

I'd imagine things like bite-sized projects of the appropriate skill level so that they learn something. One of the harder things about being a junior employee is knowing what you're supposed to be doing at any time.

gravypod• 10 years ago

Someone to feed you projects slowly and show you how to get started before you're left to your own devices.

greenbullet• 10 years ago

I was at the same place for the best part of a decade. I left as I was pretty frustrated with pay, which wasn't bad, but wasn't going up.

Partly stayed because it was familiar, I was worried there wasn't something better (I was wrong).

I've moved to a job that I might not have been able to get if I'd left earlier.

The timing was right when the opportunity turned up.

Like any relationship, you know when it's not right, but you also no if you are able to do better at that moment.

richfnelson3• 10 years ago

I left a web dev job about a month ago. I liked a lot about the company. It was a three-man dev team at an e-commerce startup and we ran a Rails/Angular webapp. The founders were great and the culture fit my personality very well.

I left the company after ~6 months because I did not get along well with one of the other developers. We had extreme communication problems and they were causing unnecessary stress.

I like to talk to people and joke around with my coworkers. This individual did not seem to have the same desire. On the company’s general slack channel, almost everyone would get in on the socializing, with /giphys and jokes and whatnot… everyone except this one developer. They never, ever said a single thing on slack that was not business-related. They never even said anything out loud that was not business related.

This communication style caused a lot of issues during code review. I would spend time creating, testing, and QA’ing a feature, and then code review would take at least three times as long as development. I’d get code comments on GitHub that said things like “I wouldn’t do it this way” or “I don’t like the use of a directive in this case. Read this: https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive”. Now, in most cases, changes to the code probably were necessary. However, I felt the tone of the comments was unnecessarily inflammatory, bordering on outright insulting.

I told my supervisor that I thought the code review communication could be improved and he agreed that the code review process seemed to be taking too long. He decided that I should get code reviews before the feature was complete, at whatever I determined was a good point to pause development for a code review. This led to an even longer development cycle. I felt as though this developer pegged me as unskilled, and thus found every excuse they could to tear my code apart. On several occasions while refactoring, I would move code snippets that were written by this developer into a new method or file. GitHub would regard these snippets as if I had written them. The developer would comment on this code that _they themselves had originally written_ and come up with a reason as to why it should be refactored or I’m not using the most efficient method, etc. It got to the point where I wouldn’t even know how to start working on a project. I realized it didn’t really matter. I could write the best code of all time and my co-worker would find a reason why it should all be thrown out. So I just started writing garbage that I took no pride in because it was going to get ripped to shreds anyway. Round after round of code comments until the code would look exactly as if this other developer had written it themselves. It was demoralizing, to say the least.

I really wanted to succeed with this company and had I been in any other department I believe I would have. I got along very well with everyone else there. Within a month of putting myself on the job market I found a new position that paid more and has a dev team with no assholes. I am much happier.

shivaodin• 10 years ago

This is one of most common reasons to leave a job; unfortunately no one will acknowledge or admit it.

I wanted to succeed in my previous company and built rapport with my manager and other team mates. We had a reorg, and another developer from another vertical joined our team. He was not interested in coding and would not code review any code. I called him out once during a pairing session but he went defensive. He took up minor task and passed the buck around. At any rate, to my dismay he was promoted as our manager in a few months. Needless to say he would retort to berating me and other team members.

I left the job without trying to burn bridges. On the last day, he called me out during the standup and "hoped he would get hard working team members in the future"

Almost all of my team mates left the job or have moved to other teams.

jdubs2• 10 years ago

It's amazing how some manager's words can have such an impact on a team.

et-al3• 10 years ago

I don't know the whole story, and I don't mean to trivialize your bad experience, but this section jumped out:

I like to talk to people and joke around with my coworkers. This individual did not seem to have the same desire. On the company’s general slack channel, almost everyone would get in on the socializing, with /giphys and jokes and whatnot… everyone except this one developer. They never, ever said a single thing on slack that was not business-related. They never even said anything out loud that was not business related.

On a more general note, we should caution not to ostracize individuals just because they don't fit in with the prevailing culture. Yes, having people with the same sense of humor is great (I regularly add ridiculous ASCII art to commit messages). It smooths over the more difficult times, but this emphasis on cultural fit is one of the more delicate points in tech right now and why Silicon Valley has this stigma of "brogramming" (puke).

And again, I wasn't there, and the person could've been an asshole of epic proportions, but the lead in gave the impression on focusing on their difference instead of the qualities of their assho--n/m. You get my point. I'm glad things ultimately worked out, and hope they continue to do so.

/steps off soapbox

richfnelson3• 10 years ago

I don't need someone I can playfully punch in the arm and tell a knock-knock joke to. I don't care if someone puts their head down and gets their work done without saying a word. But if we're going to be reviewing one another's code, I do need someone I can speak with openly and candidly. That was painfully difficult with this particular individual.

threesixandnine• 10 years ago

I want to hire that boring and unpolite dev.

richfnelson3• 10 years ago

They would work quite well on their own. But if the position requires communication between team members, I think they would be toxic. My manager acknowledged this reality during my exit interview. I was the third person added to a team of two, so the manager had not seen this individual interact with other devs before my presence.

TurboHaskal2• 10 years ago

That moment after a senior or technical lead is ripping a piece of code to pieces for about half an hour while you keep your best poker face, then git blaming the file to show him he's actually the author.

Had it last week and it was priceless.

tom_b• 10 years ago

Lack of obvious career development opportunities. Concern over the viability of the business. Discomfort with idea that projects were frequently cost-centers without tangible benefits for customers.

keviv2• 10 years ago

I spent close to 6 years at a startup before quitting. I was an early employee there. Deep within my heart I knew I had to. I couldn't explain it to my friends or my family what made me take this decision. All I knew was it was about time. I just got too comfortable working there. Life became too monotonous. In the end, I just followed my heart. After 8 months, I might be making a bit less money, I might have given away a significant part of the equity I owned, but I'm happy. I've been reading a lot, learning things which I always intended to. Been freelancing for a while now and I couldn't have been happier.

Mc_Big_G• 10 years ago

You weren't fully vested after 6 years?

et-al3• 10 years ago

One can be fully vested in options that amount to next-to-nothing.

keviv2• 10 years ago

Unfortunately no. Got the equity pretty late (a rookie mistake on my part) and got screwed royally.

Raphmedia• 10 years ago

It became a struggle to increase my value as an employee. So I moved on.

chaoticgeek• 10 years ago

Extremely underpaid ($11.50/hr as their lead dev and no benefits) to some place where my salary was doubled with benefits.

No advancement past what I had obtained. Wasn't going anywhere. I did stay there for three years though. Lots of experience that made it so I could easily turn down offers now.

I gave them a month notice to find someone before I left. They didn't find anyone until a month after I left.

itsmemattchung• 10 years ago

I once took a pay cut of $20,000 when I declined a "promotion" to become the department's manager. I had been with the company all throughout college—the position offered me the flexibility to work and attend university full-time—and once I graduated, I was offered a managerial position; many would consider this the "next step" in their career. But I kept on thinking to myself: What else is out there?

So I left.

My only regret was the manner in which I left the company. With a resignation letter in hand, I marched into my boss's office, and handed him the notice, and calmly explained that I was leaving in two weeks. I wanted to make a point: my mind was made up. I was firm and left no room for ambiguity. I was leaving and would not entertain a counteroffer. It wasn't until I became a manager, many years later, and realized how I blindsided my boss; I should've been more upfront about my ambitions of continuing down the path of engineering and never afforded them the opportunity to carve out a road for me to take.

Ultimately, it was a necessary part of my journey and without it, I would've have ended up where I am now: Amazon.

_jdams• 10 years ago

Yes pretty much everything you did was the incorrect move (at the time). Take the promotion, become manager, then look for other employment using that experience, promotion, and increased salary as a boost.

brianwawok2• 10 years ago

If you don't want to be a manager, you shouldn't accept the promo. No one wants a boss that hates their life.

cr0sh• 10 years ago

I left my last job because - in short - I was lied to.

The company had been around for a while, and I had worked there for two years. I really enjoyed being around my coworkers and management. All in all, it was a great development environment.

Then, rumors and confirmation came that the company was being sold. The new management came around, and everyone was promised that there wasn't going to be any drastic changes. I had my doubts, though, and voiced these to my teammates.

A day came where we were called in individually by the HR rep for the new company, to discuss our "re-hire". Now, my other teammates all got called in first. I found out from them that they had gotten raises. I thought - interesting; maybe this was going to work out. Still, I was wondering why I, and my supervisor, seemingly were last to be talked to...it soon became apparent.

They essentially told me that they wanted to keep me on, but only at a salary that was about 13% less than what I was making! In other words, they wanted me to stay for less pay.

Right.

I told them (well, you can imagine what I told them), and that they were fools to think they could hire anyone to replace me at that salary; I already knew I was undervalued, and I told them I could do better elsewhere. I packed my bags and left, but not before I let the rest of my team know what was up: I believed that the entire team was going to be canned, once they had completed the integration of our system with the new company's stuff.

I later found out my supervisor had basically gotten the same treatment as I did. We both quit, reducing the team from six people to four. Oh - and I guess I then knew how they got the raises. I'm pretty sure the new company had planned this to force us both out. I don't have proof, of course.

A couple of months went by, but I did get another position - this time making close to 25% more than my previous position. So - a two month "vacation" (needed, actually) - a large bump in salary - and a horizontal transition in my skillset (moved from LAMP to a javascript/nodejs stack). The company I work for now is small, but comfortable, and the team is top-notch.

My old teammates? Well - I thought they'd have at least to the end of the year; I told them as much when I left, but I warned them to polish their resumes in the meantime. Ultimately, though, the team was dissolved completely right after they finished the code transition, and only six months after I had left.

Just like I thought.

I'm sure had they kept their original promise of "no changes", everyone would have stayed and worked as hard on the product as we ever did, and enjoyed it. But apparently, they didn't really want a US-based (they were international) dev-team (they already had one overseas at their headquarters) - they just wanted our infrastructure (I worked in back-end cloud server management and automation development). I doubt that they ever really wanted a dev team in the sale to begin with.

joezydeco• 10 years ago

Are you having a "shields down" moment? It happens to everyone, and it will happen to you a lot over your career.

http://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/

draw_down2• 10 years ago

This guy's writing drives me nuts.

bbcbasic• 10 years ago

oh! By that definition my shields are always down.

photogrammetry• 10 years ago

Such a terrible, misleading article. Sounds like something a middle manager in the Borg would repeat ad infinitum to his inferiors/slaves.

One should always be looking for ways to improve their life, even if it means quitting.

kageneko• 10 years ago

It was a combination of things. I didn't enjoy the work environment very much and I thought some of the policies were rather dumb. The product itself was ~8 years old and had just been hacked on since then.

The Big Thing was when, after I had been there 2 months, they announced benefits cuts for my subsidiary -- and no bonuses. These benefits were very important to me and I had stressed this during my interview. So that turned me into a motivated job seeker.

I kept my resignation as professional as possible. Worked out my time, did a proper knowledge transfer, wished everyone luck.

taw897978• 10 years ago

The boss had it in for me. I got along with everyone else at the company, and because I was generally well-regarded and also due to the amount of turnover lately, it would have been alarming to the team if I were just straight fired. So he started setting me up for failure. He started imposing arbitrary requirements and deadlines, became oppositional to everything I said, and went out of his way to point out my shortcomings in public, probably to help sell the team on why he fired me. We used to get along, but something changed along the way, and I suspect at least a part of it was something personal where I might have inadvertently offended him. When I finally realized that he didn't want me to succeed, which meant it was probably impossible to succeed even with my best effort, I submitted my resignation.

baccheion2• 10 years ago

I was being harassed all day long, everything they advertised as being their work environment ended up being BS, I wasn't able to do anything, nothing available was worthwhile, there was a lot of anal retentiveness and Jness (MBTI) present, the environment was generally unpleasant, and I quickly realized I was wasting my life in that place.

It was annoying, as the place I'm referring to is the almighty Google. This was many years ago, but I still remember very clearly the huge gap between what was advertised and what they actually were.

The previous job was at an old world company (rated as one of the 50 worst places to work by Glassdoor while I was there) and the idiot manager I had was on an entirely different level.

brianwawok2• 10 years ago

I think one universal truth across big companies is that no 2 teams are the same. I worked on two different teams at a big (not google big company).. the work, the manager, the policies were night and day different. Perhaps they were as different as any jobs I have worked.

Is it possible you just got a not fun Google team ;)

baccheion2• 10 years ago

Possibly.

I was on the Adwords Campaign Management team (responsible for http://adwords.google.com). In a way, you can tell it would've sucked, as you can see their interface is still the same crap, backward, half-assed garbage it was when it launched in 2009.

Even separate from the nature of the team (most didn't really seem happy), it seems I was further singled out in some way. I don't know why, but they seemed very serious about ensuring I was miserable, harassed, annoyed, and stalled out (unable to do anything). And then, as I walked around each day, many looked miserable (depressed or anxious and on edge (worried about sounding stupid?)), and there seemed to be a general mood of dissatisfaction.

If you read reviews on Glassdoor, Quora, or anywhere else online, you'll probably start hearing the same themes. That is, even if I wasn't explicitly singled out, I still would've probably not enjoyed my time there; it just wouldn't have been as severe.

jdubs2• 10 years ago

When I realized the product manager was finding features on wikipedia and had no real customers in the pipeline. A VP told me to lie on an expense report, while managers & architects were able to expense 1k+ meals.

I knew something was up when a different VP told me to care less about the product, company and the work that I was doing.

hammock• 10 years ago

What do you mean finding features on Wikipedia?

JoeAltmaier• 10 years ago

Got taken over by a new investor, who had their own ideas. Stayed a while then left them to their new direction.

reacharavindh• 10 years ago

My coworker and I worked super hard for 6 months to develop a feature that was new and innovative to the consulting company I was working for. They made us do tech sales to sell our POC to win projects, and we did win many.

One day, a coworker we had never heard of approached us and asked to answer an exhaustive set of questions about our POC. I did.

Subsequently, he asked for a detailed cookbook to reproduce the whole thing. I gave it to him. He was dumb enough to not be able to understand/use it even with everything in hand.

After a week, he freaked out and said there were a team of 8 in a foreign country at client location (been for 6 months) getting paid to implement the prototype. They got nothing!

My CTO steps in and says, "The project delivery is in danger, so you work on the whole thing and finish it, and those 8 guys will pretend to the paying customers that it was their work and will forward any further questions to you again." I claimed it was unethical, (to claim credit for someone else's work), and that I'd be happy to work on that project, as long as my name was on it. The customers knew me because everything started with my presentation of the POC earlier.

CTO said No, and I walked out.

Probably the best decision I made myself. I switched jobs, saved some money, went to Grad school, and at a better job now.

tcrews• 10 years ago

2006 - The company I joined as first employee couldn't pay my salary and offered a cut of the server consulting business (which was done 100% by me alone). Each month they would find excuses to avoid paying it. A new owner bought part of the company and was determined to review my deal. It wasn't making me a lot of money, mainly ensuring I got paid market rates.

2009 - After almost 4 years at at a support role at IBM, I wanted a change. They sold me on some architecture role that ended up being about collecting requirements for small SOA projects. After 3 months, my people manager wouldn't let me apply for a job at their Linux Tech Center and said I had to wait at least another year. Plus the director wasn't happy LTC was trying to "steal" other projects' staff and it was unlikely they would even consider. Since I had gotten the maximum performance rating every year, I thought they should be more considerate. Gave a 2-day notice and left. Manager threatened me, saying I would never work for IBM again in my life.

2011 - Team lead was a dick and consistently make me look like a inexperienced fool in front of other teams. He wouldn't touch the infrastructure for fear of breaking it and would constantly fight other teams, trying to hide our issues. I felt it was wrong. One day he refused to acknowledge a ton of errors we were causing and I confronted him. He said I should leave if I wasn't happy. I gave my 30-day notice to our manager. The team lead called me saying I could leave in a week if I wanted (he would talk to my manager to cancel any fines). Before leaving, I updated all our 500+ servers to the latest firmware version that was know to fix a lot of issues. Got thank you notes from other teams for a while.

2012 - project to modernize all servers from aix/VMs/hpux to Linux got cancelled at Motorola after Google bought it. Nothing else to do there and we all know what happened. Stayed 10 months. Nice people but it was like working at a graveyard.

2013 - I guess that IBM manager was wrong after all. Got a job working with Linux at IBM. Left for better pay and more benefits. The team was excellent.

2015 - Left top 5 global food company. They treated us really good but their technology stack was horrendous and they didn't care. I felt it was setting my career back. How would I explain to a recruiter that was working with 10 years old technology? I really miss them though but this is a fast paced industry.

2015 - still here... Lack of clarity around projects is a concern but pay is good, remote work and they are nice people.

Spooky23• 10 years ago

Manager threatened me, saying I would never work for IBM again in my life.

I would have doubled over laughing.

lojack• 10 years ago

Last job was for an ~500 person Ad Agency. I worked mostly solo on all of my projects. There was other developers within the company, but they were treated as completely different departments -- guessing on purpose. The company as a whole was overly political. Lots of meetings, not a lot of actual work getting done. Plenty of people I know of that literally did nothing. In the 2 years I worked there I was never able to figure out who my supervisor was. After quitting, I was finally able to figure out who it was -- someone I never met, and didn't even know their name. I was overpaid and overqualified. Could have easily asked for a significant raise, and could have gotten away with doing significantly less work at the same time. Ultimately I quit because the work was boring and I spent too much time in meetings. Took a pay cut, but I couldn't be happier with the new job.

woutr_be• 10 years ago

Over the past two years our company changed directions at quite a few occasions, I didn't always agree with it, but I kept working because I build this product from the ground up.

A few months ago we were told we were having financial issues, and if we couldn't find any more investors, we all would be out of a job end of May. Obviously I started looking for another job, but end of May comes around, and at the very last day we were told we had new investors and could keep going. On top of that, they asked us to give up salary for meaningless stock options.

I kept going anywhere because it's also my product and I could look for another job in the meantime. But obviously morale and motivation was pretty low, eventually the CTO sat down with me and gave me the option to either resign or be let go. That was about a month ago, just signed the contract to my new job.

gdiocarez• 10 years ago

When management is not being prioritize and we can't focus on client needs because everyone is doing different projects that causes delay of deployment to clients.

canterburry• 10 years ago

I left my last company when I realized the promotion I was promised when lured over to a new team was never going to materialize. I wanted to make a jump to management after spending many years as a principal engineer. A director from another group approached me and promised to promote me if I joined his group. I did.

He talked about all the new responsibilities I was going to have an the team members who would report to me, but before he was going to announce it, I just needed to deliver this one thing first. So I did. Then it was another thing. Then he encouraged me to setup 1:1 meeting with my future direct reports. So I did. He however, didn't stop meeting with them directly himself. They were totally confused as to what the heck I was doing and what exactly they were supposed to do with my meetings.

He encouraged me to do sprint planning and work with my future direct reports to estimate stories and execute. Meanwhile, he gave them completely different direction in his own meetings. Soon, no one cared who I was, what I said or whatever was agreed in the sprint planning meetings. That's when he concluded he probably couldn't promote me since I didn't have the teams support and that I probably should just focus on delivery.

Yeah...so that's when I quit.

dublinclontarf• 10 years ago

Really really shitty.

And humiliating.

draw_down2• 10 years ago

These days it doesn't take too long, honestly. I've had my job for about 3 months and I wouldn't mind something else. Significant changes, which they could have deigned to inform me of when I was interviewing, have made my job materially worse. At 3 months in. And this isn't some shit company, its one that's well known and revered here.

TurboHaskal2• 10 years ago

#1 Bad pay, stressful environment, long hours, lack of autonomy and recognition.

#2 No raise for three years, new tech lead was clueless and a chronic micromanager, careering colleagues lacking ownership. I saw the company going down in two years and the visit from agile gurus confirmed my fears.

cauterized• 10 years ago

I was offered the opportunity to build and lead a growing team. The expected VC investment never materialized. The team shrank instead, largely due to non-competitive salaries. I moved on.

Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

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