Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?
Was money the only issue? or You got bored?
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.
Is it possible you just got a not fun Google team ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
One should always be looking for ways to improve their life, even if it means quitting.
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.
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.
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.
#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.
i felt like it was a bad fit after only two weeks, stayed for 18 months because my mom worked there.
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.
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.
And humiliating.
- 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 :)
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.
I would have doubled over laughing.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Had it last week and it was priceless.