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You and your job

youtheuser.com

57 pointsrobin_reala40 comments

I believe he missed a few situations:

* If it is Tuesday - leave. * If your house is yellow - leave. * If someone sneezed in your building - leave.

The resume you build would be a nightmare for any employer. Once you become completely competent in your job or become a key player, promptly resigning seems like the worst possible thing.

Could you imagine the next HR interview?

HR: "Why did you leave you last job?" A: "I learned everything about the product, was completely productive, and enjoyed the work. So, I had to leave."

Also, stringing off to create your own product would be even worse advice. The moment your complete the first rendition of a project, you would meet all the requirements to quit working on it. Your manager, yourself, would want you to stay, which means you would violate the "If your manager wants you to stay - leave." rule.

My experience has been that once you're completely competent in your job, that's the job your stuck with. You can try to grow into other areas (and end up doing 3 people's jobs) or apply for different positions but you're out of luck since you've become a 'key employee.' Whether that's bad management or my inability to play office politics, it's happened more than once.

Which made it time to leave.

I've generally found that once an employee is completely competent (or exceptional) at their job, they are promoted to manager where they are miserable or ineffective. It's called "the Peter Principle," and it is disturbingly common in the technology world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

As an employee you don’t have to accept those promotions. You can push to expand your role in engineering instead.

Provided your company is far-sighted enough to pay you according to your ability, not your managerial rank. For most the money is too good to turn down.

The one time I’ve been in that situation I’ve ended up leaving that company and taking a much better paid engineering role at a different one :)

As weird as this post was, it was still only half a post. Lots of interesting thoughts, but the most important questions were never addressed:

  1.  Where do you go?
  2.  How do you find it?
  3.  How do avoid being in the same position a year later?

OP's advice is a recipe for a bad resume and a more miserable employee. Sometimes you just gotta put up with a little shit for a while before the right path becomes available to you. Ironically, the times when OP advises you to leave can be your opportunities of greatest growth when you don't even realize it.

I agree that following OP's advice would make for a bad resume--no one has ever worked in a situation that didn't hit at least one of those points. I think a good question to ask is, at what point have you passed the point of having to "put up with a little shit" and moved into the realm of "genuinely unhappy with your job"? The answer to this becomes especially important if you're the type who can't shut off after work--the type who needs progress and productivity on a daily basis, instead of stagnation.

>> 3. How do avoid being in the same position a year later?

Seems to me the wrong question to be asking. Being in the position where you need to "challenge yourself" (and leaving is one way to do so), shouldn't be a problem, it's just something you need to notice and resolve.

As for the other questions, they are great questions, but you'll only ever find ancedotal answers. The serendipity of how you found the next thing and what it was are the rewards for taking the risk. I usually find the story of how companies or people made themselves far more interesting than what they became.

OP has a point. In my previous job, when I looked around, it seemed like almost everyone seemed be to just coming to the job to get paid. In some pathetic cases, after seeing some really unhappy people dragging it for over a year, I have screamed silently - why don't they go find something else ?

This post makes a point, but its not to be taken literally.

>> why don't they go find something else?

- Because the opportunity hasn't presented itself.

- Because s/he can't afford to quit a job when her/his spouse has just been laid-off.

- Because the car/house/dental treatment hasn't been paid-off.

- Because those students loans can not be deferred

- Because this company actually pays for the a good part of tuition, and requires that the employee stays for at least a couple of years after graduating.

- Because the person has already left four or five different jobs previously, so it's getting harder and harder to justify to an interviewer why the company should hire someone that can't stay at the same place for more than 18 months

One step at a time. And allowing yourself to leave is sometimes the hardest one to take.

I like the sentiment, but a little bit over the top. According to this, there really isn't a single situation in which you should stay at your current job.

"If your manager is trying to make you stay, they aren’t a good manager – leave."

If you're doing a good job, I'd say your manager is not doing his/her job if he/she is not trying to make you stay.

Agreed, the manager is working for the company, not for the employee, so keeping a good employee is in the best interest of the company, even if it's not optimal for the employee.

What a brain-damaged article. Seriously, what's next?!

"If you have a good life, commit suicide. If you have a great wife, leave her. If you have kids, leave them and never return. If your company starts making a profit, sell it at a loss. If you're healthy, recklessly endanger yourself. If people like you, start acting like an asshole. If you have a nice social network, cut off all ties. If you're rich, waste it all and then go live in the street. If you like this article, write me a scathing piece of hate mail."

This post obviously assumes one can simply afford to leave a secure position for an insecure one.

What about the wife, kids, mortgage, and bills?

Clearly not very practical advice.

There is a big difference between

1) impractical

2) does not apply to all life situations

You're right. I should also have been more neutral/PC:

What about the spouse, kids, mortage and bills?

Clearly not practical advice for people with commitments.

Funny that reading the post, the younger me would've agreed without question.

Programmers -should- feel slightly challenged. If we don't, we tend to make things more complicated until we do.

One of the solutions I've found for that is to try to make the solution as simple and clean as possible. That adds the 'complexity' in the right direction, instead of the wrong one. It's still difficult to do, but not because the code is an untamable hydra.

Researching new tools, like Unit Testing, has also helped. The difficulties in learning and using them keep the added complexity away from the code itself. (Yeah, Unit Testing is an old example, I admit it.)

Utter nonsense. More to the point, dangerous nonsense, because some people may read it and go through with it.

There's only one good reason to leave a job (other than retirement/health/personal reasons unconnected with the job itself) - because you have a better opportunity elsewhere. Whether that better opportunity is more responsibility, a bigger paycheck, a better work environment, new skills, whatever, it should be better than what you have now.

To leave a job just because you feel "unchallenged" - well, either you have a trust fund, or you are plain stupid.

I felt that was implied. I didn't see it as "Leave with no attention to other commitments;" rather, as "leave to someplace better that will offer you this."

Indeed, your taking his advice far too literal.

Instead of "If you aren’t being challenged in your job – leave". I would say: find a way to challenge yourself. Take some initiative. It might be your job that's stopping you from reaching greater things, but I bet it's not your place of employment.

Talk to some experts. Come up with new ideas. Be disruptive. You've got the knowledge, the contacts, and the credibility to do so. Leaving now without trying that first seems like giving up to easily to me.

All the criticism of the post is centered on how unconventional the advice is, and how impractical it would be for one to follow. Both criticisms are particularly evident in the missive that following the advice "would make for a bad resume". And yet, that is exactly what is being taken to task here.

The author is suggesting that you release the practical & conventional wisdom surrounding your job and how it routinizes both you and your life. The first requirement is that you throw out thinking about your resume. You reject staying somewhere you're either not happy or not growing just because it might look good on a piece of paper, or because you think you're actually going to get somewhere with it.

In another author's words:

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your f*ing khakis.

According to this post, I reckon at least 95% of people fit the criteria of those that need to leave their job.

"The role of a manager should be to ensure that those that work for him/her eventually leave and go onto bigger and better things"

I would honestly love to know the source of this quote.

I'll admit, the ideal manager is one who's primary focus is the employee's personal development but put yourself in the shoes of the manager; your focus is almost entirely on two specific things: Your own personal development and maximising your current staff's ability in order to be a more successful manager in the eyes of your superiors.

"If where you work there is a business culture of trying to make competitors fail – leave."

That rules out the vast majority of companies with direct competitors.

At least it rules out a lot of (most?) Fortune 500 companies. It might not rule out my employer, but it would probably rule out quite a few business units within my employing company.

I'd say it absolutely rules out Microsoft. ;-)

Not the ones I've worked for.

The culture has been to do the best we can do. But not to worry about every thing our competitors did. It worked out pretty well.

so what i'm reading is the ideal job is getting paid not enough money to work a job where people don't like you, you don't know enough about the system, you fail a lot at the things you do, you're constantly under pressure, your business doesn't care if you quit, and neither you nor your company are successful.

Sure, we all know that no job or entrepeneurial venture ever involves being knowledgeable, bored, or feeling unmotivated or unchallenged. Nope. The minute you hit one of these minor obstacles you should throw up your hands and quit immediately. That's the recipe for a happy life..

"If you aren’t failing enough – leave and go find somewhere where you fail before you succeed. When you find yourself succeeding too often – leave again."

I see - and where, exactly, are the people who will hire someone and then keep them around while they fail on a regular basis?

The post is unreasonable, but most reasons to leave a job are good in that they teach you to remain dynamic and doing new, better, greater software (or whatever you do).

However, I found at least one exclusive set of points: -If you aren’t being challenged in your job – leave. -If someone is standing in the way of your progress (either internally or externally) – leave.

Someone may be standing in your way - isn't that a challenge to beat him?

A couple of years ago I would have given similar advice. However, since the recession started the job situation has utterly changed, and you can't just leave and expect to step into another job quickly - no matter how talented you are or how many letters you have after your name.

My advice now would only be to leave if you have a good alternative confirmed job offer or are starting a business.

The article was written to provoke discussion. That being said, "There's a time to earn, and there's a time to learn." The author certainly values learning and experience over what is typically defined as stability. This points to his beliefs and experiences with growth.

Or perhaps he's buddhist. Lao Tzu wrote, "If you want to be given everything, give everything up."

Post makes a huge assumption, you are your job. That is your job is your life, your most important and proudest accomplishment. To the contrary, many people work to support what is there real passion(s). It's just a job.

Was this written by a freelancer by any chance?

Or maybe written by an wealthy heir?

Leave a job when and only when you want to.

Leave or stay a job, cherish your time and make everyday as interesting and satisfying as possible.

So, if I feel successful, content, well paid, respected I should leave my job? I don't think so!

look at Parasoft's unit testing capabilities - it's very interesting:

www.parasoft.com/unittesting

So suppose I work on a garbage dump searching for stuff that can be recycled. Because I could not find a proper job. Since I probably don't enjoy my job, I should leave - to do what?

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