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>Don't quit your job without your next source of income secured.

I guess this is the takeaway from a self preservation standpoint, but the alternative is worse. Spending months of your employer's time completely mentally checked out, taking sick time and vacation for interviews, pretending like you care in meetings, it's all too much. I watched that happen multiple times before I left, and it's really discourteous to the people you work with. It just seems unethical to me to remain somewhere once you've decided to leave.

When you quit, you lose leverage. It's not unethical to use personal and vacation days as you see fit.

They are your days to use, however you feel like. Hell, you really should be entitled to use your lunch hour if you want, but that might be my blue-collar roots in jobs where I actually clocked out for lunch and had mandated 9am and 3pm breaks showing through...

> When you quit, you lose leverage.

Not if you have any other kind of safety net, e.g. savings or frugal low cost lifestyle.

Having been through this recently I certainly empathize with feeling like you're doing something wrong when looking for a new job. What got me through it was realizing that if the company was looking to replace me they would do the exact same thing - it's just how business works.

That being said, as difficult as it is to continue to give 100% leaving well is very important for building references that could help you in the future.

It is absolutely not unethical to remain somewhere once you've decided to leave. The agreement between you and your employer is that you provide your work in exchange for their money. If you're employed at-will then the company is free to fire you any time they think they're not getting their end of the deal.

Of course, it is more fun to work at a job you care about. But you are under no obligation to "care," and there's nothing wrong with keeping a job while you don't care until you find another one.

It is not, absolutely not. Just think from the company side, they protect their financial interest first and in time of difficulties they lay you off with no mercy. There is nothing unethical in that as well. You just do your job in a professional manner even on your last day..

You do not owe your employer your true heart and soul. You exchange your services for money. If you are holding to that agreement you should not feel guilty about doing what is best for yourself.

This is good advice

I've had 5 jobs now, each lasting about a year and a half at most, and I only quit 1 of them because everyone on the team was being replaced to avoid having to grant any options prior to an acquisition. Twice my employer went out of business entirely, another time they laid off 20% of their workforce to secure more funding, and most recently a company let go all of it's remote developers after a change in leadership.

While I agree you shouldn't quit your job without having the next thing already in place, at least in my experience this is a very volatile industry and you can't really expect to keep a job for a long time anyways. The odds may be better at a bigger company, but it still happens. One of the largest employers in my city just laid off about 1100 people.

I've been lucky in that I've been able to quickly find work after these things happened before, but I look at it like I need to be prepared to potentially have to go without work for months at any time. Hopefully my next job will be one I can keep for several years, as the constant job hopping really isn't for me.

I have switched a few times in the last few years, one time was because a start-up wasn't paying us (two devs quit on the same day,I was officially fired for making enough of a fuss).

Not having a job when you are applying for new ones puts you on a back foot with salary negotiations, as you don't have anything to compare it to. However you do have a lot more time and energy to put into the interview process. Especially when people are looking for technical tests and you have limited spare time and energy after work.

On the contrary, I quit my job without having a job to move into, only $1000 savings and a credit card, and then moved to Australia.

Everything worked out well and it was the best decision I ever made.

Upon saying that, I knew that there were a lot of jobs available, and I was also willing to do any kind of job, not just software engineering. If push came to shove, I was willing to go back to working in construction or hospitality.

I also had a backup plan if all else failed, which was to fly back home and stay with my parents while I sorted my life out.

My advice would be to not quit your job without a plan and a plan B.

In Australia, you'd probably make more money in construction vs software engineering.

That doesn't necessarily mean you'll be happier, however. Most construction jobs are very hard on the body.

Maybe, maybe not. I was pretty happy when I was doing construction.

I very frequently consider getting any job that involves being outside and doing physical work over sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day. I like programming, but I hate not being outside for vast majority of the day and what this lifestyle is doing to my body.

Do you really believe that? Being outside and getting exercise is really nice, but using your brain is so much nicer. Would you really give up a job that is intellectually stimulating for one that uses you mostly for your mechanical abilities?

Yes. I have worked manual jobs in the past(repairing bicycles, working at a warehouse and as a driver and for a while at a semi-construction job that involved being outside a lot) and I feel like overall I was more consistently happy. I would come home and do coding in my own time to satisfy the intellectual needs.

The handful of manual labor jobs I've had (delivering water, installing business projects), left me bored and tired at the end of the day. Any health benefits of the exercise I got was taken away from the boredom of waiting around for person/thing to get from point A to B. There's a reason why many construction workers are overweight.

Yes, but if you do construction or manual labor of any kind as a living (i.e. for years, decades), it leaves your body frail and broken. With programming, you only have to watch for relatively minor things like carpal tunnel and bad posture.

I'm reasonably certain that plenty of people do manual labor for a living who don't end up "frail and broken", and that decades spent in a sedentary position can have detrimental health effects beyond mere bad posture. And carpal tunnel is no joke.

Either can be taken to an unhealthy extreme, but on balance the human body benefits more from physical exertion than the lack of it.

My concern with manual labor jobs is not the effect on my body, it's the effect on the mind. Like I said in the previous comment, after a hard day of manual labor, sure I was tired, but I was mostly bored out of my mind. Moving some heavy object X from position A to position B gets less romantic when you've done it 50 times.

Sitting in an office desk for 30 years can't be good for you either, but if it's in a position to keep my brain active (even if my muscles aren't), I'd take that job a thousand times before going back to pure labor.

In fact, one of the most memorable parts of those summer jobs was creating a shoulder rest for the 25 lbs bottles to sit on, out of discarded plastic. I honestly can't remember whether it worked at all or not, but I definitely remember being far more interested designing and cutting this piece of plastic than carrying bottles of water.

> Would you really give up a job that is intellectually stimulating for one that uses you mostly for your mechanical abilities?

Do you find programming jobs intellectually stimulating beyond junior level? Maybe I have really bad luck, but all that I seem to be able to find - and see my friends doing - are the computer equivalents of lowest-level construction work. I usually have to step into other people's competences (e.g. contributing UX or even domain-level ideas) to get anything interesting from them.

Ride a bike to work. If you live too close then take a more interesting path to work that gives you some proper fitness every day.

I already do. It's not about the fitness.

I think I get what you mean. I do landscaping and misc. yard work on the weekends to get my "working outside" fix. I'm sure it's different for everyone, but for me I need to really break a sweat out in the sun once and a while to keep my happiness levels up.

>Most construction jobs are very hard on the body.

So are sedentary jobs. Obesity, heart disease and everything else that goes with them are no joke.

By the way, the next source doesn't have to be a full time job. Explore contracting as well. I have found that to be a great alternative to an FTE position, and have bounced back and forth between FTE and contractor. (Preferably on your own but through a body shop works too.)

It's not exactly the same skillset, but you'll understand and appreciate sales and accounts receivable much more after a stint of doing that yourself.

There's also an element of desirability in having a job. If you have a job, it means someone has selected you and is paying you to do certain roles. In and of itself this makes the candidate more desirable than one who has either quit or been fired.