The Art of Quitting
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
>By resigning from Reddit,
Behind the scenes, Ellen Pao could have been forced out (also known as being "fired") but presented publicly as a resignation. I thought we don't really know what happened? Therefore, it seems biased to frame a thematic essay about "quitting" around Ellen's circumstances. If she didn't voluntarily separate, it's not "quitting" -- it's getting fired. Does the author Ernie Smith know the inside details of Ellen Pao's situation that we don't?
>Ellen Pao is choosing to focus her attention on the other things that interest her.
The underlying Washington Post article that this sentence links to is ~900 words written by Ellen Pao. She makes no mention of "other things that interest her."
Overall, a blog post of dubious quality.
And privong notes here: "the mentions of Pao seemed very out of place" and 300bps also explains: "The Art of Blogspam: Put sort-of related recent news item in first paragraph to seem timely." I think the conclusion is obvious.
I think it is actually a good post, and I agree with it conceptually. But I don't think it has anything to do with Pao's resignation.
I agree. When I read the post, the mentions of Pao seemed very out of place, with respect to the flow. The meat of the post was interesting, but the attempt to connect it to Pao's departure felt like a big (and unnecessary) stretch.
And she didn't leave to pursue other interests; she was forced out for reasons not made public. She certainly was unpopular on Reddit, though it's hard to know how much of the Reddit zeitgeist/groupthink/circlejerk is manufactured by small groups of influential users. I think the board decided she had to go simply because they didn't want their user base leaving en masse, and getting rid of Ellen was the only thing that would satisfy the user base (or at least the "power user" base). From what I've read, the board is anxious to monetize the platform in some way, and it's hard to monetize a platform where trolling and harassment are as commonplace as they are on Reddit.
And to some extent, I'd say that Reddit itself actively resists commercialization. One of the greatest benefits of Reddit as a user is that the algorithm is relatively simple to understand: users upvote and downvote, and while it's easy to see how to game that system, it also allows for the possibility that content will rise to the surface organically (even if a lot of the content is manufactured and upvoted via click farms). You don't get that if you're restricting the content, and I think trying to commercialize it would destroy the feeling of chaos that makes it so successful.
Everyone should quit something that really matters to them, at
least once. We all need to feel what it’s like on the other side
of a big success story. Only then will we all understand that
quitting isn’t "giving up," but setting the stage for something
else.Isn't the theme of the article that quitting to start another pursuit is quite productive and not justifying Ellen Pao's move? I agree that the author may not know the reason behind Pao's resignation but that single argument doesn't break their point.
I think it's a relatively reasonable logical conclusion that Ms. Pao, freed from responsibilities at Reddit, is pursuing things that interest her. Are you saying that she's most likely pursuing things that DON'T interest her? The 900-word essay seems to set out a thesis or mission statement for what she might do now...
I spent 20 years building a successful career as an enterprise software engineer, bouncing around between configuration management, development, and ops. It's a secure, good paying, stable career. And I grew to resent and sometimes hate it.
Then I started building something for myself, discovered the idea of creating my own startup to solve problems I experienced doing enterprise software projects in a general way, and I love that. It makes me feel like I'm doing something that actually matters.
Right now, I'm back in the enterprise to make ends meet and building on the side, which sucks and drives me crazy - but at least I see the exit and can keep moving toward it. And I figure I can get five or ten years out of building a company before I'm done with that as well.
Once you hit a certain age and a certain level of success, the things you realize you'll never do weigh on you more than the things you haven't done yet. And the things you do look more like impediments than accomplishments. That's when you need to change.
The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?" Configuration change is the primary cause of failure in complex software systems. But the part that breaks isn't necessarily the part that changes. For example, a database schema change can break apps that rely on the database. But in large organizations, where the database is administrated by an entirely different team from app development and developers may not even be allowed to look at the production environment, it's a huge pain point.
Detecting configuration change and finding the relationships and impact is a really difficult and challenging problem. The biggest takeaway from the alpha for me was that "noise shaping" is a hard problem. For example, Wordpress alters the schema of its MySQL database several times a day. It's a tiny thing (an autoincrement value on a single column), but it makes sorting important changes like upgrades that only happen weekly or monthly or yearly from unimportant changes that happen daily.
The trick now is to get a product out of it good enough to make money, so I can afford to quit dayjobbing and live off my own creation, rather than sitting at someone else's desk and counting the number of times a day I wish I had my own product here to help solve the problems I deal with over and over, every damned day.
It would do in software what a really good reliability engineer with years of knowledge can do "Foo has broken" "Nah foo is fine, someone changed Bar again without reading the wiki" stuff.
But this is a HARD problem. Man, abstracting change in an actionable, readable, efficient way has been difficult. Not to mention the security issues and other headaches.
Separately, this is just bad writing. If a college student turned this in to me I would write 'good start, delete all the irrelevant stuff about Pao and either use an example that supports the main thesis or don't use an example at all'. The threads linking this paper together are very weak.
I'm guessing 'Pao' and 'reddit' are to drive traffic. Ugh.
1. Quit: I spent a summer in investment banking, at a prestigious bank after 2 years of hustling at a state school (way easier to get this type of job at an ivy league). I left after a summer despite loving the people and perks -- it wasn't for me.
2. Persevere: While learning computer programming, it was rough to start from scratch. Seeing how slow I was compared to others was discouraging, but I pushed through and now love what I do/the skills I have. I recall taking a graduate level computer systems course, while working full-time, which was fairly challenging for me at the time (this course required writing and debugging assembly, writing programs like malloc from scratch, etc. with no other formal CS background). It was 100% worth it!
Perhaps the lesson here is that learning at the early stages is tedious, and one should push through. Or that you should have a motivator that isn't financial in taking on something tough.
Not that this is a bad thing (I applaud anyone who does something difficult in the pursuit of long-term happiness), but the fact that many people enter into unfulfilling job situations because they're drawn to the high profile and/or salary probably plays a large part in why they feel unfulfilled after working there for a while.
You can learn about coding on your own time anytime you want, at any age, on your own and with the help of free online courses, meetup's or paid courses etc.
Learning about M&A, building your professional network in investment banking, the financial markets is not so much accessible. Nothing against his enthusiasm/passion, I don't think OP was very wise to quit his job.
An evidence for that would be how fast was a new interim CEO found after the previous one "quit".
1. Put sort-of related recent news item in first paragraph to seem timely
2. Rehash old content
3. Close with sort-of related recent news item in last paragraph
4. Add clickbait headline
Lightweights! I've had 88 jobs since 1972.
Once a recruiter told me that everything on my resume was excellent except how often I switched jobs. How could that be?
I told her that was because as soon as anyone gave me undue shit, I quit.
No regrets. On many of them, I probably exercised too much patience and should have left a lot sooner.
(You get one life to live. If it's not the life you want because of your job, do something about it. Time flies.)
Sometimes I felt bad for leaving, because I know whoever would be replacing me couldn't do as good a job, but it's just business (the business of my life).
One of the things that is good about this is that I have gotten a few vacations in between jobs I wouldn't have otherwise, not to mention the vast array of experiences that have really helped me have a bigger picture understanding of sysadmin'ing.
It's a no-win situation. Unless, of course, you can do a better job of evaluating a job before you take it. But people need to pay rent, and heck yeah, companies straight-up lie about the jobs they offer.
Perhaps it's time for hiring companies to consider that even though employees are discouraged from saying negative things about a former employer, that sometimes yeah, that former employer was a jerk royale.
Of course, you have been building your career for longer than I have been alive, so there's stuff I obviously ignore.
Pretty simple, actually:
1. Do the right thing, even if it's not popular.
2. Tell the truth.
3. Be nice.
Most importantly:
4. Be the best you can be. (You'll probably end up better than anyone else.)
I have never been unemployable because I have always added much more value than I've taken. Maybe I got this way because I never put up with too much shit.
First of all, Jordan didn't "quit" to go play baseball. He had already won three championships and had already done pretty much anybody at that level could do. He wasn't "begging for a new direction" either. He always wanted to play baseball and wanted to fulfill a childhood dream is all. After doing so (no matter how bad he was) he went back to basketball and achieved even more when he came back. No exactly someone who quit and stayed away.
If you actually read the Jordan Price article, it talks about the boss he had and the psychological abuse he was taking. Sure he was at his "dream job" but the jokes and insults from his negative boss drove him to quit. It wasn't really his choice to quit, it was more he was driven out by an his boss who was a douchebag.
And the Ellen Poe situation? Quitting is completely different than being set up to fail. Again, using her as an example of "goal disengagement" completely misunderstands her whole situation. She was set up to fail, then driven into submission by the inmates who are running the asylum at Reddit.
If you want to use a better example, try Robert Smith, the running back for the Vikings who abruptly quit after a career year in the NFL. He was about to get a huge contract extension, but he gave up the money so he could pursue a career in medicine. He also wanted to get out of the NFL without any lingering physical issues. He still appears on some NFL and college football shows, but for the most part lives a pretty private life post NFL career.
If you set out to do something and stop doing it before you've succeeded, even though you could carry on with at least some possibility of further and future success, calling it anything other than "giving up" is just sugar-coating it.
I'm sure it's sensible and wise to give up in many circumstances, but giving it a fancy name really shouldn't be part of the process of justifying that decision.
Side projects come to mind when I think of quitting. Sometimes the project becomes much bigger than what you expected. You and your buddy don't have the time nor resources to dedicate towards seeing it through or scaling it up. It really all depends on the situation.
If you make a goal at time t1 and decide at t2 that that goal was a hasty and thoughtless goal, then I think the person you are at t2 should be the person you evaluate yourself as, rather than clinging to statements you might have uttered in the past. Black and white thinking of "success / failure" is a good way to make sure everything in your life goes exactly as planned, while wearing blinders. You need a combination of both in order to really be successful.
Being mean to yourself doesn't necessarily lead to success. If you've only got a mile left in the marathon and you've already ran 25, yes, that extra mile is kind of important, but also, no, it really isn't.