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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
#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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] baccheion|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brianwawok|9 years ago|reply
Is it possible you just got a not fun Google team ;)
[+] [-] reacharavindh|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] itsmemattchung|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taw897978|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaoticgeek|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] keviv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mc_Big_G|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|9 years ago|reply
http://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/
[+] [-] photogrammetry|9 years ago|reply
One should always be looking for ways to improve their life, even if it means quitting.
[+] [-] draw_down|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbcbasic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenbullet|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tom_b|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdubs|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woutr_be|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TurboHaskal|9 years ago|reply
#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.
[+] [-] eonw|9 years ago|reply
i felt like it was a bad fit after only two weeks, stayed for 18 months because my mom worked there.
[+] [-] kageneko|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] canterburry|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
And humiliating.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] holycode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dozzie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lojack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkTank1|9 years ago|reply
- 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 :)
[+] [-] karmajunkie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamcw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdiocarez|9 years ago|reply