[petsfed]

I think its not just recency bias at work, but also the broader experience that nothing changed after the first straw. If the complainant can't assemble the various issues into a coherent narrative that signals that they should leave, then they're not going to. So its not just fixing issues as they come up, its fixing the right issues before they can spread.

I worked at company where the projects I was working on kept getting cancelled. And sure, that's business, these things happen. But couple that with also being reassigned well outside of my comfort zone or job description while they looked for something new (and all of the proposed projects that would be back in line with my job title were also getting cancelled before development could even begin), I began to see a pattern.

The final straw, such as it was, was the announcement that they could no longer purchase milk for coffee in the breakroom, in an effort to save money. It wasn't that "I can't work at a place that can't afford milk for coffee", it was "this company is so bad at planning for the future that it can't even find a way to purchase milk for the breakroom, let alone drive a massive development and manufacturing effort to completion".

[hinkley]

There’s a sort of a chess clock that starts after the first injury. Every move adds a little more time to the clock but slowly runs down goodwill.

It does seem to be that the later the clock starts the better things go.

But analogies aside, it’s also that first incident of “did I make a mistake coming here?” And that can start with dumb logistical things like they knew you were showing up on Wednesday and they didn’t have a desk or maybe a composter ready for you.

The Gottman Institute thinks that the only emotion a relationship cannot endure is contempt. So far I haven’t encountered any meaningful counterexamples.