Ask HN: Is it unprofessional to leave a new job where everything is a mess?

I was head-hunted to a 20 person startup in a senior (non-tech) role; I’d been sold a big vision, told the business was very well funded, loads of exciting stuff on the cards. First month in I discovered that the “significant seven figure investment” that I had been told had been made didn’t exist and that the product was such a mess it was unusable - and critically for me, unsellable.

The CTO and I met and discussed what needed to change, and it turned out that most of what I saw as product related issues were things he’d also been trying to change. We presented these to the (hyper-paranoid) founder/CEO who agreed that everything we had said was valid and needed reworking. A week as we began to roll out a plan of changes the CEO had a tantrum and accused us of conspiring against him and wanting to take over the company and kick him out.

When I discovered shortly after that a key part of the product didn’t work and was actually being manually faked I put my exit plan in place. My reputation was at stake because most of the customers I was talking to were people I’d worked with for years. I couldn’t go and try and sell them a product that I knew was fake.

Fortunately as part of my deal I’d negotiated a very favourable exit package that basically immediately vested my first year equity grant to cash and allowed me to quit and leave with six months salary on top. Actually, the fact that they had agreed that should have been a warning flag as it showed how chaotically managed the business was. There’s no way they should have agreed the terms I got.

It was THE most stressful period of my working life. I wanted the work I was doing to work, I saw how the business could succeed - but there were so many red flags that I had no choice except to walk. I think it was four months in I realised the whole thing was a disaster and about 7 months in that I actually left.

Even if I’d not had the severance package I would have left and picked up some consultancy or gone client side for a bit to tide me over.

If you can afford to leave, leave. If you can’t afford to leave, make your priority lining up something that lets you leave. Being in that sort of situation is utterly destructive to your mental health. It took me about three months to recover from the stress.

Just ask yourself: would this company go out of their way to keep me employed if it wasn't in their best interest (i.e. financial trouble, your skills are no longer needed etc.) or would they give me my two weeks notice?

As you'd probably realize, they likely give zero shits about you personally.

So don't give more than that about them. Just leave. You don't owe them anything, not even an explanation. Let alone your guilt.

You would leave a relationship if that was the case. Why would you stick with something much less serious and important like a job, then?

At the very least, you should be able to provide reasons for leaving your previous employer. They might be as benign as "I wanted to grow in X direction and there wasn't the opportunity for that" but no-one has 100% rosy feelings about a company that they're leaving. I would be fairly distrustful of anyone who pretended that was the case.

What is your worry about saying negative things?

> Almost every attempt of mine to change anything was met with either "yeah we know but we have to live with it for now" or a straight denial to hear me out - brushed aside as a newcomer (I'm senior and was hired as such).

A senior resource in such a mess can take action and seek consensus afterwards. The idea is to pick a problem sub-system and fixing it. Just do it and don't talk about it. Get it done with demonstrated benefits to establish credibility. Subsequent change proposals will be supported by management. It's a risky move -- you may find yourself contributing to the mess -- but you are prepared to quit anyway so failure is definitely an option.

> the project is a slow motion train wreck

Reexamine this diagnosis. Include related matter that almost certainly you are not disclosing here, including honest self-assessment in this reevaluation. IFF you determine that (a) this is a mess, and (b) I am not capable of contributing to fixing the mess, then sure, quit.