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Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

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Re: Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

#31

Post by reacharavindh »

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.

Re: Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

#32

Post by tcrews »

2006 - The company I joined as first employee couldn't pay my salary and offered a cut of the server consulting business (which was done 100% by me alone). Each month they would find excuses to avoid paying it. A new owner bought part of the company and was determined to review my deal. It wasn't making me a lot of money, mainly ensuring I got paid market rates.

2009 - After almost 4 years at at a support role at IBM, I wanted a change. They sold me on some architecture role that ended up being about collecting requirements for small SOA projects. After 3 months, my people manager wouldn't let me apply for a job at their Linux Tech Center and said I had to wait at least another year. Plus the director wasn't happy LTC was trying to "steal" other projects' staff and it was unlikely they would even consider. Since I had gotten the maximum performance rating every year, I thought they should be more considerate. Gave a 2-day notice and left. Manager threatened me, saying I would never work for IBM again in my life.

2011 - Team lead was a dick and consistently make me look like a inexperienced fool in front of other teams. He wouldn't touch the infrastructure for fear of breaking it and would constantly fight other teams, trying to hide our issues. I felt it was wrong. One day he refused to acknowledge a ton of errors we were causing and I confronted him. He said I should leave if I wasn't happy. I gave my 30-day notice to our manager. The team lead called me saying I could leave in a week if I wanted (he would talk to my manager to cancel any fines). Before leaving, I updated all our 500+ servers to the latest firmware version that was know to fix a lot of issues. Got thank you notes from other teams for a while.

2012 - project to modernize all servers from aix/VMs/hpux to Linux got cancelled at Motorola after Google bought it. Nothing else to do there and we all know what happened. Stayed 10 months. Nice people but it was like working at a graveyard.

2013 - I guess that IBM manager was wrong after all. Got a job working with Linux at IBM. Left for better pay and more benefits. The team was excellent.

2015 - Left top 5 global food company. They treated us really good but their technology stack was horrendous and they didn't care. I felt it was setting my career back. How would I explain to a recruiter that was working with 10 years old technology? I really miss them though but this is a fast paced industry.

2015 - still here... Lack of clarity around projects is a concern but pay is good, remote work and they are nice people.

Re: Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

#33

Post by lojack »

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.

Re: Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

#34

Post by woutr_be »

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.

Re: Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

#36

Post by keviv »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #28
keviv wrote: post #12

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 a…

You weren't fully vested after 6 years?

Unfortunately no. Got the equity pretty late (a rookie mistake on my part) and got screwed royally.

Re: Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

#37

Post by threesixandnine »

richfnelson wrote: post #9

I left a web dev job about a month ago. I liked a lot about the company. It was a three-man dev team at an e-commerce startup and we ran a Rails/Angular webapp. The founders were great and the culture fit my personality very well. I left the company after ~6 months because I did not get along well with one of the other developers. We had extreme communication problems and they were causing unnecessary stress. I like…

I want to hire that boring and unpolite dev.

Re: Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

#38

Post by canterburry »

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.

Yeah...so that's when I quit.

Re: Ask HN: When did you feel to resign/leave your last job?

#39

Post by draw_down »

These days it doesn't take too long, honestly. I've had my job for about 3 months and I wouldn't mind something else. Significant changes, which they could have deigned to inform me of when I was interviewing, have made my job materially worse. At 3 months in. And this isn't some shit company, its one that's well known and revered here.
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