In Praise of Quitting Your Job, or The New Work Ethic.

In any company it is difficult to find ownership and recognition at the lowest levels of the corporate hierarchy. If you only work for the company for less than a year, as the author proudly admits to, then you should not expect to be given substantial influence in the company.

Influence and recognition must be earned, and that takes time and hard work. The bigger and more established the company, the more time this will take. If you're impatient, then you're going to have to work at a startup or start your own company.

From my experience, the trick is to get engaged and routinely demonstrate that you care. If you begrudgingly implement or design every request that comes your way from the confines of your cubicle, of course you will burn out. If instead you ask your boss about the customer's needs or take the initiative to track down and talk to the sales person in charge of the account for some additional detail, you've effectively taken a small piece of ownership and showed some initiative. This rarely goes unnoticed, and definitely factors into decisions involved influence, ownership, and recognition in the future.

Lately... She's a Javascript/ front-end developer (co-creator of Twistori + everytimezone for example), business thought leader type (did i just say "thought leader?" Sorry.), and co-founder of the SaaS service http://letsfreckle.com. But none of those things would get much as much attention as they do if it weren't for the fact that she is an amazing user experience/ interface maker. These skills make the things she works on (from books to slides to web form interactions) really friendly and fun.

(I have no professional affiliation with her. But full disclosure: We are Twitter friends. #realtalk)

By ownership I mean ownership of my domain (area of involvement, etc) in the project. I don't mean ownership as in control and possession. The kind of ownership that kept me around at my last gig was the kind that let me make suggestions, criticisms, and decisions that were taken seriously. I had responsibility to back up every claim I made and that responsibility kept me highly motivated to produce software I could. It made the project feel more collaborative and kept me involved as a part of its development.

What kills that motivation is a loss of that ownership. In the final months of my last gig we brought on someone who took total ownership of the project practically from design to implementation. It no longer felt collaborative. I felt like a monkey in a room of monkeys trying to type out Shakespeare; as if I could replace myself with a junior programmer at half my salary and things would still run smoothly. That's not a good feeling and such loss of ownership (or lack of it in the first place) is completely demoralizing.

I get the sense that the OP was referring to this kind of ownership. The kind that makes you feel involved and responsible.

But does that mean you should quit your job? I don't think so. Some jobs will have ups and downs. I didn't leave my job when they brought the new guy on. I was going to stick it out... just circumstance brought my tenure there shorter than anticipated. I think you can stick it out in this way as well and avoid "depression." I take pride in my work and it does affect me very personally.. but you have to keep things in perspective. Especially when you have other people relying on you to keep your job.

Ethical is continuous vesting with no cliff, or at most a month or two of cliff.

> A vesting cliff exists so that both parties -- employer and employee -- can have a chance to get to know each other before stock is granted and make sure that they're making the right decision.

It doesn't take a year to make that decision.

Do you really think that cliffs benefit employees or were you just hoping to slip that by?