7 years ago I was hired as the sole developer in a train wreck situation. 14 year old company had just relaunched their site to early and without any testing. It was like eBay but for an expensive niche market.
The primary developer walked after the launch. The new site was buggy and the whole thing had been rebuilt without any of the previous security tooling. Phishing and fraud against the user base were everywhere.
I spent a year fixing this site, combatting fraud, building anti fraud tools, setting up DMARC, learning both the old Perl system and the new rails system, adding new features, running the servers and being on call 24/7 at the expense of my home life.
I did it too. I stabilized the site, rendered the fraud and phishing ineffective and saved the company.
At my review they thanked me for saving the company...and told me they didn’t think I was working hard enough.
I realized that if they actually believed that after the year I just put in there was nothing I could do to change their mind and I was really, seriously depressed for most of the next month. As you might expect, during that month my work actually did suffer and the CEO sent me a nasty note over a weekend while my wife and I were out. She saw the note and told me to quit because she didn’t want me working for somebody like that. It was the biggest relief in the world to hear that from her because I was struggling with how to tell her any of it. I internalized it all. I asked what about money? She said we’d figure it out.
So I called and resigned immediately and told them I’d write up transition documents for the next developer. Told him what he needed to do moving forward to make the company work and he actually listened to exactly what I told him to do and paid me an extra 2 weeks after my last day to actually thank me for saving his company.
Couple of months later I got a good job for the next 5 years and now that experience has me working in the email security and antiphishing world...very happily.