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

Giving your employer the standard two weeks notice is so if they're called by a place you'd like to work for reference they say they'd rehire you. If you go negative anytime during the exit process your management can use that to flip your re-hire status. That's just one way previous employers can affect someone who's left. The balance of power is firmly stacked against the employee and for the employer.

If you want to be a "voice of change" then you'd better have enough evidence to stand up in a court. Anything less can be gaslit.

While they do come across as petty in our societies it's downright employee hostile. Why do organizations have so much power on the future of someones work?

So many organizations do legally questionable things and mouth gag you from doing the right thing and reporting their scammy behaviour because somewhere down the line you want to make sure that when the next organization calls for a reference they don't destroy your job prospects.

A simple example related to this point is that this is precisely why it took a whistleblower to expose the shit that Facebook is doing.

If all the previous researchers felt like they could walk away and get a new job, while highlighting their great work AND calling out Facebook for what it does they would have.

I just saw an example of a sequoia funded startup firing someone during mat leave and then having the audacity to propose a onesided non disparagement clause. The person in question was close to accepting it, because she feared a potential backlash in her future career.

It's completely insane that in most societies corporations can abuse employees to the extent that they are and then employees bend over and accept it, because they might have a bad reference. Usually the only way to actually free yourself from those companies is litigation with mutual non-disparagement. That really shouldn't be the case.

> Of course you can explain that the job wasn't a good fit, but in an interview situation you want to avoid opening the door for follow-up questions that will force you to choose to either make yourself look unprofessional (or too fussy) or to blame the former employer.

It is not unprofessional to end up in a situation where what you are asked to do is not in line with what you want for your career. Employers rarely put their employees career development first.

Note that I agree with you that ranting and needlessly badmouthing a company never reflects positively on someone. I just disagree that you should always be positive.

> Then he launched into a long explanation of how he didn't get along with his manager and how some of the other people on his team were slackers and so on.

That’s because venting frustration never looks good during an interview. But it would probably have been fine to say that as he was getting older, maybe he had a daughter, maybe he had some kind of epiphany, he was starting to feel uneasy about the porn industry and that it affected is ability to fit in the team. That’s not positive but that’s shifting the perspective from blaming other to a change in yourself which is a legitimate reason to search a new job.

In the same way, I wouldn’t necessarily look badly on someone who left a small company after four months and explained to me that they are actually looking for a place with more established processes because at their point in their career they are looking to learn the best practices and not put them in place from scratch and they misjudged the state of the company they worked for. That’s basically telling you were working for an immature but you shifting the discussion towards you and what you are looking for.

Or, "we had differing opinions on how to develop and maintain quality software." You can then answer almost any question (even, "what was the disagreement?") with your ideals, how you've put those ideals into practice in the past, and nothing more. You can indirectly explain the problem while keeping the conversation focused on the purpose of an interview: you and your prospective employer.

Life is far too short to stay in a job you don’t enjoy.