Ask HN: Is it fair to resign a job after a Month due to not a good fit

4 points by penguinlinux 5 years ago | 5 comments

Thanks for any advice. I am a DevOps enginer with lots of experience with many technologies. During the month of April i got a few companies reaching out during the pandemic and i was lucky to get a job with a company looking for an SRE, from the outside the company needed someone with my skills and the team was nice and I thought this would be a good fit for me so I took the job.

A month into the job i see the company really does not have good best practices for development, I have no access to dev environments or QA to test anything. It took 2 weeks for me to just get admin access on a Windows computer. They are a finance company and they don't even understand why I need virtualbox on my machine. There have been 3 outtages on a new service that was rolled out recently and i can see why. There is no communication between ops and devs and there are no best practices. The people are NICE but also they are not really looking to suddenly change their process because they involve security and change control and that's something they are not changing right away.

I interviewed with another company that is full AWS and i would basically take ownership of their existing environment from configuring aws resources, ci cd pipelines and working with monitoring and load testing. stuff that I now how to do and do well. I feel my current job is basically being a linux admin and paid very well for it but really they are not using my skills and even if i want to do my job there are blockers on my way.

I want to be honest and just thank them for the job and resign and let them now i don't feel well getting paid so much money when they are not maximizing my skills . I don't want to offend them or come across as an ungrateful person. is it fair for me to do this resign and move on or should i give them a longer chance ? any advice would be really helpful

auslegung 5 years ago |

I think it totally depends on if you want the challenge of improving their practices. If you do, then stay and help. If you don’t, then leave. And I’d leave ASAP because this economy is so uncertain, the other jobs you want might get snatched up quickly.

I empathize with you not wanting to bail on them so quickly, but this stuff happens and the sooner you’re out the sooner they can get someone who looks forward to helping them improve their practices.

And in an ideal world you’d be able to give them honest, helpful criticism and they’d receive it well. But that’s generally considered a lost cause during the exit interview, so tread softly. Maybe separate from you leaving, have conversations with whoever you can about the importance of improving their practices.

penguinlinux 5 years ago | |

thank you , I care about the company and i don't think i want to leave because i think highly of myself and i think this is beneath me, I just feel someone else could do this role and find it a better fit than me. I am a cloud infrastructure engineer with lots of experience that I can't use here since this job can be done by a linux administrator. I will chat about the need to bring devops and hopefully they know i come from a good side and not being critical of what they do.

WheelsAtLarge 5 years ago |

Run, Run, and don't look back. It's great that they were willing to hire you but a job has to be beneficial to both sides. The reality is that if you were not doing your job they would let you go. There no reason for you to stay if they can't meet your needs.

I wouldn't burn bridges but I would gracefully leave if I were you. Try to leave the place in better shape than what you found it in but it's time for you to go to your next challenge.

penguinlinux 5 years ago | |

thank you for your advice. I never want to leave bad impressions. In fact i respect my employer and i think anyone would just coast and get paid at this job but that is not me. It is not fair to them and it is not fair to me as i feel i am regressing instead of learning .

DigitalSea 5 years ago |

Yes. I am not sure what it is like where you are from, but in Australia and the UK, there is a period of time (usually 3 months) where you're on probation and either side can terminate employment on the spot. You've already made up your mind in my opinion and should move on.