Ask HN: Who want to be fired? Is your job terrible? Would a sense of relief wash over you if you didn't need to come in tomorrow? Talk about it with your friend, the internet! |
Ask HN: Who want to be fired? Is your job terrible? Would a sense of relief wash over you if you didn't need to come in tomorrow? Talk about it with your friend, the internet! |
Why am I not quitting? I was hired to be a tech lead/manager a bit more than a year ago and a lot of people rely on me, it would suck immensely to have a boss that everyone likes quit on you after just one year. I have been on the other side and I know how bad it would feel. People love me, as I turned around a heavily burned out team, unfortunately severely burning myself out in the process…
But realistically, I’ll most likely quit soon regardless, I am on the edge and one little crisis from here (production outage, argument with my director, …) will push me over. Some of my direct reports have been telling me: “I see you are burning out, let me know anything I can do to help, it would be awful if you were to quit and we were to report back to the old management”.
I am in an insanely stressful hedge fund, the quintessential definition of pressure cooker. 70-80h a week of distress and brutal oncall, including weekends. It’s tough for individual contributors who have to deliver work, but for (technical) managers is hell on earth.
There's just so much inertia. I have a comfortable life with not a bad salary. I have great wlb. And I work remotely. Everytime I think about leaving, I just focus on it maybe being a matter of perspective.
BTW Why do people always advise others to find a new job before quitting the current one? The finances of software people cannot be that precarious. Are you afraid of the mythical gap in the resume, or what?
There are a lot of jobs out there but the interview process can take months and after being exhausted from searching, you may well just accept a bad deal.
I've been in bad jobs though, and tried to job hunt from there. There was one where there's a meeting every half day to discuss progress. It was so draining that it was a confidence hit during interviews. I quit and it felt like the days were literally more beautiful.
I will still have to work a few months and I dread it.
I actually would be happier if I got fired, effective immediately.
I won't badmouth my employer here because I don't think they have done anything wrong. We just don't fit.
I'm lucky that my wife makes enough money for both of us, so I won't look for a new job, I'll just become a stay at home dad, and pursue my side projects while the kids are at school and the home duties are done.
I left tech completely for 5 years, to make gears, which was rewarding, I stayed because I was part of a 4 man shop, and it was nice to not worry about servers on the weekends, etc.
My wife's income took a hit, and now I've been out of tech for far too long... nobody programs in Pascal any more.
The funny thing is, I recovered in one month, quit, and had the happiest two months after that; but after the fourth month I also realized that I still like doing my job, just not there. It took me three more months to find a new job I liked, meanwhile the initial happiness rush became boredom.
My point is, working with your side projects will improve your skills and stave boredom; and who knows if you'll find you just needed a sabbatical instead of staying at home forever.
I am currently in a IT project I don't want to be in. There is too much going on and there is so much shit here. They told me that it was going to be X and I was already hesitant, but I had to do it and now it is more like XXX.
I am still here because I don't know what I should do else and I like the pay (but I don't need it and it isn't that great). Also, I know the book of Cal Newport "So Good They Can't Ignore You", but I don't know how to implement his advices. Probably I will not like my next job or the next thing I would do (if I know what it would be).
2. Give the customary notice because you're a professional.
3. If it keeps happening, it might not be the jobs or it might be working for other people.
I've worked with people who always complain, and when an object of their unhappiness disappears, they quickly replace it with another. It's as if they were unhappy with themselves and kept projecting it elsewhere.
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
To me, it seems dismissive to just ask "Who wants to be fired?" when there have been those whom we've lost to suicide or cardiac events from being overworked and overlooked. It's just not right to reduce that problem to "haha, fire me, durrr"
I had a friend of a friend in NY some years ago not show up to work, and my friend was weirded out because it was unusual. The guy was some director of account management or something at Goldman, and he jumped in front of a train around Canarsie or somewhere. Guy had a wife and a newborn and a toddler. This stuff really happens, in my experience.
> Why do people always advise others to find a new job before quitting the current one?
1. Interviews are complicated (and not just technical skill dependent) and sometimes time consuming especially if you are looking for specific companies or domains to work in. Your pace at getting the job might not match the company's. Hence your plan of savings for 3 months might have to be stretched to fit for 5 or 6 months.
2. Explaining why I quit my previous job without another offer was a constant question asked during the initial HR interviews and that required carefully worded answers. Since it was during the covid pandemic the general assumption would have been that I was part of a mass layoff.
3. Your existing job provides the stability for you to negotiate better since you already have something to fall back on. This matters only if you do not have an existing offer in hand.
You’d be surprised. hedonic treadmill intensifying
A lot of people spend a lot, partially to be in a certain location for their job, partially because they can afford the starbucks everyday, dining out all the times.
Dunno. I did exactly that last year. I don’t regret it. My kids weren’t worse off in any way. Within ~6 weeks I had signed up for another job with better salary.
I started a job last November, and after about 3 months I was ready to quit. I spoke with my manager and he said he would help fix the problems. He hasn't been able to fix everything, but he was able to fix my biggest annoyances. For the things he could not fix, he is helping me mitigate the issues.
Though if your management is not willing to help you fix the issues then it is time to move on. I've had that happen before too.
What kind of jobs? A few days are too few to judge a workplace, I've never seen someone quitting before completing their probation period.
and yes few days in a bad environment is well enough to judge. and what probation?
There's no shame in doing pleasurable things with our free time, not everyone has the same way of resting from work.
My uncle worked backend systems for a trading floor in the 90s. His last straw was when a vendor CE died in the datacenter, iirc of a heart attack during an early morning repair. Someone called 911 when he was discovered, but the fire/ems guys got into a fight with the management and security and stormed off.
They ended up getting threatened to complete the repair or get fired and rolled the dude into a cold corner of the datacenter, where he sat for several hours.
Anyhow. Yeah. Finance sucks. They ought to make it illegal to work more than 40hrs in that industry, right away.