Have you ever or known anyone who quit a job within a short period of time after starting? Say less than 90 days?
Because I’m pretty much thinking about doing it as soon as I find another job.
Why? Because apparently I will be working for a total psycho. I was initially hired to manage a small group at a Fortune 500 company where I would report to a director above me. Well, apparently the director quit and now I report to the next level up. And apparently, THAT individual is a total lunatic. She has fickle moods and berates her people for the same things she may have praised them for a week earlier. I have no one to provide any professional guidance to me other than the team of consultants and project leads who I am to manage (my superior is apparently NEVER to be disturbed). All of them seem nice and professional, however they have pretty much all indicated their unhappiness and desire to seek employment elsewhere.
Also, other than being thrust into organizaing a major meeting, I have pretty much been sitting on ass doing jack shit and not surfing the SDMB because it is blocked.
So clearly I have no interest in continuing in a position that I was lukewarm about accepting in the first place and is dramatically different from what was originally proposed to me.
Assuming we’re not talking about losers, but actual professionals, sure, a few, usually in circumstances like your own; things changed ater they arrived, and conditions sucked.
If your previous employment wasn’t short, it’s probably not something employers would balk at. Just tell them the truth; “It simply wasn’t a good fit for me.”
Just do what you need to. What is the alternative? You know me. If you can get a new job based on your past experience then the problem is solved and there is no downside. That is all there is to it. I interview people all the time at the professional level and some of them have had bad job experiences with short work history there and I don’t care. Lots of people have including me. I got fired after six weeks once for a company that basically tried to convince me that I knew nothing about really basic computer skills despite being and expert developer for 6 years. They were absolutely psycho too. I just leave it off my resume and there is no reason for anyone to care about that.
I quit a job after seven months because I gave them a promise when I started that if the major project that I had been hired to work on had not been started, I would not stay. At the six month mark, the begin date was four months out. That I had no problems with. Then they changed it to 16 months out and I decided that they had broken the conditions of my employment and I was honor bound to keep my pre-employment promise of departure. (However, some of the people there felt that I was betraying them by leaving so quickly.)
About four months after I left, the entire 120+ person division was layed off. No way I could see this as anything other than vindication of my decision.
I your case, I gotta agree with RickJay. Conditions have changed and it is no longer a good fit. No harm, no foul; just time to move on.
Although with my own experience as the caveat, that some people at the site might hold a grudge against you for doing so.
I quit my last job just a little over 90 days after I started. I had come from a highly respected company and joined a smaller company after I was recruited. I found out shortly that the new company had made some outrageous promises in exchange for a needed capital infusion. They spent a lot of the money on salaries for people with great resumes, and then hit them (us) with ridiculous expectations.
I knew I had to quit within 45 days. I told interviewers the exact truth - that I made a horrible mistake and needed to get out both for myself and for company X because I wasn’t going to do what they wanted. No one had a problem with it at all. I think they appreciated the candor.
I know this is a serious issue to you, but I wonder if I could risk a minor hijack here. I’ve often wondered in a situation like this - where you know you will be leaving soon because it’s awful - what if you were just totally honest about the problem and what needs to be done to fix it? Like go to the highest level people and tell how screwed up it is and what a lunatic this woman is. Again, I don’t mean to sound cavalier about your career, but if you know you’re leaving anyway, why not? Maybe there’s a 1 in 10 chance that someone is impressed and something good happens. And BTW, please don’t read this as rhetorical question, meaning this is what I’m advising (although I know it sounds like that). I literally mean I wonder… and why not? and would love to hear responses from people who have spent more time in big companies than I have.
Gee, thanks Shagnasty for reminding me of a two month gig I had completely erased from my memory.
Got hired to be the Manager of a development project. When I got on site, I found nearly 60 consultants, no organization whatsoever, and five other people who had been promised the same job. Then I had problems with my piece of shit consultant company owner, who put me on probation and threatened to fire me because I had the nerve to complain about the above lies and the fact that I’d been there a month and hadn’t been assigned any actual work.
That job has never appeared on any version of my resume.
The best Karmic Justice about that job was that, one year later, I got called by some guy who had been hired to completely rebuild the consulting firm because every single consultant had quit in the previous year. Just flabbergasted when I told him my story, but admitted that it wasn’t the only story like that he’d heard and that he was having severe doubts about being able to rescue the company given the reputation that the owner had established.
On my end, no one ever asked me about that two month gap in my resume.
Most jobs have a probationary period of about three months for new hires, I believe. It’s a kick you out or you quit on your own period, because you really don’t know what you’re getting on either side until you actually show up and start working. I wouldn’t think too much of it - I wouldn’t put it on my resume or talk about it in interviews, either. If anyone questions a gap in your resume, you were just looking for a good fit.
Sorry to hear it isn’t working out. I assume this was the job that you had serious doubts about to start with? Fingers crossed for a good one coming up soon.
A friend just had to do this. She joined a company’s accounting group and found it to be a complete mess. They never disclosed in the interview that her job was to help clean the mess. Nothing illegal, but it was nothing that she wanted her name attached to either if things did get worse.
I think if you can explain that the job you have is materially different from the one that was offered, you have a case. If you have a lot of job hopping on your resume, it probably doesn’t help you, but this is something you can explain away.
I have done this - after 30 days it was clear my boss and I were not a good match.
She wanted me to email a client, but wouldn’t tell me what about except in the vaguest terms. I’d draft up an email for her to review then she’d say that wasn’t at all what she wanted and to redo it. I suggested that perhaps for the first few weeks she could give me some appropriate wording which I could then tailor to my own wording. No, I had to ‘work it out myself’.
She sat right next to me in a small office and insisted on seeing every email I sent, and listened to every phone call I made and gave a running commentary of what I should be saying instead of what I said.
I used the distance of the job (which was another big factor) as my reason for resigning. I knew she was never going to change her ways, and she was extremely well regarded in the organisation so there was really no point in saying I didn’t think she was effective as I wouldn’t have been believed.
In college I quit a pizza delivery job the day after I started. The dispatcher was an abusive asshole. I called the next day and told them I wouldn’t be back.
I quit a job as an IT manager on the second day. They were a bunch of crooks - health & safety issues, pirated software, the works - and I didn’t want to carry the can.
I agree with everyone else - cut your losses and run. With less than 90 days there, you don’t even really have to worry about a gap in your resume.
I’ve spent way too much time in jobs where if I had let myself, I’d have known in the first month or two that it wasn’t going to work it. It rarely gets better. The first six months at a decent job are typically a honeymoon period - you should be LOVING the job at this point because it’s all new and exciting and you haven’t been there long enough to figure out all the politics and bad stuff.
I quit a TA position at a university because the prof was an abusive asshole. I lasted about two weeks.
Seems to me if this is an anomaly—according to the resume, you worked at one job five years, another for seven, this one for three years—it shows you aren’t flighty and shouldn’t count against you.
That said, don’t go from the fire to the frying pan. IANA HR person but back-to-back short stints would look more suspicious.
I wonder if this is going to be more common as jobs get harder to find, i.e. if it’s an employers’ market where they feel they can do whatever they want and employees will have to take it.
I quit the job from Hell after about a month. Go a whole month having to wolf down your meal and rushing home to go to sleep. You may be able to get 8 hours of sleep, if the trip to and from is fast and you can eat in less than 30 minutes. Have them add more work from somebody else that can’t keep up. Quit that day. To make the whole day unpleasant add in a venomous bitter woman secretary that called into headquarters multiple times daily to get people in trouble. Her ultimate goal was to get every worker there fired, and prove that she was indispensable while everybody else was incompetent. She even got headquarters to tell the manager he had to put the computer back where she wanted, right under the leaking ceiling. The computer had been there at one time and a $2,000 repair had to be made. The whole shipping terminal shut down without the computer. That shows how manipulative she was.
I had to recuperate for a month after quitting I was so run down. The manager quit a week after I left.
I quit a job at the end of my first day. I took it because I was desperate, even though I knew I was very underpaid for the work I was doing for them. But they put me to work in a stockroom, like with cinder block walls and metal shelving and storage and cardboard boxes. It was a miserable day, and thinking about doing that for several months or years was more than I could handle.
I told my boss the job wasn’t what I expected and it would be my last day. He was really pissed off, but whatever.
Oh, and the job was doing video and multimedia work, not stock room work. They were just out of offices and cubes, so they set me up with a computer in the stock room. It sucked.
Within the first 90 days is the best time to quit a job (if you have to quit). As others have said, there’s always a honeymoon/probationary period where you’re trying to determine whether it’s a good fit for you. One of my first jobs was so horrible that I knew within two weeks that I wanted to quit. I went home crying every night. Unfortunately, I was given some bad advice that I should just suck it up because that’s the way the world works. I finally quit after 8 months, and the only thing I regret is those extra 7 months of hell. If the job isn’t right, get out. It can only get worse, and make you miserable.
If the aggravation of doing a job is outweighed by the compensation you get , then that is the right time to quit, whether you’ve been there 10 minutes or 10 years. Provided of course, that you have a financial backup plan in the form of a new job or loads of money in the bank. I know lots of people who quit jobs soon after getting them. Heck, about 5 years ago, I changed jobs 4 times in one year, after about 4 months each. No psycho co-workers or anything, I just kept finding better jobs. I’m still at the last one. I doubt any potential employer would have a problem with it, especially considering that you are management. Managers are always getting picked off by headhunters or recruited through networking. Just call it “bad fit” or something.
The sysadmin at the company I’ve been working at for six weeks quit a week or two ago (she’d been there a week longer than me), because the company owner kept riding her ass. The straw was when he jumped on her case for clocking in (we’re all hourly) one *minute *late once. Didn’t matter that she was on a fifty hour schedule and still arrived 15 minutes early/stayed about 15 minutes over the rest of the time. One minute. He was always telling her how to do her job, complaining that certain things were taking too long (even though he knew nothing about them), and much, much more. She just couldn’t take it any more, and she knew if she stuck around she was going to blow up at him. (The previous sysadmin quit for the same reason and didn’t manage to hold back.)
Strangely, he’s never acted like that toward me. I’ve barely spoken to him at all.