I just gave notice yesterday leaving my current professional position for another one in three weeks. The new job is for a lot more pay (20+%) and slightly fewer working hours. Similar work, same city.
But damn, I feel crappy. My bosses at my current company taught me almost everything I know, and basically begged me to stay when I told them I was leaving (including a raised salary). So my heart feels pretty awful, but my head says the new job is still better–and obviously they wouldn’t be offering a raise if I wasn’t leaving.
Anyway, is this normal? What’s your experience? Tell me what you think, or how you felt leaving a very good job for something else.
Consider this; if the company you were working for was struggling to make their profit targets, would they hesitate to cut you if they thought they could do without your skills? (That’s a rhetorical question: the answer is no.)
You’ve been honest and straightforward with them, haven’t just used it as an opportunity to extort a salary increase from them, have given more than the standard two week of notice, and are (presumably) doing your level best to tie up project and hand them off. This is every damn thing you owe any company and nothing more.
Now, if your guilt is over “betraying” your boss on a personal level, that’s in your own conscious. But you have to look out for yourself first and foremost because that isn’t anyone else’s job.
“A person that don’t look out for himself is too dumb to look out for anybody else. He’s a liability, right, Bobo?” – Jim Thompson, The Grifters
I resigned a position in an urban location, where my employer demanded 24/7 availability.
This caused no disruption to my nocturnal REM cycles while I considered alternative resolutions.
In late 2000, I resigned from a good job at a well-known mutual fund company to move to Ohio to marry my wife. I really liked my job, my boss, my co-workers and the company. At the time, my bride-to-be’s twin sons were sophomores in high school, and moving them to Maryland was out of the question. When I resigned, my boss actually had tears in his eyes. It was really hard to leave that job and move.
The job I moved to was with a consulting firm. I got a pretty good raise, but I really didn’t want to do consulting. It was just the easiest entry into a new job market for me.
Within a year, my old boss and most of my old team got laid off, and I got hired as an employee by the first company I consulted at. I’m still there.
I think your response – a little guilt for leaving, probably some sadness, too – is perfectly normal. You appreciate the bosses you worked for because that they taught you so much, you mostly enjoyed working for them, and view them (a little) as friends. But you also wanted/needed more money and to work less hours. In my experience, it’s always easier to leave a job that you hated because you hated the work and/or the people. Clearly, not the situation here. So mixed feelings seem appropriate.
To mitgate those, I would make an effort to express to your soon-to-be former bosses how much you appreciate what they taught you, that you’d like to stay connected to them professionally (makes sense since you’re still in the same line of work), and wish them and their company the very best.
On the simplest level, the situation is this: They hired you to do a job, taught you how to do it well, which you did, and they paid you accordingly. You have both fulfilled your respective sides of the agreement. You have every right to do what is best for you. No need to feel guilty for doing that.
And you never know what will happen in the future; they may be coming to you looking for a job, and you’ll have both an established working relationship and an intimate knowledge of their capabilities. This has happened to me several times already.
Also, since they had a pile of cash that they could have been paying you, and which they hadn’t, let that be your gift to them for teaching you almost everything that you know, in this field.
I left under similar circumstances. More money, more responsibility - but the job I had was wonderful, liked my boss could have stayed forever. I felt like I’d been there long enough.
I wish I could say the new job worked out. Although they loved me, I didn’t love them and when my husband took a job with more travel and longer hours, I “retired” to be home for our kids. If I’d stayed with the old company, I probably would have also “retired” to be home with the kids, its just needed right now with as much as he works.
I moved from Alaska, and a job I LOVED for a chance to see what it was like to live in the States. I still miss it, and it was terribly hard to leave it. I’ve learned a lot, and really like Colorado (though I wasn’t crazy about my first assignment in Washington state), but if I had the choice to do it again? I’m not sure if I would, even knowing then what I know now and all that.
The new job is okay, but unlike you, I took a pretty big cut in pay, and also had to give up my second job, (which I also loved). This is the first time in the last 20 years I haven’t worked two jobs, so the extra time is nice, but I miss the pay!
I guess the bottom line is that I would have always wondered what it would have been like to live in the lower 48 if I hadn’t done this. But at some point, I’ll probably go home, 9 months of snow and all.
You wanted experiences…here’s mine, it wasn’t good and hasn’t ended well. I left a job that I loved working for people I loved because of the travel time and a smallish raise. The company I left was going thru a tough financial time and couldn’t match what the new company was offering, so I went. I cried all the way home the last day.
I got to the new job and it was nothing like I was promised. The owners were dishonest and I stuck it out for almost exactly a year before we decided mutually to part ways. I thought I’d get another job in a minute. Boy was I wrong. Now I’ve been unemployed for the last 3 months for the first time in my life. My depression and anxiety have me almost housebound and I have no medical insurance to get the meds I need to help me. I would give anything to take my old job back.
Even under the best of circumstances, leaving a job for a new one can be stressful. You are leaving the familiar for the unknown. You probably have relationships or even friends at your old job. Leaving that can also be difficult. You have to learn a new job with new people, rules and culture.
This breaks my heart. I’m so sorry for your hardship. Please contact the pharmaceutical company that makes your meds. I have heard that they have programs to help people in your situation. Have no idea if it’s true, but it’s worth a phone call. I’ll be thinking of you.
It also reminds me of something I haven’t thought about in years (with good reason). When I was a child, my father left a company he’d been with for many years because he felt he’d risen as far as he could and wanted more income and professional challenge. Took a promising job that required moving the family from the only home my brother and I had known and which everyone in the family loved. Two months later, the new company filed bankruptcy and my 53-year-old father, with no college degree and two kids under 10, was out of work. For 13 months. He finally was hired by an excellent firm (the Los Angeles Times, no less) and stayed with them until retirement. But he was never the same person. The experience changed him in ways that effected everyone in the family. I know now that this is just what happens in Life, but a part of me, forever eight years old, still misses the father I had before what my brother and I call “The Chatsworth fiasco.”
I left one of the best jobs of my life because the work had become cyclical and routine and there was little on the horizon to show any coming change. I left behind a perfectly adequate salary, insurance, a former GF who was still great fun to share a workday with and several friends for a 50% salary bump and the chance to head and build a much larger department. I still miss that job… however, the company downsized a year after I left and folded two years later, so I don’t regret the move.
The job I went to sucked - the kind of place that expected 10+ hour days and more than 5 of them a week and got it from the vast crew of new engineering grads who were still living in their college apartments; those of us with families who didn’t live a block away were really under the gun for only working 9 hour days and not coming in more than one weekend a month. They eventually ran me out on bogus charges of wasting computer time.
I moved across (that little) town to another tech place that would have driven Dilbert insane, and after four months of irresolvable faction fights, 20yo accounting clerks who controlled my critical vendor spending options and employees I could neither wake up nor fire, I walked out on 10 minutes notice.
That was late 2000. Tech sank virtually days after I walked out… and I was safe on the shore. I went on to a MUCH more satisfying career, mostly self-employed when I wasn’t flying around the country as a magazine editor.
So yeah, sometimes we do leave good jobs… but if you’re careful about it, it always has a chance to be the right move.
I left a job I was enjoying a great deal because I got an offer to work in China.
It’s great being in China, and I guess if I didn’t take it I’d have regretted it, but the job itself is definitely a step down.
It’s only now I can really appreciate just how efficient my last team was, and how good a rapport we had.
My new team certainly works hard, but they have a knack of creating problems and unnecessary work for themselves. But they don’t take kindly to people pointing this out, which is probably why such inefficiencies persist.
Years ago I worked at a nice company, good people, great bennies and enviroment, but my pay was so-so. Expectations were a modest bump every year. My immediate boss was a good man, but it would have been 20 years before he ever left and I would have moved up. I would have eventually clawed my heart out out from boredom. I was offered a job out of the blue to be a tech rep in the same field as a consultant. The starting pay and the offer of something new was too good to pass up. So I gave my immediate boss my 2 weeks notice, he went up front and within 2 minutes I got called to the General Managers office. I had in the few days before quietly removed all my personal effects antipicating being shown the door on the spot. It happened a few times before to others.
The GM that day was sick as a dog and really should have been home in bed. He thanked me for everything I’d done for the company in the last few years and dragged himself around the desk to shake my hand. He then thanked me for not screwing around and saying, if you pay me X, I’ll stay, and he didn’t insult me by offering either. Asked me to stay the 2 weeks and help interview for a replacement.
That company had 2 bars nearby that on friday evenings you could find a handful of people in one or the other (or both) having a couple of beers before going home. I was single and one of the younger guys and no secret as a regular. That 2 weeks later, my last day, I was blown away that a ton of people who normally didn’t stop, did to say goodbye. That same GM was there and called the other bar to yell at them to tell them to come over too for the goodbye.
I damn near cried all the way home.
That leap of faith years later gave me the courage to do it again into my current job. Went from a multi-million a year nation wide company into a 2 man partnership with my best friend into what was his Grandfathers buisness. My income has cratered but my quality of life is through the roof.
I still miss the first company, but change is good, sounds trite, but leaving on your own terms and not being thrown out on your ass is priceless.
About a year ago, I left a good job (decent salary, good benefits, generous 401k match and profit sharing) of 17 years to go into business for myself. Leaving was tough… I was giving up a tremendous amount of job security, not to mention all the relationships I had built up over the years. That company paid for my bachelor’s degree through tuition reimbursement. I truly cared for my coworkers and they for me. I had great insurance coverage. I was betting on the idea that I could be even more successful out on my own. Due to some strange internal politics and bureaucracy (there was no way to make the leap from my current job to the next level, i.e my bosses job, without leaving that department and getting more experience from another department), I felt that I had achieved about the highest level I could with this company, and so was facing another 20 years or so of the same job with maybe 2-3% raises each year.
There are some days when I believe that I’ve made a horrible mistake… but mostly its been O.K.
I once worked for a Silicon Valley firm that, in hindsight, was special. Co-workers were hard-working and talented. Camaraderie was so high that “alumni” parties were frequent where past and present employees met for cocktails. I had learned very much at that job; my salary had doubled in a few years (though I was still underpaid ). I was ready for a raise and/or a break, was too shy to ask for the raise, so resigned! :smack: A few weeks later, thinking an income might be nice, I accepted a job offer at a 30% salary hike.
I almost immediately knew this new job was a mistake. The talented engineers had left; my immediate supervisor was a lewd nincompoop; his supervisor was addicted to some kind of pills and liquor; the contrast with the old job was stark. The old company offered to match the 30% raise but, stupidly, I turned them down, thinking such a double-switch to be “immoral” or something. I never found another company with the special cooperative atmosphere and joyful camaraderie of that first company.
That company had hundreds of employees and was somewhat historic, yet has very few Google hits. I won’t name it – that might lead to the discovery that Septimus G. Stevens is not my real name.
… Two decades later I made a much bigger mistake: not leaving a company when I should have.
Those sort of “high camaraderie” jobs are common in the tech industry. Many of them are created with a cult-like mentality by design. It keeps people working extremely hard because they feel connected with work and not much else. Most likely after a certain point in your life (typically a few years out of college) you are not going to give a shit about being best pals with your coworkers because you should have developed interests and relationship outside of your workplace.
Even if you stay at a company forever, it may not stay the perfect company forever. I worked at a similar environment where we had a large close-knit group of coworkers. I’m actually still close friends with a lot of them, even though most of us no longer work there. But from what I can tell from people who still work there, it’s actually kind of horrible. Or maybe it was always horrible, but we just had a really good group. Either way, the company you love now may not be the company you love in 5 years. Especially if it’s a Silicon Valley tech startup.
