How did you decide it was time to leave your job?

In My Humble Opinion
1

As of last week I’ve been at my job for a year, and it’s my first job after completing my masters in social work. My agency is a great place to learn and comes with a strong reputation, but my position is one that people don’t stay in for longer than 2 years…part of the reason being the agency does not pay well. So when I started here, I knew it had an expiration date.

My coworker and I were discussing when we thought we would leave. I’ve figured I would probably look to leave around the 18 month mark. I like my job, I work with some truly great people and I’ve got a great relationship with just about everyone there, especially the people with whom I work the closest. I’ve also made some good connections with people at other agencies who send referrals to me (I think it’s funny I’ve got favorite CPS workers and probation officers). I could do without my immediate supervisor half the time, though. All that aside, I’m starting to feel like I’ve learned all I can here. On the other hand, maybe it’s that I’ve really hit my stride and feel comfortable. Either way, I don’t necessarily feel *ready *to leave.

Other than the calendar, I’m not sure what will make me decide it’s time to go. I’m looking for how you knew it was time for you to move on, or perhaps signs I should be looking for that my time has come. Thanks in advance!

2

I decided it was time when I learned that I was passed over for a promotion - yesterday :frowning:

3

"You no make sushi. You stupid white boy. Need somebody to wipe butt? "

I’m not making a bad accent; that’s verbatim. After hearing that for the 10th time, I called it quits.

The full thread with all the tears and laughter can be found here

4

I lived in Vacaville Ca and the company wanted to send me to San Jose.I didn’t want to commute some 90-100 mi each way.So I came back to Alaska to work.My commute is round 5min here, and the scenery in the summer is breath taking :smiley:

Oh BTW I return to Ca in the fall.

5

I was at my last full-time job for 12 years, and decided to move on when it appeared that my new boss thought he needed to clean house. I didn’t want to be let go, so I quit, even though it meant I missed out on a severance package and was ineligible for unemployment. (The SOB called me saying he refused to accept my resignation, asking me to come back, and then said “You’ll miss out on a severance package.” WTF?)

That’s not at all like your situation though.

Are you bored? It doesn’t sound like it. Are you okay financially? You say the agency doesn’t pay well but you don’t say you need more money.

Like you said, you’re comfortable. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Altruistic hat ON: It sounds like you’re probably doing good work and helping people. Even though you’ve learned all you can, you can probably be an example for others.

Is it possible that high turnover is part of the reason the agency can’t pay better? Are they always recruiting, training new people?

But I’ve never been particularly ambitious and I don’t have a degree, so it’s been easier for me – I can justify working at something that isn’t particularly challenging.

Congenial surroundings and a sense of accomplishment, knowing that people appreciated me, were more important than title or salary. Of course that’s easy to say now, since I was grossly overpaid at that last job. :slight_smile:

6

I left my last job after 3 years because:

  1. My last boss got very upset by laughter – when some of us would burst into laughter for one reason or another, she would come storming out of her office saying something like, “There’s entirely too much levity around here.” – and she meant it. The first time she did it we all started laughing at her “joke”, until it became clear that it wasn’t.
  2. I knew my position in the company was going to disappear in another year or so, and I had applied for two other positions within my own department, and didn’t get them. It became very clear to me that there was not a happy future ahead for me there.
7

I left my last job when it became clear that the company’s goals and my goals were fundamentally different. I wanted to be part of a hip, fast-moving, cutting-edge software company where the main focus was producing a high-quality product. The Ones In Charge, however, were more interested in creating a facade in order to get as much money from the non-profit that owned the company as possible. In that way, you get a software company that doesn’t employ any actual software engineers. :rolleyes:

8

[Chris Knight]Who talks like that?[/CK]

I knew it was time when the insurance corporation I was working for decided that it was time for me to stop fixing their computers and maintaining their network and start analyzing insurance. I was torn between becoming Linty the insurance analyst or Linty the . . . well, pretty much anything else in the universe, because life’s just too short for some paths.

OK, maybe “torn” is an overstatement . . .

9

Does getting fired count?

10

My first gig out of school was at a big engineering firm downtown. There were many pluses and minuses. I decided to leave when the minuses began to outweigh the pluses. The biggest reason was the commute - I hated fighting the traffic to and from work, and as a mom with young kids I didn’t like being 30 minutes away from their school.

I went to work at the City, thinking that would be a great fit for me (took a $3k cut in salary too). However I soon discovered that unique frustration which being a government engineer entails - being mandated to pursue projects with little or no benefit, while seeing worthwhile and much needed projects kicked to the curb. So I did my 4 years (retirement program mandate) and left to start my own biz.

Turned out to be a good thing, because I ended up marrying one of the City guys I worked with, and the City has a policy that no two relatives can be concurrently employed. :rolleyes:

11

My last employer put me through graduate school, so I knew it was time to leave them when I had my library degree.

My last position was doing tech support for the library. I knew it was time to leave that when a librarian position opened up at a branch I wanted to work at.

I’ll know it’s time to leave my current job when a cataloging position becomes available, I get published, or I wake up dead, whichever comes first.

12

I knew it was time to leave my last job when my boss called me at home at 9:00 pm on my birthday, which was also my regularly scheduled day off, to ask me where I had put the rubbing alcohol. I had been screening my calls for some time before that, since she had a tendency to call me at home for bullshit reasons, but this was the last straw.

13

My Last IT Position;

I was burned out and stressed out. I was also in a seriously bad place in life where I hated myself, my life, the entire world.

The company was in constant layoff mode, reducing staff on a monthly basis, each month proclaiming the end of layoffs, inevitably followed by more the next month. Consequently, people were in panic mode and the majority of the management and senior people in my area firmly believed the only way to NOT be laid off was to work 70+ hours per week to prove your loyalty and value to the company. (I note that it did not save them from the axe like they so firmly believed. The guy they sent to tell me this was laid off less than a week afterward.)

I was Project Leader on two major projects and part-time on a third.

Then I suffered a major, stress related, life changing back injury right about the time of my birthday. The week after, I worked only 35 hours, because I had three chiropractor appointments, a Neurologist appointment and an MRI.

I was told that I would not be allowed to go to the doctor anymore. Just straight out. I responded that this was illegal and they couldn’t stop me from doing so.

I was called to work on the 4th of July. I left at 5:30pm, telling my co-workers that I was leaving for a date with my future wife. The next day I was disciplined for “leaving without telling anyone”. My boss declared that he had wanted me to remain until a job completed at 1:30am in order to monitor it. Bullshit.

I was then given a written notice, ostensibly for something that had happened a month before. They blew up a minor incident to something major, just to have something to nail me for. Even the other party said that they were exaggerating what had happened and that they were unreasonable.

I was also told that I would be required to work every single day, weekends and holidays included, through the end of the year. I asked for it in writing and got a very vague “you will work every day required” statement.

So I gave a month’s notice and left.

If there is any Justice in the Universe, Karmic or otherwise, I have invoked it on all of these expletives. Just the worst forms of Humanity and I hope they pay in blood for it.
My current job; I knew it was time to start looking when I saw what my co-workers were getting away with and how far management was willing to go to keep themselves blind to it. The people who need the most direct supervision are deliberately kept in the positions with the least amount of supervision.

Reports of their activities are dismissed as “hearsay”.

14

I left my previous one in 2004. To clarify: I was working on two college campuses at the time; the one I left was where I had been working for a much longer time than at the second one.
Long story made very short: I could not come up with a single reason to remain at Campus A, where I was nothing short of miserable. Campus B beckoned for the long term, and that was that.
I actually left on good terms, door still open and all that, but I have no wish to go back to A.

15

I spent the last three years building a new line of business for the company and making a huge pile of money. When it was time to spin it off into a new division, I was excluded from running it because the President wanted to give the job to a personal friend. Seeya.

16

I am in the moving process - literally - between one job and another.

The job I left was my first after finishing my master’s in library science. It was a great first job for someone like me - with a little library experience, coming from a completely different career.

I started looking around the 18 month mark, but probably sent my first resume for another job a couple of months later, with my first interview elsewhere late last summer.

The new job is an excellent career move - some place that I can hopefully see myself being for a longer period of time. Not that I’ll ever really stop looking - I feel like my field is one where I have to pay attention to the job ads, in part so I know where I need to update my skills.
ETA: Answer the question, why don’t I?

I knew it was time to leave when an excellent position came open in a part of the country that I want to be in - it fit my skills, was going to offer serious opportunity for career growth and just seemed right somehow. I admit that part of me wishes I didn’t have to leave the old job to get the benefits of the new - leaving was hard - probably the most difficutly leaving of a job I’ve ever had to do.

17

I’ve found that you usually know when it’s time to go - some circumstance or event will happen, and it’s just obvious that the job is not right for you, or the company is taking advantage of you, or you’re wasting your time there. If you’re not there yet, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I left my last job before I would be forced to cover the entire office again for my supervisor’s vacation (which I was expected to do for a very low rate of pay). You can have one or the other - you can have my work for a low rate of pay, and a low rate of responsibilities and stress, or you can ramp up my responsibilities, but the pay has to keep pace. They wanted it all for nothing, and with 11 years of experience in this field, my time is worth more than that.

18

Let’s see…

The last job, I knew it was time when my team manager said he couldn’t assign me extra work because it wasn’t fair to the people who were too shy to volunteer for extra work. I figured I’d stay through the end of the summer. I got laid off with about half the corporate staff instead. I got a pretty nice severence package out of it.

The job before that? I decided to quit after a student assaulted me and the principal only gave her a suspension.

19

I knew it was time to leave when I realised the job I had ended up doing after so long at the company was not at all what I had expected when I began. It somehow ended up being completely different to what I thought it was going to be, and then I realised that I didn’t like being there anymore. So I left.

I’m currently taking an extended amount of time off, to concentrate on going into a totally new career, and I do not regret the change one bit.

20

I was selling cell phones and cell phone service. I never cared about phones. As a matter of fact, I would say I actually outright disliked them. But my brother made the job selling them sound easy and profitable, so he put in a good word for me with a manager at another location and I got in. I figured the more I learned about phones, the more interested in them I’d be.

I was wrong. I learned plenty of great things about myself, bucked my social anxiety, and picked up a lot of skills, but I grew to dislike phones even more than I had before. I understood and appreciated that people needed them, but a big part of my job was to sell phones and some high end phone services even when people didn’t need them. Or want them. And on a personal level, I didn’t want them to want or think they needed to pay an extra $25 a month so they could watch TV on their phones. I decided it was time to leave my job when I was at a prime place to close a sale…and I’d stop talking, take a step back, and let the customers attention flounder away.

Bleh.