I’ve always wondered about that - I don’t want to burn bridges, but if I’m leaving a job anyway, I’ve often thought I should tell them flat out what’s wrong with their company. No one ever asks me, though.
This is not about a “career” type job, so it’s not as important.
I took a job because the employment agency person really pushed it. I went to work the first day. On the way out at the end of the day I stopped in the bathroom and threw up. I hated it that much. I went home and called in sick the next day. Day three–I went in and quit.
It was really stupid. But that’s what happened.
I didn’t call the employment agency and they didn’t call me. The person’s name was Nina. With a long “I.” What a dumb name. Like 9 with an “a” on the end
When I had gone on one interview (before–for another job), Nina wanted me to send the person who interviewed me a telegram telling them how much I wanted the job. A telegram? I actually went as far as looking up Western Union in the phone book before stopping myself. I am not a telegram-sender for such a stupid reason. This was in 1985–awhile ago, yes, but have you ever heard of sending a telegram to say “thanks for the great interview!”
[I have had to edit this FOUR times to correct spelling.]
“Seconds count, buddy. Ditch the bitch.”
Stranger
Nah, they’re like the guys in the cages in that old Bruce Lee movie (or the parodies thereof).
1> They know, and don’t care
2> They know, and they do care, but they can’t do anything about it.
3> They don’t know and they don’t care
4> They don’t know and they care, but aren’t going to listen to YOU.
Probably the single biggest WTF for me about people in management is how they can tune out the truth from people simply because those people are not at a level that they think they need to listen to. And even after the Truth comes around and bitchslaps them upside the head, they’d sooner punish you for being ‘out of line’ or ‘insubordinate’ than admit that someone beneath their position was right about something when they were wrong.
I quit a job a couple years ago after only five weeks, and without having another job lined up. Fortunately, I was able to claim unemployment on my previous job, where my job was eliminated.
What happened? Basically, in my then-23 years in my field — restaurants — I’d never worked for such an idiot. The owner of the place had, in my opinion, absolutely no business running a restaurant. He had been a successful orchardist for years, and he was delusional enough to think that qualified him to run a restaurant.
I knew something was wrong when I found out that all of his food suppliers required him to pay cash when they delivered stuff, because he’d bounced too many checks to them. Then another employee warned me to get to the bank as quickly as possible on payday to make sure I got my money before paychecks started bouncing (I was fortunate in that regard - none of my checks bounced).
I got the job via the bartender who worked the morning shift with me at my previous job - her job was eliminated at the same time as mine when that restaurant decided to stop serving breakfast. She was hired at this other place, and recommended me as a breakfast cook. She told me that she made it clear to the new boss that I was a breakfast cook, not a dinner cook, and I made that clear as well when I interviewed. I was told that would be fine. (I can cook dinner, of course, as long as I’m, properly trained on the menu. I just don’t like it.) Within a couple weeks, they were wanting me to cook items from the dinner menu for weirdos who came in during the breakfast hours and wanted steak & lobster. Um, sorry, I have very little seafood experience, and no lobster experience. And they wanted me to cook this on the fly. During breakfast. I don’t think so.
Two weeks after this bartender and I were hired to work mornings (7:00 - 3:00), the owner told the bartender that he was switching her to the 10:00 - 6:00 shift. She said, “No, I don’t think so,” and quit. Unfortunately, she was my ride to work since I didn’t have a car or DL at the time, and the location of this restaurant make biking unfeaseable. So the boss told me not to worry, he’d arrange a new ride for me. Then he promptly forgot, leaving me waiting at home the next day for a ride that didn’t show up.
The night cooks at this restaurant were a pair of Mexican men. One day I overheard the boss openly refer to them as “My Mexicans” (as in “What time do my Mexicans get here?”) Oh goody, he’s a racist, too.
After about three weeks, he changed my shift from 7:00 - 3:00 to 8:00 - 4:00, which completely screwed up my ability to catch a bus home. Getting off at 3:00 had allowed me about 15 minutes to walk to the nearest bus stop and catch a bus. Due to the way the bus schedule worked, getting off at 4:00 meant waiting around for another 45 minutes. I didn’t like that at all, since this was the middle of winter and it was full dark by the time I got home. My lack of a car was a primary reason I preferred early morning shifts: I liked getting off work while there was still some daylight to get things done in.
Meanwhile, the boss had been complaining that we weren’t getting enough breakfast business. Well no wonder: he was opening at 9:00, while every other place in town that served breakfast opened no later that 6:00. By the time we opened, everybody who wanted to go out to breakfast had already done so - someplace else.
That led to him deciding that we weren’t going to open for breakfast any more. Except he didn’t bother to tell me about this. The first I learned of it was when I checked my schedule for the following week. After five weeks of 40 hours each, I saw I was scheduled for four days, four hours each (10:00 - 2:00), for a total of 16 hours. That’s when I decided that the job had deviated far enough from the job I was hired to do. I didn’t even bother to give notice - I just didn’t show up the next week. Screw 'em.
Shortly before I quit, I discovered the guy hadn’t paid any of his taxes for that year, either. About five months later, the place was shut down. The really sad part was that he wasn’t even spending his own money on the place. He had an older sister, a sweet old lady who happened to be loaded. She naively thought her “little brother” could do no wrong. She kept giving him all the money he asked for, and he spent more than half a million dollars of her money on the place before it went under.
This is one of the reasons I’m so tired of the restaurant business and am starting to look for a new field. “Local restaurants” (as in the non-chain variety) used to be owned by people who worked in restaurants for years, saved up their money, and bought their own place. Now they’re owned by people who made their money in some other field and decided it would be cool to own a restaurant. Compared to my 25 years in the business, many of these people are, frankly, noobs. And yet, none of them are ever the tiniest bit interested in any advice I might be able to give them. Things like, “Um, this new idea of yours? I’ve seen it tried a dozen times, and it’s never worked in this town.” Or, “If you keep doing [dumb idea A], then [bad thing B] is going to happen.” And they continue to do ‘A’, and of course ‘B’ happens. But you know, they’re the boss, which automatically means they know more than a mere employee :rolleyes:
About 20 years ago, the job I had been in for about four years was getting kind of stale. Although it was at a great place (the most popular museum in the world!), I was not working the in field that I considered as my “real” career. Also, management had must decided not to approve a major project that I would have been interested in heading. So I started looking for a new job.
I soon found something that was 1) on my preferred career path, 2) in my home town, and 3) working for someone I had known in earlier in my working career and whom I thought had a good reputation.
After a very strange interview process (before a hiring committee, answer these 10 questions, speaking for exactly 30 minutes), I was offered the job. The first warning sign was finding out that that although I had stated my minimum salary requirement, and had been told I would get it, my place the organization’s pay structures put me a couple thousand below that number. When I mentioned this discrepancy, one of my superiors explained, “Well, I assumed you knew that I would do something to get you to that number.” WTF? Why and how would I assume that? But that turned out to be the least of my problems.
Another signal I should have taken more seriously was the fact that three or four other people had left this position within the previous couple of years.
It shortly became clear that my immediate superior was a complete asshole. He constantly questioned my ability and undermined my authority with the people I was nominally supervising. It was the most unpleasant six weeks of my professional career up to that point.
At the same time, I learned that my bosses at the old job had decided to go ahead with that big project I wanted to do. So I persuaded my old boss to give me my job back and gave notice to the new one.
In an exit interview, my new boss’s boss asked me (rather pointedly I thought) if there was anything I wanted to tell him about my reasons for leaving. Perhaps thinking that I didn’t want to burn bridges, I said no. I probably should have explained what an asshole my boss was, but I think the turnover in the position should have given them a clue.
It was the right thing to do, and I never regretted it. Life’s too short to work for assholes. That job has never appeared on my résumé. And I never went back to that career path.
I think those are the two biggies.
I’ve been a temp for 13 years now, working for umpteen different companies in different industries - I have a very unique perspective on what works and what doesn’t because I’ve seen more of the spectrum than most people, but you’re absolutely right - no one wants to hear it from me.
I’ve done it a couple times. The first time was in a consulting team with incidents like these:
- coworker is feeling ill, asks another one to take him to the hospital. The boss yells at them, calling the sick guy a wuss and a sissy. When the “cabbie” comes back with news that sick-one has been hospitalized with gastrenteritis, boss claims he’s just faking it, the damn fairy.
- big soccer match day. All morning and until 5pm (match time) the majority of male consultants spend their time prancing around the room and singing loudly, led by the boss. When the lead programmer asks them to cut it out, they laugh at him and tell him to suck it up.
- lead programmer is going to stay until late to do some work for me. He’s told me he won’t have anything for me to do until the next day. He has my cell, in case of questions (boss doesn’t have it, I’m nice but not that stupid). Boss makes me and my junior stay, although lead programmer says it’s for nothing. So we are there from 9pm (when the rest of the team leaves) until 3am, listening to our mp3’s and reading discarded newspapers while the programmer works. Well, except for when we go get dinner: chinese rather than pizza (the pizza place delivers to where we are but the chinese doesn’t go into industrial zones).
Next day I’m so tired the letters swim on the screen, so I need to leave. Boss yells at me “if you leave don’t come back.” I stare at him and say “ok.” I leave.
And he was terribly surprised when he got my resignation letter. First he claimed I “can’t leave us high and dry!,” then when I refused to stay… he fired me, which in Spain means full bennies, as opposed to zero bennies if you quit
The second time, I left when I realized the boss had gone to kindergarten with Mr “In Russia, Resignation Hands YOU In!”
That first project is still ongoing 4 years later. It’s become legendary, so having been able to withstand it for 10 weeks (and getting kudos from the customer) is actually a positive in my history, as weird as it sounds.
Here’s a bit more background:
I spent about 4-5 years at my last job, a boutique management consulting company where I eventually reached a management position. The culture there was basically similar to a fraternity house. Long hours. Constant need to respond to every assholes Blackberry message. Lots of parties, happy hours, expensed dinners and lunches. Piss poor reactionary management by a bunch of 20-somethings who missed the dot-coms, immature unprofessional kids making money for the first time blowing it on strip clubs and booze like they think they’re in Boiler Room. Now don’t get me wrong. I like the partying and comraderie. But the place was excrutiatingly frustrating and my SO said I was pissed off and angry ALL the time.
My new job, I am HOME by 6pm every night. Don’t get me wrong, it’s boring as fuck working with mostly middle aged people, but at least no one really bothers me and my day is short. And clearly my tolerance for dealing with assholes is much higher after having worked in post-MBA lunatic asylums for years. The head of the group snapped at us while we were preping for a meeting and eveyone else was all worked up for like a week. I’m like “Are you kidding? I need to be yelled at by at least 5 assholes including 2 attorneys, an imbecile and a few senior level douchebags who have nothing to do with my project and just want to toss theur $0.02 in before I lose any sleep.”
And some headhunters have been calling with consulting jobs but I’m not really thinking I’m in much of a hurry to get back into that bullshit.
So basically, it’s like I just broke up with a kind hot and exciting but out of her mind crazy chick and now I’m bored because I’m dating the plain girl with a pool in her backyard.
Well your last post seems exactly opposite of your OP. I thought you wanted to quit because this woman was psycho? I guess I am confused by the differences in your two posts.
People shouldn’t work for anyone who is psycho–find another job. If the job doesn’t challenge you and you want that challenge–find another job.
I have worked in boring offices–it is a slow death, but it is mainly painless. Each day a little of you gets drained and before you know it you hate your life. But I have also worked in wild offices and it is also draining in its own way.
To me it sounds like you in the long term will be bored in this office. Use this place as a safe place to spring forward and search for what you want. Find a job that has a little of both of these qualities, sounds like you have been hanging at the extremes. In other words find a quality woman to date who is a dynamo in bed! 
5> Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. (They do know, they do care. They Won’t do anything about it)
As long as the problem hasn’t yet bitten them, senior execs don’t like to stick their necks out. I walked off a job after a few weeks, where my role was to find out what was going wrong, report it and correct it. I did so (a very basic issue), and got a response that was so utterly naive, it was breathtaking. It was pretty obvious it was impossible to perform the role because senior management utterly refused to fix the problem, so I left.
The issue? The project team, who had already failed to deliver the project several times previously, was made up entirely of long time employees who would be made redundant if the project succeeded. I was assured that the team would in no way be letting this impact their performance…
I miss it off my CV entirely, and no one’s commented so far.
I got out of a job one at about the 90 day mark. It was a good decision, even though I didn’t have another job lined up.
When you nearly get in a car crash on the way to work and your first thought is, “Wow, I wish I got an injury so I could go to the hospital and miss some work”, it’s time to go.
If you’re going to go, go now. Leaving one job in a short amount of time isn’t bad; everyone realizes that there are impossible jobs out there. It’s only if you leave every job quick that it’s a problem.
Congratulations on making that hard decision. Lack of another job is usually the biggest stumbling block for people to quit jobs that are destroying them, which is a vicious circle when they’re not getting another job because of the bad job’s effects on their self-esteem.
One of the big things for me with the a-hole who ran the consulting firm (above) was that I got into a very minor car accident. The back end of an empty semi-trailer ran over the hood of my car. Dented up the car but didn’t do any real damage - I was able to drive away and didn’t need anything other than body work.
But when I met with that piece of shit, he sat on the same side of a long conference table, about 8’ from me, and without every looking directly at me, went on a long rant about how there must be something seriously wrong with me as a human being, because bad things like that only happened to people who deserved it.
:eek:
Only person I’ve ever wished cancer upon, strictly as a lesson in compassion.
Ha!
In college I worked at a pizza place. Worked the first day for 12 hours, no food, no break, if you wanted a soda you paid for it. They also made me buy a hat to wear with their logo on it (it was their attempt at a “uniform”). I came from a restaurant background where I was making double what this place started me at, and I had 4 years experience at that time. I went back the next day and told one of the owners I quit. The other came in and said, “Y’know, I was thinking about it, and I’d like to give you the extra .50/hour you asked for when we hired you.” The other owner said, “don’t bother, he just quit.”
I went back to my dorm, grabbed some lighter fluid, and set the hat on fire. Good times.
thank Og I don’t do that for a living anymore.
When I found myself without a job in 1993, I signed up with Manpower. They gave me a battery of tests: reading and writing skills, math skills, computer skills, manual skills. I scored pretty high in all of them. Then they sent me to a $6/hour job making cardboard boxes: dirty, potentially dangerous, standing on a concrete floor all day, and requiring none of the skills I’d been tested for.
I walked out after four hours and called Manpower. The 21-year-old girl who’d signed me up told me she was disappointed in me, and that they couldn’t use me anymore. I think I literally saw red for a second, and said, “You don’t understand the situation. Your company has failed to live up to my minimum standards for a contractual partnership, so I’m letting you go.”
Everybody should quit at least one job. Very next day, I went to another agency and within two days started making a lot more, sitting in a comfortable office at a computer.
Mostly I want to quit because the job is a) boring b) in a crappy location and c) apparently the VP is out of her mind. Might as well throw in d) it’s not what I want to do but since I don’t actually know what I want to do, I’m not counting it. Not so much that I want to quit. I just don’t give a shit but I ike getting out of work at 5 for a change.
I’m finding that I have very little reaction with the psycho woman, other than I meeting I organize once every two weeks. Plus, I’m happy to just have to deal with just one psycho instead of a dozen.
I think right now I think the combination of not knowing what I want to do and not wanting to jump right back into a psychotic consulting environment of working 14 hour days will keep me here at least for the summer.
I did the same thing when I was in college about that time. If you were in Connecticut, there might even be a chance that we worked at the same box factory for Manpower. They neglected to tell me to bring gloves as I would be stuffing razor sharp cardboard scraps into a compactor. I lasted about a week.
Well it sounds like a good job to pay the bills on over the summer and give you a chance to find out what you want.
My advice–don’t make any major decisions while in this job. No new house, no ‘let’s have kids’. I know several people who have done that and then convince themselves the job isn’t that bad, etc. 10-15 years later they hate their lives. As I mentioned a boring job will kill you, just very slowly. Good luck!
In my experience, that is a good thing to do. Well, not a good thing, but not a bad thing. Waiting longer is bad. As other posters have said, “that job wasn’t a good fit” is a valid reason. The employer knows that someone starting out in a position is a gamble. The employer certainly knows she/he is taking a chance. If they see someone with the maturity to try a new position and take decisive action when it doesn’t work out, that is a positive. Waiting until the sixth month is not. Then it looks like your performance wasn’t up to expectations then. But 30-60 days (90 is stretching it a bit but still OK), I would view as a positive thing on a resume.
expressive and to the point as always!
excuse my ignorance, but where is the quote from? I would enjoy that.