Reasons You Have Left (Or Have Thought About Leaving) Your Job?

[DestinyArrives]

I'll be honest, as much as my company has been rather nice to me at times (bonuses paid out like normal with poor company performance), my manager being a wonderful lady and having some extremely friendly coworkers, I just fell out of love with my current position. My reasons to go:

- Remote, remote, remote. I need to work remote, especially since everyone just comes in the office and sits on Teams/Zoom meetings all day. Like what the heck, I have to come in 4 days a week for this? I want my time back commuting 45 minutes to a hour each way every day. Not to mention it gets so loud and noisy.
- Pay; my manager has made reference to how hot the job market is and that "people can boost their incomes greatly." Well, you know what? I want that too, especially since I originally accepted this position for lower than what I was asking.
- The work itself; I'm just bored with what I do. My manager and team keep convincing me (without realizing) how terrible and boring the work can be. Most of my team has been revolving doors during the time I've been there and now I can see why.
- HR. They don't care about anyone, at all. In fact it's overshadowed the work with all the stupid decisions and requirements they've put in, especially with the one day remote a week policy. Oh and guess what? Can't be a Monday or Friday.

What's your reasons that you have left a job/company (or if you haven't already, have been thinking about leaving)?

 

[Culex]

My wife left her job at a law firm because her boss brought in his wife to work on billing and things turned toxic quick.

 

[Nose Master]

They were pretty much ignoring all COVID precautions during the beginning of the pandemic, and we worked with the public.

 

[Reym]

I feel you, OP. Sometimes it isn't a big thing, but things just snowball.

I haven't left my job, but I desperately want to.
They hide our leave accruals, keep it like it's some kind of trade secret.
I haven't gotten even a cost of living increase in years.
They stopped giving me holidays. (Asking HR about it basically resulted in a noncommittal shrug.) We only got three holidays to start with!
Talking to corp is like talking to a wall. They just assume someone else will take care of it. So stuff never gets done.
Now my boss is leaving because he got so pissed at corp, he was basically the one thing there I liked.

I wish I could leave, but I don't think I could find another job, so I feel kind of stuck…

 

[Wrexis]

Bullying. They brought in an axe man boss who bullied people out of the job so they wouldn't have to pay redundancy.
It worked well, unfortunately I wasn't quick enough to notice that I was one of the last ones left.

 

[DestinyArrives]

They were pretty much ignoring all COVID precautions during the beginning of the pandemic, and we worked with the public.

Click to shrink...

I know someone who had a majority of his team get Covid around the same time. His HR plays dumb anytime there's a mention of "Did you notice these 6 people had COVID? And diagnosed around the same time?" Their response is, "Are you sure they didn't get it from separate incidents?"

 

[Tater]

I have an interview Monday that I'm hyped about. Reasons I'm looking:

• No one is getting promotions. I've been told I'm "on the edge" for years now, but so have many other people.
• Raises tied to promotions also means smaller pay bumps, and an incentive for the company not to promote.
• Not doing what I'm interested in - I keep having to fix other team's code, because they disbanded and no one else is willing to learn how it works. I have held multiple sessions, but people refuse to learn how to use a debugger and instead use print/console.log
• Mass exodus in the past few months means that my department is doing worse, and now there are fewer people to keep the lights on.

Despite that, it's not a bad company, and I like many people there. They handled the pandemic really well. I wish I was staying, but many coworkers have commented that it feels like they're trying to push people out to reduce headcount, instead of paying severance.

 

[dougie4306]

i have been thinking about quitting my job since day 1 cause i hate being a cashier and having to feign the whole customer service thing

(im a cashier)

 

[Tokyo_Funk]

In my history:

- Denial of bereavement leave twice
- Being sexually harrassed 3 times, assaulted twice.
- Violent threats from management
- Manager pouring hot oil down my back
- Being blackmailed
- Extreme bullying
- Being threatened with "The Mafia" for asking for my pay after 3 months work.

 

[DestinyArrives]

I feel you, OP. Sometimes it isn't a big thing, but things just snowball.

I haven't left my job, but I desperately want to.
They hide our leave accruals, keep it like it's some kind of trade secret.
I haven't gotten even a cost of living increase in years.
They stopped giving me holidays. (Asking HR about it basically resulted in a noncommittal shrug.) We only got three holidays to start with!
Talking to corp is like talking to a wall. They just assume someone else will take care of it. So stuff never gets done.
Now my boss is leaving because he got so pissed at corp, he was basically the one thing there I liked.

I wish I could leave, but I don't think I could find another job, so I feel kind of stuck…

Click to shrink...

Part of my problem is I work with niche technology that, tbh, I don't really care about. I was in a financial struggle and just out of college, so I took the first role I could land. Was it worth it initially? Yes. Is it worth it now? Nope, not at all.

We don't have a leave accural problem, but we have an everyone works overtime for free problem. It's pretty much forced, like it or not. In your holiday situation, I would of considered walking out immediately.

I say you're in a good position for changing jobs though. Since you have a role currently, you can apply around for a while and see if anything lands that you want to do. I started doing this just to test the waters. And if you don't like what the company you're interviewing with is offering/presenting? You haven't left your current job so you're in the clear.

 

[Kasai]

I've worked at my current job for almost 8 months, and I gotta say, I'll be looking for a new job in a few weeks when I'm back from vacation.

Its the only food Jon I've ever worked or seen where the manager is expected to work from open to close; 9am to 10pm. Its not a one off thing, it's expected like 2-3 times a week. A job that was "45 hour a week maximum" has become almost always 55 hours a week.

My boss sees no issue, as she tells us all she doesn't expect us to do any more than she does. She has like 8 kids and a husband she hates, so she spends every waking hour just killing time somehow.

Point is, money isn't always worth it if there's no time to spend it and the time you're working is spent being miserable and over worked.

 

[PspLikeANut]

Noisy environment. Looking for a quieter job and safe for my ears. Thinking library

 

[Big Powder]

Quit a pizza job in my teens because I wanted to focus on my senior year theatre stuff. Quit a shoe stocking job at 2am because I was putting ~20 pairs of shoes on the bottom rack, sorted by size number (so sitting down to figure it out was justified) and the manager came to rudely tell me that I wasn't allowed to sit, only to squat. Quit a McDonalds after like three days because it was incredibly stressful, more than I had ever imagined (the location near my home is in a genuinely constant rush, absolutely no downtime, and the way parents don't clean up after their kids really upset me). Quit a hotel job because a manager who came in after I left decided to change my schedule and then text me lying as if they were "reminding me" that I had work on a specific day (I found out later that she was trying to pass off one of her shifts as my own in a sneaky way), but I had already taken a picture of the schedule so I had proof that I was being lied to, so I quit because I didn't appreciate being lied to. Went back there a year later and quit again when COVID started as I live with two people who are at high risk.

 

[Kevers]

I broke the social media policy for bitching out my company on Twitter and got written up, I left a week later.

 

[Forerunner]

Promotion potential. I actually didn't mind the job and would have kept doing it, but I capped out GS wise, so there was no reason to stay. If I was closer to retirement than I probably would have stayed because it was a good gig, but I'm 33 so I still have a lot more earning potential.

 

[Deleted member 4212]

One of my coworkers told me she is leaving today because she got an offer 70% over her current salary. So that would be a good reason

 

[Mathieran]

I left my job because I wanted to get paid better. I left my 15 year career that I loved for a 50% pay increase and it's worth it. I'll get better raises too, I could be making almost double my old pay in a couple years. And the work is mostly easier and less stressful.

 

[Jakisthe]

I've thought about it. As much as I like it, which is a lot, the hours can be crushing - although it has gotten better - and it's not as much as I could conceivably be making.

More structurally, it's not necessarily the sort of job people stay in their whole career. Some do, and the work is amazing, but in a decade or so I can see how it would be held against me, in a sense.

 

[CMP]

The amount of hours that you work, especially for the amount paid. If I'm going to work plenty of hours, then they better at least pay me alot more.

 

[DestinyArrives]

The amount of hours that you work, especially for the amount paid. If I'm going to work plenty of hours, then they better at least pay me alot more.

Click to shrink...

I also wish that if we have to work more than the standard # of hours, then we get paid for it. Pain of a salaried position...overtime is not paid for many roles (mine included).

 

[vainya]

These are the reasons I put in 2 week's notice at various jobs:

- Place was really hostile toward younger employees. It was weird, almost like older workers blamed us for their job losses in 2008.
- Place was really toxic. They would have shouting matches over Teams at least twice a week, mandatory work on nights/weekends, and there was a lot of micromanaging.
- I just grew bored of the work I did and needed a career change.
- There's a mass exodus at my current job and I'm almost finished with my Masters degree so I want to work in that field.

 

[Tater]

- Denial of bereavement leave twice
- Being sexually harrassed 3 times, assaulted twice.
- Violent threats from management
- Manager pouring hot oil down my back
- Being blackmailed
- Extreme bullying
- Being threatened with "The Mafia" for asking for my pay after 3 months work.

Click to shrink...

Where do you work? Are you an indentured servant, or is this just standard for Amazon?

 

[Pau]

I finally convinced myself to apply to grad school and leave a job because they gave me all of the responsibilities of the previous manager who left, but not the title nor the raise. Staying would have given me free tuition for a very expensive Master's program, but I would have had to do the program part-time.

 

[Lakeside]

I quit an engineering job because the company required me to defraud the US government. Fortunately I was young and gave no shits so I got my boss and his boss fired.

 

[TaySan]

I was moving out of state. Gave notice in advance

 

[BuBu Jenkins]

Quit my job two months ago at a shitty back breaking warehouse position that new management thought they can force me to work overtime that was always optional before these new jackasses started changing shit up which i didn't take kindly. not only did i not stay the 9hours that they requested i walked right out the building after our meeting never to return again... shit felt great. Need to start on my path to an actual career now instead of these dead end shitty jobs anyway, done slaving away for garbage pay.

 

[Addie]

Ethical reasons. I couldn't support the policies of the agency in question. It took me a while to find a fallback, but I figured something out.

 

[jmood88]

2017: money
2020: wanted to get in the field I went to grad school for, and get out of a toxic work environment
2022: money, and escaping another toxic work environment

 

[Litigator]

Left my law firm not because of anything wrong with firm which was very good to me, but because of the nature of the business of private law practice at big law firms which is the same everywhere.

It's a for-profit business at the end of the day. So, compensation and your overall value to the firm is based on how much money you bring in for the partnership. The amount of money you bring in is based on how many hours you can bill to clients. You're in the business of selling your time. Time is a finite resource. You can't make more of it. You can't scale up the manufacture of time to meet demand. There are only 24 hours in a day.

It gets to the point where you can't go to the doctor, go to the dentist, take a vacation, or day off, or do anything in life other than working without being stressed that you're losing time that you could have otherwise spent working and billing hours to clients. Because the revenues and profits of the partnership are tied directly to hours billed (i.e. amount of time spent working rather than value of a product) the business is only sustainable if everyone continues to drink the Kool-Aid of the culture of glorifying and glamorizing overwork where you're a laudable hero if you sacrifice your life to work 24/7 and sleep at the office and a lazy unworthy bum if you'd rather work to live rather than live to work. I left when I got off that Kool-Aid.

On top of that you're pretty much a mercenary / hired gun for whoever can afford to pay tens or hundreds of thousands (or millions) in legal fees. So all you're doing is being a cog in the machine where only the wealthy have access to top legal representation and the common person is fucked if they ever need it.

 

[hitme]

Big funding came in months ago and the micromanagement started to an already stressful environment.

 

[Beren]

I left my old job because my bosses were abusive and my current job offered double my salary to not be abused. Super easy decision.

 

[Tokyo_Funk]

Where do you work? Are you an indentured servant, or is this just standard for Amazon?

Click to shrink...

Currently between jobs, but all these events happened in:
- Working in an I.T job (Provisioning/faults)
- Chef/Kitchen/Hospitality work
- A Government Job
- Retail (Telco)

Never personally worked for Amazon, but I did work for Google and they treated employees well.

 

[julia crawford]

Bit of a pickle right now to be honest. I'm not very comfortable with the ethics of the work that I do and if I think about it enough it makes me want to quit immediately. So I'm getting an offer this Tuesday which will likely be very very good. But... I've been making an effort to improve my workplace, explore better ways to improve team communication and workflow and suggestions are being heard and applied so things are getting better :/ and because of how I came into this job, I work with a lot of people that I've worked years with before, and it hurts to leave them. Well. It's life I guess.

 

[Motorcycle Dork]

Due to leave my former job as I secured an extension with my second employer. People who works in retail will know how it saps all of your energy. I'm so overjoyed to be leaving that hellhole.

upd: I also don't plan to stay long for my second job as there's been a mass exodus. I will move on in a couple of months and seek better positions.

 

[Kisaya]

For the last one, hostile coworkers and an unstructured workplace.

All the others were mainly because of pay and needing to advance in my career trajectory.

 

[Lkr]

last job I left was due to money, my old manager recruited me to a new company and had the inside edge when I told him all I needed was more money.
I was expected to do the job of 3 other people who left with no pay raise. so I left to get a pay raise and do less work.

if I leave my current job, it would be due to pure annoyance by some dumb shit that happens internally (not even malicious, just people not following directions even after the 10th talk about it). that said, this is easily made up for with how chill everyone/company culture is. i'm so used to having a director that blames me for the mistakes of others that i'm still genuinely shocked that people are appreciative at this company after the 11th explanation

 

[shox]

I was directly (solely) responsible for increasing their Amazon sales by 900% and they rewarded me with a 20p per hour pay rise. I walked out the door and have been self employed for the 7 years since.

 

[mhayes86]

In order of jobs:
-Left for better pay.
-Left to focus on college.
-Contract ended and I couldn't find another I was willing to work on.
-Piss poor management and blatant favoritism.
-Got really boring. After completing a large project, all work became O&M. I was also looking to move out of state.

My current job is 100% remote which I love, but my gripes with it are management is a bit aloof, a good chunk of the work I do I don't really enjoy (there's variety, but only a small amount of it I've actually enjoyed), and a recent acquisition has been nothing but a headache. I haven't looked around because I really enjoy the remote work, but think I'll start looking once my daughter's first birthday comes around in a couple months.

 

[machtia]

I'm leaving my job next week after nearly five years. There's a lot of reasons, but the biggest is low pay and lack of opportunities within the small org where I work.

I've barely had a raise in years. Leadership says it's a budget issue, but in the interim they've created multiple new exec positions that earn more. All were filled by outside hires without being advertised. Our budget is fixed, so these people are not there to bring in extra money. Their salaries actually eat into the bonus pool. We are constantly short staffed at my level, and I've taken on more and more duties, but my bonus (and everyone's) was the lowest ever last year.

Worse, my amazing boss retired a month ago. Instead of promoting someone from within, leadership picked an outside hire with less experience than half the staff and no management experience at all. This was for political reasons that make sense, but it's a bitter pill. I did not go after that role, but on paper even I am more qualified than the person now in charge.

I gave extra long notice (6 weeks) to help the office transition, but I wish I hadn't. The new boss is trying but has no idea what they're doing. There has been zero transition planning for my role, and no attempt on the boss's part to learn what my work entails. (Part of my job involved doing some admin/managerial things that the boss is officially supposed to do.). I am gone next Friday, but the boss didn't even sit down with me until 4 pm yesterday to discuss how they'd distribute my duties until my replacement is on board. I've been given no opportunity to cross train anyone, so the office is basically screwed once I'm gone. All they'll have is the hundred pages of documentation I've been furiously writing.

I felt bad for leaving at first, but quitting has made it clear how little my organization cares about actually functioning well.

 

[Elry09]

I worked a customer service job for a company I believed in, so much so that in less than four years, I sold a million dollars in product, the third to ever reach that number, and the fastest ever.

For hitting that milestone I got two balloons and five dollars worth of Kudos

We got a new head of our department, and she made it clear that there would be no upward mobility for me. I'm bi-polar, and open about it. I went to HR with my frustrations and discovered that this HR worked for the company and not the employees

I always was positive, always cheered on people for their successes because I knew what it felt like to succeed for that company and get nothing in return, and the head told me that everytime I cheer employees on, it felt disingenuous

At that point I felt I couldn't escape their narrative, no matter how much I succeed at with whatever was thrown at me, so I quit. It was scary, being bi-polar, stability is important. And it's been hard, but I'm now working on my own and at 46, I'm running social media for there small businesses

 

[CrankyJay]

Left in July because I was basically left to twist in the wind with little to no direction, was getting more responsibility piled on, and my company was being stingy with merit raises at a time when they were raking in record profits.

I only stuck around as long as I did because my boss was always dangling carrots in front of me.

 

[Shokunin]

I almost always leave a job because of talent drain either at the management level or laterally within my team. That's usually enough for me to mentally check out and find a new roost.

 

[Tttssd1972]

Boss who I have a great personal relationship with is…. all over the place professionally. GREAT people person, but a leader? Not so much

Our field reps treat us like shit and instead of enforcing company policies tell our customers WE cube monkeys are the bad guys. THIS is the major reason I have always been so close to leaving the company. Field Reps have been enabled to treat office folk like total shit when we are just enforcing policies enacted by legal/compliance teams… ya know… so the entire company isn't fucked come audit times…

 

[Petruccis Biceps]

I was thinking of leaving my long time job for a few years. They did the right thing and closed to remote only during pandemic and it was great. However my job title eventually changed over to a more a client oriented role than the tech role I enjoyed. I only stayed on because the job was remote and I had a lot of friends in my coworkers.

Eventually, I got let go but now I found a new job where I'm finally doing what I wanted to do, higher pay, and fully remote.

 

[capybara-dive]

- Better Pay
- Boredom
- Unhappy

That's why Ive left my three actual career jobs. I am lucky enough to be in a field where finding a new job is relatively easy, I guess. But I also always keep in mind if they were unhappy with me they likely wouldn't hesitate to drop me. So why should I hesitate to drop them.

 

[Smoolio]

Team leader here, actively trying to leave.
- Increase in meetings per week and prep for these meetings by 8 hours per week, which is 8 hours less I get to spend looking after and developing my team.
- Cancellation of ad-hoc OT, we are now expected to do a little bit of OT built in, and any extra need to leave early another day to keep hours level which further reduces hours I get to devote to my team.
- Aggressive month by month ramping up and down, average tenure has gone from like 2 years to 3 months. Less time to truly build a good mentor relationship, though proud that those that left from the 2 year tenure group have gone great places.
- My pay being less than agent/frontline jobs at quite a lot of companies I've seen while looking around, snowballing this vibe.
- Some of these are due to a boss change, which has been a negative change for other general reasons also.

 

[klauskpm]

Right now I don't have a reason to leave my current job, but I already asked to leave many others.

Reasons why I left previous companies:
- I outgrown the company, meaning, I didn't have anything else to learn there and wished for more;
- Extremely toxic behaviors, like blatant mysogyny, transphobia and homophobia, be it from coworkers, or leader or corporate teams;
- Being treated as a number after told I was part of the "family", and asked to do several favors as such;
- Working a HUGE amount of over time hours, like up to 200 hours of over time a month;
- Instability;
- Constant lies from the leadership team that made my colleagues lives a living hell;
- The opportunity to move to another country, while receiving 6 times more, and working in a better environment;
- My leader completely ignored an idea of mine and declined to see my presentation about it. Several months later that idea was implemented by a major competitor which resulted in the end of our company;

Reasons why I would think about leaving a company:
- Management or leadership teams that don't do shit to improve problems in the working culture;
- Toxic behaviors;
- Lack of transparency;
- Lies/broken promises from leadership;
- Mistreatment of my coworkers;
- Bad working culture;
- Micromanagement;
- Instability;

 

[Red]

I left a job last year for better pay. I'm thinking of leaving this current job because I'm not learning anything and I can feel my skills stagnating.