I quit my job in March, and it was surprising to me just how difficult it was to quit despite it being abundantly clear that it was the right thing to do. I’ve always been annoyed with people who complain about their jobs but never did anything about it, and then I became one of those people. I knew I was becoming that person, and I hated it, but I didn’t feel like I could stop it.
Quitting felt like failing, and when faced with the prospect of failing I shift into a grinding mode where I hope that if I just keep pushing, something will eventually come together. So I spent months trying to change things that were within my control and influence things that weren’t in my control. I also had great coworkers who tried to help me out. But, as hard as I can work, burnout works harder. In the end I still wasn’t happy, and I gave up. It’s hard to accept that a particular job just isn’t right fit no matter how much you’d like for it to work out.
I regularly use the thought of quitting as a coping mechanism (in races, during grad school), but committing to actually quit was unexpectedly difficult. I was frustrated with myself for staying in a situation where I was unhappy for so long, and I was frustrated with my job for making me unhappy. If I had quit a year earlier, at least I wouldn’t be frustrated with myself. If I stayed in the job and found a way to make it work, maybe the frustration would have been worth it. But by the time I quit I was just frustrated with everything. To the shock of no one, it’s hard to make positive changes from a place of frustration.
I wanted to write this down while I’m still between things, so excitement about the next job can’t lead to rosy retrospection; there’s no “when one door closes, …” yet. The postscript is that quitting was 100% the right call, and I’ve been so much happier in all parts of my life! My only regret is spending a full year trying to make it work and letting myself be unhappy when I should have given it a few months before accepting that I needed to make a change.
This isn’t meant to be a negative post, just self-reflective on how I wish I handled the situation better. And even though that position didn’t work out, it taught me a lot. I worked with incredible people (seriously, some of the smartest people out there) and learned a lot about LLMs, building cloud applications, and startups! I also learned more about what I need in a job which will come in handy when searching for new roles.
Post-postscript: Science™ suggests that people are too cautious when committing to big life changes, so maybe I just need to involve more coin tosses in my life.