Necessary Endings - Know When To Quit Your Job
Hey 👋 - Ilya here.
What's up and welcome to the Weekly One on One!
Here's one short tip on how to Level Up as a developer.
Today's issue takes about 3 minutes to read.
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In today's issue, I want to share my thoughts on quitting. You probably have quit your job at some point in your career. It's a great way to try something new, get a better salary, or a more interesting job.
I have used this process over the last 8 years to determine when and why to quit. Knowing the answers to those questions always calmed me down, even when going into unexpected.
Let's dive in.
Early Warning Signs
Pay attention to early warnings.
Early warning signs let you know that you're about to start the ending process. Or at least start thinking.
- Are you engaged in the boring stuff?
- Are you thinking about your work outside your work hours?
- Are you rereading the email from this recruiter you got yesterday?
1&2 are indicators of engagement. Being a developer is interesting and stimulating. It just happens that I think about work problems outside work. I am a bit terrified when it doesn't happen.
Let's admit it, recruiter emails mostly go unanswered. But this tiny moment when you start reading them more carefully tells a lot about whats going on inside your head.
Just pay attention to those signs.
Timing
I like to think about quitting in 3 different phases of your job:
- Early on in the career
- When a new opportunity arises
- When things are going wrong
1. Early on in the career
When I just started out, I was hungry.
I was hungry for learning. I did not know much about nor care about processes or company structure.
Main questions to ask yourself on a regular basis:
- Am I learning?
- Do I have someone to learn from?
Goal:
- Optimize for learning
- Prepare for the next stage
2. When a new opportunity arises
This is the hardest situation to be in.
You are still learning, but now you're not a beginner anymore. A new opportunity arises. You are not suffering. And the new opportunity sounds interesting.
Michael Lopp helped me a lot in figuring out how to deal with this stage.
Main questions to ask yourself:
- Is it a new or a unique opportunity?
- Is it progress?
- What's genuinely unique about this new gig?
All projects are more or less the same. Different people, different tech stack. Same frictions, same problems.
You don't want just to switch to something new, you want to go for something  completely different.
- Different sizes (startup vs enterprise)
- Different domain. (I used to work in the beauty, energy, automotive, and now internet technologies. Completely different domains)
3. When things are going wrong
This is the obvious one, but it's also very hard.
But you have been at this place for a while and it's hard to quit.
This concept comes from Henry Cloud and his book "Necessary Endings". Usually, we're asking those questions:
- Do I want this same reality/problem six months from now?
- Do I want this level of performance a year from now?
- Do I want to be having these conversations 2 years from now?
The answer is NO.
But it is still hard to quit. Maybe things will get better?
Those additional questions helped me many times to see if my hope for the better has legs:
- What's the reason to have hope that tomorrow will be different?
- What is the picture is changing that I can believe in?
If there is not much hope, this is the time to quit.
Disclaimer
Don't do anything angry.
Breathe.
Take a day to think.
Prepare.
Good luck!
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See you again next week.
Cheers,
Ilya