
The Art of Quitting - rshrsh
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-art-of-quitting
======
jasode
I'm not sure what to make of this blog post. The author writes:

 _> By resigning from Reddit, _

Behind the scenes, Ellen Pao could have been forced out (also known as being
"fired") but presented publicly as a resignation. I thought we don't really
know what happened? Therefore, it seems biased to frame a thematic essay about
"quitting" around Ellen's circumstances. If she didn't voluntarily separate,
it's not "quitting" \-- it's getting fired. Does the author Ernie Smith know
the inside details of Ellen Pao's situation that we don't?

 _> Ellen Pao is choosing to focus her attention on the other things that
interest her._

The underlying Washington Post article that this sentence links to is ~900
words written by Ellen Pao. She makes no mention of " _other things that
interest her._ "

Overall, a blog post of dubious quality.

~~~
mgalka
Agree.

I think it is actually a good post, and I agree with it conceptually. But I
don't think it has anything to do with Pao's resignation.

~~~
privong
> But I don't think it has anything to do with Pao's resignation.

I agree. When I read the post, the mentions of Pao seemed very out of place,
with respect to the flow. The meat of the post was interesting, but the
attempt to connect it to Pao's departure felt like a big (and unnecessary)
stretch.

------
beat
I feel this.

I spent 20 years building a successful career as an enterprise software
engineer, bouncing around between configuration management, development, and
ops. It's a secure, good paying, stable career. And I grew to resent and
sometimes hate it.

Then I started building something for myself, discovered the idea of creating
my own startup to solve problems I experienced doing enterprise software
projects in a general way, and I _love_ that. It makes me feel like I'm doing
something that actually matters.

Right now, I'm back in the enterprise to make ends meet and building on the
side, which sucks and drives me crazy - but at least I see the exit and can
keep moving toward it. And I figure I can get five or ten years out of
building a company before I'm done with that as well.

Once you hit a certain age and a certain level of success, the things you
realize you'll never do weigh on you more than the things you haven't done
yet. And the things you do look more like impediments than accomplishments.
That's when you need to change.

~~~
nextos
Good luck. Tell us more about your startup someday.

~~~
beat
I'll be back with a "Show HN" once I get the beta running. I took several
months last year to work on it full-time and got an alpha version working,
which taught me a ton of things I didn't know I didn't know about the problem
I'm tackling. Now, I'm working on a beta based on lessons learned from the
alpha.

The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?"
Configuration change is the primary cause of failure in complex software
systems. But the part that breaks isn't necessarily the part that changes. For
example, a database schema change can break apps that rely on the database.
But in large organizations, where the database is administrated by an entirely
different team from app development and developers may not even be allowed to
look at the production environment, it's a huge pain point.

Detecting configuration change and finding the relationships and impact is a
really difficult and challenging problem. The biggest takeaway from the alpha
for me was that "noise shaping" is a hard problem. For example, Wordpress
alters the schema of its MySQL database several times a day. It's a tiny thing
(an autoincrement value on a single column), but it makes sorting important
changes like upgrades that only happen weekly or monthly or yearly from
unimportant changes that happen daily.

The trick now is to get a product out of it good enough to make money, so I
can afford to quit dayjobbing and live off my own creation, rather than
sitting at someone else's desk and counting the number of times a day I wish I
had my own product here to help solve the problems I deal with over and over,
every damned day.

~~~
noir_lord
As someone who has worked on larger enterprise stuff this would be incredibly
(like a salary a year incredibly) useful tool.

It would do in software what a really good reliability engineer with years of
knowledge can do "Foo has broken" "Nah foo is fine, someone changed Bar again
without reading the wiki" stuff.

~~~
beat
It's funny, the reactions I get. A lot of startup programmers who have never
worked on large systems don't understand why it's so valuable. But those who
have done big enterprise use phrases like "holy grail".

But _this is a HARD problem_. Man, abstracting change in an actionable,
readable, efficient way has been difficult. Not to mention the security issues
and other headaches.

~~~
noir_lord
I'll bet, it's a truly monumental task to take on (so kudos for giving it a
try), stuff I work on these days doesn't need that level of monitoring (We
have 4 servers and a bunch of desktops laptops, it's pretty much vanilla small
business stuff) but I know a few people who would love that kind of stuff.

------
xacaxulu
Although in this case, Pao isn't resigning from anything she put blood, sweat
and tears into. Rather she showed up to a fully functioning project, kicked a
hornets nest she had no right to kick based on a personal worldview of how
people should be nice and more notably, _profitable for her shareholders_ on
the internet, then she got stung and ran away crying. I'm all for the type of
quitting that this article talked about, but I doubt that "routine career
failures recast as 'damsel in distress harassment', stemming from rather
dubious claims" is what we should aim for. Pao is no role model for me.

Separately, this is just bad writing. If a college student turned this in to
me I would write 'good start, delete all the irrelevant stuff about Pao and
either use an example that supports the main thesis or don't use an example at
all'. The threads linking this paper together are very weak.

I'm guessing 'Pao' and 'reddit' are to drive traffic. Ugh.

~~~
dummy7953
Wow. After all the truth that's come out which makes everyone else look like a
turd (especially Reddit's own users), you still can't find no love for Pao?
Ask your doctor if reality is right for you.

------
zallarak
There are 2 sides to this.

1\. Quit: I spent a summer in investment banking, at a prestigious bank after
2 years of hustling at a state school (way easier to get this type of job at
an ivy league). I left after a summer despite loving the people and perks --
it wasn't for me.

2\. Persevere: While learning computer programming, it was rough to start from
scratch. Seeing how slow I was compared to others was discouraging, but I
pushed through and now love what I do/the skills I have. I recall taking a
graduate level computer systems course, while working full-time, which was
fairly challenging for me at the time (this course required writing and
debugging assembly, writing programs like malloc from scratch, etc. with no
other formal CS background). It was 100% worth it!

Perhaps the lesson here is that learning at the early stages is tedious, and
one should push through. Or that you should have a motivator that isn't
financial in taking on something tough.

~~~
a_shane
It seems like a recurring theme in these types of posts is that people leave
high-paying jobs and that we should applaud them for "giving up" their
salaries to do what makes them happy.

Not that this is a bad thing (I applaud anyone who does something difficult in
the pursuit of long-term happiness), but the fact that many people enter into
unfulfilling job situations because they're drawn to the high profile and/or
salary probably plays a large part in why they feel unfulfilled after working
there for a while.

~~~
zallarak
High pay is definitely a positive outcome. But it is one of several things
that matter, not the only one. The fallacy I think lots of people fall for is
to over-weigh its role in contentment - but it definitely does have a role.

------
c_lebesgue
Why the assumption that Ellen Pao was not fired? It felt like one of these
cases when an employee has a lengthy talk with her supervisors, after which
she is given an option to quit, as a way to save her face.

An evidence for that would be how fast was a new interim CEO found after the
previous one "quit".

~~~
ritchiea
The example of Ellen Pao was merely a way to start the conversation. That
specific example does not diminish the message of the piece which I find very
insightful.

~~~
theseatoms
Agreed, though I found the example to be distracting and forced. The author
would have done better to leave it out.

------
300bps
The Art of Blogspam:

1\. Put sort-of related recent news item in first paragraph to seem timely

2\. Rehash old content

3\. Close with sort-of related recent news item in last paragraph

4\. Add clickbait headline

------
ritchiea
It would be really nice to talk about leaving a job, seeing your goals and
expectations change, or finding yourself in a position that previously seemed
like a "dream job" only to find yourself not as fulfilled as you expected.
Rather than fixating on the specific example of Ellen Pao. The piece is about
an experience that many people face not about Ellen Pao.

------
ufmace
I feel another rant about terrible marketing practices coming on after a
minute on that site. No, I don't want to sign up for yet another email list
for a site that I've read zero content on so far. No, I don't want to like you
on FaceTwitInstaLinked yet. Let me read a few things in peace, and maybe if
they're good, I'll like your stuff then. You're already starting off in a bad
hole asking me for that stuff in a way that interrupts what I'm trying to do
before I've read one word of your content.

~~~
Facemelters
sites would function that way if people actually did what you said you'd do if
they waited.

------
edw519
_People born between the years of 1957 and 1965 had an average of 11.3 jobs
between 1978 and 2010_

Lightweights! I've had 88 jobs since 1972.

Once a recruiter told me that everything on my resume was excellent except how
often I switched jobs. How could that be?

I told her that was because as soon as anyone gave me undue shit, I quit.

No regrets. On many of them, I probably exercised _too much_ patience and
should have left a lot sooner.

(You get one life to live. If it's not the life you want because of your job,
do something about it. Time flies.)

~~~
xacaxulu
You're resume would only be a problem if the company was looking for good
little worker bees who don't ask questions and who will take shit all day long
and ask for more. It's almost the perfect filtering mechanism for crap
companies hahah.

~~~
dummy7953
What's problematic is that the more jumping you do to avoid dumb workplaces,
the greater the possibility that only dumb workplaces will be desperate to
hire you.

It's a no-win situation. Unless, of course, you can do a better job of
evaluating a job before you take it. But people need to pay rent, and heck
yeah, companies straight-up lie about the jobs they offer.

Perhaps it's time for hiring companies to consider that even though employees
are discouraged from saying negative things about a former employer, that
sometimes yeah, that former employer was a jerk royale.

------
at-fates-hands
The examples in the article are really poor examples for a number of reasons.

First of all, Jordan didn't "quit" to go play baseball. He had already won
three championships and had already done pretty much anybody at that level
could do. He wasn't "begging for a new direction" either. He always wanted to
play baseball and wanted to fulfill a childhood dream is all. After doing so
(no matter how bad he was) he went back to basketball and achieved even more
when he came back. No exactly someone who quit and stayed away.

If you actually read the Jordan Price article, it talks about the boss he had
and the psychological abuse he was taking. Sure he was at his "dream job" but
the jokes and insults from his negative boss drove him to quit. It wasn't
really his choice to quit, it was more he was driven out by an his boss who
was a douchebag.

And the Ellen Poe situation? Quitting is completely different than being set
up to fail. Again, using her as an example of "goal disengagement" completely
misunderstands her whole situation. She was set up to fail, then driven into
submission by the inmates who are running the asylum at Reddit.

If you want to use a better example, try Robert Smith, the running back for
the Vikings who abruptly quit after a career year in the NFL. He was about to
get a huge contract extension, but he gave up the money so he could pursue a
career in medicine. He also wanted to get out of the NFL without any lingering
physical issues. He still appears on some NFL and college football shows, but
for the most part lives a pretty private life post NFL career.

------
bshimmin
"It's not giving up, it's disengagement."

If you set out to do something and stop doing it before you've succeeded, even
though you could carry on with at least some possibility of further and future
success, calling it anything other than "giving up" is just sugar-coating it.

I'm sure it's sensible and wise to give up in many circumstances, but giving
it a fancy name really shouldn't be part of the process of justifying that
decision.

~~~
scott_s
The quoted sentence is the summation of an article trying to distinguish
between quitting because you can't do it, and quitting because you no longer
care. Focusing on the renaming aspect is taking it too literally; that's just
a rhetorical device.

~~~
noxToken
Wholeheartedly agree. It may just seem like it's sugarcoating it, but there is
definitely a difference in changing focus and just giving up. Saying something
other than, "I just gave up on it," (which is what quit generally implies)
gives more a story behind why.

Side projects come to mind when I think of quitting. Sometimes the project
becomes much bigger than what you expected. You and your buddy don't have the
time nor resources to dedicate towards seeing it through or scaling it up. It
really all depends on the situation.

