Ask HN: Why did you quit your last job? - boca
======
knorker
Money, and the BS "oh we can't pay you more than this"... until I resigned and
suddenly it _was_ possible to pay me more. Too late then. Much, much too late.

When someone says "oooh, I can't find qualified people" I don't believe them.
If you offer people 2x what they currently make to do a job that isn't bad
then you'll get them. If you don't want to offer that then you are offering to
underpay them, and that's why they won't come.

You don't have to hire underskilled people and train them[1]. You can just
pay. Conversely, if you don't pay them, they'll leave. (well, some will stay
to be exploited, sure)

</rant>

[1] E.g. I disagree with
[https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1021960484738629632](https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1021960484738629632)
and [https://caylent.com/sre-vs-
devops/?utm_source=social&utm_med...](https://caylent.com/sre-vs-
devops/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=edgar&utm_campaign=sre%20vs%20devops%20blog)

------
magduf
Two reasons: 1) Better pay, tired of where I was living, wanted to move to
more urban environment 2) Wanted to move closer to girlfriend of over 1.5
years

Then the girlfriend dumped me as I was moving. :-(

At least the job seems to be OK; I can't complain much about things like being
overworked, the company doing poorly, bad morale, or anything like that. And
luckily, the dating opportunities in my new location are far better than where
I was, but it sucks moving to a new place with no friends and suddenly losing
someone so close one by text message, without even the courtesy of a face-to-
face meeting to talk about it. Between all the weight loss, lack of sleep, and
inability to concentrate it's amazing I'm still employed.

~~~
notlob
[deleted, this was a total overshare]

~~~
magduf
Thank you for sharing. It does help to know we aren't alone.

The bad part is, I would have been sorta-OK with breaking up if we could have
talked about it, and maintained some contact. We were having problems before
this point, so it wasn't a total surprise. But she suddenly turned ice-cold.
I've never had a relationship end so badly. I'm still friends with my ex-wife,
for instance, and am Facebook friends and sometimes exchange some messages
with the girlfriend I had before that, but this gf had a "personal policy" of
basically deleting me from her life if we broke up, and she did exactly that.
And the thing that really pushed her over the edge was when I complained that
she wasn't helping with my move (which she wasn't).

Edit: deleted the rest in response to parent's deletion; I don't want to
violate his privacy.

------
jacob9706
Management, it's almost always management. It's quite horrifying to watch the
rest of that companies software department either leave or be driven out by
the single problematic person.

------
sofaofthedamned
Because they couldn't guarantee they wouldn't call me on my wedding day, which
is on Saturday. Hence I've spent the last two months with my wife to be
sorting out house out and making it awesome for the wedding reception!

~~~
shoo
Good on you! Wouldn't guarantee they wouldn't call you on your wedding day?
What a bunch of clowns. & More positively forward looking: congratulations

~~~
sofaofthedamned
Thank you! It was an awesome day. We're still cleaning up the house 2 days
later...

------
mstaoru
My boss has been gradually overdosing his LSD and MDMA, becoming more and more
frantic and chaotic. Once he called me on Saturday night, apparently under
influence, and demanded a new feature to be done by tomorrow morning. I said
no, adviced him to get some sleep and hang up on him. He sent me a message
saying that "he knows people who can make my life very hard". I took a
screenshot and emailed the message to the whole company (200+), along with my
resignation letter. That day I decided I should stop working for other people.
The company bankrupted shortly after, auditors discovered massive tax fraud
and a bunch of unpaid credits from European banks my boss was hiding from.

~~~
m_t
Did you think about going to the police as well regarding his threatening
message?

~~~
mstaoru
He is a son of a well-connected former KGB colonel, so no good would come out
of this.

------
505aaron
I got tired of executive doublespeak. The company made lots of promises during
recruitment that never materialized. It has made me super aware of the
importance of culture. I haven't found any full-time positions that fit me
yet. In the meantime, I am taking a break from corporate life and freelancing.

------
tboyd47
They were starting to adopt a cutthroat culture where managers boast about
firing people. I remember the point where I knew I was going to quit was when
the VP called all the tech leads in a room and essentially told us, "Good
riddance to these other folks, but good news! You are the ones we wanted to
keep..."

~~~
anonytrary
My CEO was proud of his rapid firing skills, and the only people he kept
around were the people who built his tech-debt ridden system in the first
place, or put in 60h+ a week. For such a young company, the Github
contributions were full of ex-people with a few hundred lines of code. Like,
if you have to fire so many people you hire, then fire the people who are
hiring everyone, or treat your employees better so they actually feel like
doing good work for you.

------
ConfusedDog
Last time I quit because my girlfriend broke up with me and I was in need of
change. So, I went back to school and got a PhD - broke record time getting it
because I worked like crazy. Because of school stress, I was working out
really intensely and got into best shape of my life. Now life is good, I got
fat again...

~~~
kjeetgill
> Now life is good, I got fat again...

Jesus I can relate. I'm back on the diet/gym train again but it was so much
easier when I was running away from life stress.

------
acesubido
I applied for a Rails Engineer job. Day 1, my team lead insisted on Grails.
After 6 months, team leads stopped Product Development, and the next few
months consisted of me being inside datacenters installing Hadoop clusters on
baremetal. Funny thing is; I did that to myself, since I never complained and
just took it in.

Almost 2 years in, never touched rails code, lots of ansible playbooks,
dockerfiles, random ruby scripts, several company trips to Japan/US; it seems
that I became the de-facto Big Data engineer on the company. Many would think
it was something I liked. But I didn't. Executives, managers and engineers in
the company relied on me to solve what was "sold" to current enterprise
customers about "Big Data" and "Machine Learning". The pressure sets in. I
couldn't in my nature pose myself as an "expert data scientist" and "big data
guy" when I have 0 experience with ML, Python, Spark and Statistics.

I resigned. I thought the reason why I felt stressed because I was alone in
this Big Data thing. Boy, I was so wrong. They counter-offered and gave me a
high position + a 5-person team, 3 statisticians and 2 system administrators.
I never should have took that counter-offer. This time, the pressure is higher
since I'm officially responsible for the entire Product line. I needed to
catch up to a hyped-up ecosystem of frustrated customers whose only chant was
'your company told me my Hadoop platform could do "Big Data + Machine Learning
+ AI" where is it?'.

After 4 months of trying; getting me and everyone on the team into Datacamp +
Python training seminars, while writing an MVP for a ML-product I thought of,
while building product roadmaps, being on meetings, handling internal politics
and current customer support. I resigned.

I guess the real reason was; I didn't want this in the first place. Even if I
tried to embrace the work, the climb was too steep with amount of runway I
had. Customers are expecting ML-based products, now. I couldn't live up to the
standards of a Big Data Lead when I have 0 experience on anything Big Data, no
mentors teaching me about the proper way to write ML products, let alone run a
team.

------
clort
I've just left my job, last week

I left because the place was going downhill and morale was rock bottom. Weak
management and funding shortfalls meant that non core departments were being
starved of money. Staff were leaving or being made redundant and I was going
to be the only one left in my department with little to do. I took the chance
to apply elsewhere where they hopefully value the work I do and got in. I am
taking a 20% pay cut to do so and I hope it works out. I might have been ok
for another year but management turnover meant we have had 3 'staff
reorganisations' in 4 years all of which seemed to be cost cutting measures
and I can't see that it was going to go on much longer anyway. The latest set
of management have come in and shown only slash and burn style; I think they
could be aiming to cut back to core and then build from there. Perhaps it will
work for them, but I was not optimistic about it.

~~~
ConfusedDog
Honestly, I think you should have stayed and keep working hard. With fewer
competition and obvious competency, it was more like an opportunity than an
unfortunate situation...

~~~
thsowers
Sometimes when the ship is sinking, you need to jump off

~~~
ConfusedDog
You should read Kazuo Inamori, he was not even being paid on time and still
worked hard... really inspiring dude.

~~~
mnm1
Sounds like an idiot to me. How can someone that dumb be inspiring?

------
TipVFL
They closed my offices and moved them from downtown to the far side of the
suburbs.

I live near downtown, and specifically chose my job and house to be a nice
bike commute. My nice 30 minutes by bike turned into 2 hours by bus and train.
So I quit.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
Bored. The people I really liked working with weren't there anymore.
Development environment was getting more overbearing (emphasizing process just
for the sake of it while ignoring its flaws). Finally just got sick of getting
up every day and coming to work.

~~~
throw_this_one
So what did you do, just quit and hang out? Or did you have a backup plan and
backup savings?

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Got a better job.

------
AFNobody
Management made demands that exceeded resources available and kept blocking my
vacation to try to meet deadlines. I literally left with 100% of my vacation
accumulated.

------
AgentOrange1234
My team lead was the least competent person on the team. This was constantly
frustrating. When it finally bugged me enough to look around, much better pay
was available. So that pretty much did it.

~~~
douglasdrumz
I am a team lead and my team members are at least my level of competency
(which means they're usually better than me). I listen carefully, trust the
team and shield them from problems from above.

~~~
AgentOrange1234
It sounds like you’re a good team lead.

My current manager, one of the best I’ve ever had, is much the same.
Technically not superb. But at least pretty good. Also a great listener, and
really keyed in to what the team is up to, struggling with, contributing, etc.

The TL I had the issue with very much behaved like an IC, almost never met
with me, seemed to be dialing it in most of the time, and just generally was
very hard to explain things to. An absent parent, more than a bad parent.

------
27072018
Tomorrow will be the end of the requisite one month notice period for me in a
job in the humanitarian world. I have no job lined up, as yet.

I just couldn't take it anymore. I can't count the number of times I walked
into 2 of my female colleagues sobbing alone in the office. The office is
small so it is common to occasionally be the only one in the office.
Management knows about the cause of this toxic culture but I just can't stand
it anymore. My mental health is more important than whatever they have been
paying me.

Now, while I have been teaching myself programming for sometime, I believe I
can find my way in a Ruby code base. I also know some Elixir and Python. I am
based in East Africa just in case someone here would be kind enough to adopt a
40 year old degree-less man. Just for the experience, I wouldn't mind
accepting a non-paying software role. Well, thankfully, I can afford to pay
the bills for a few more months.

------
phyzome
I thought our product was being used in unethical ways, so I jumped ship to a
more neutral industry.

------
bsvalley
I quit all my previous jobs (maybe one exception) because of a very bad
Manager. These managers are extremely hurtful for companies and I believe
upper management does not get the same side of the story. Surprisingly, I
always get along with senior managers over direct managers. If people want to
improve the tech industry in general from an employer perspective, I'd start
by cleaning that 1st layer of management pretty hard.

------
dandigangi
I ran out of money trying to build my startup for just under 3 years. It was
sad but a better decision overall. Went back to an old VPs company which was
recently acquired as a senior web engineer. 10 months later I took over the
web engineering team as our first engineering manager.

------
zerr
Agile (scrum), i.e. micromanagement hell + low salaries and no increase
policy.

------
sloaken
Most people have a collection of reasons that build up to a tipping point of
why they leave. I have left 5 jobs, and had 2 jobs leave me (laid off).

First in Highschool I had 2 jobs in the summer working about 60 hours a week,
parents made me drop one. I kept the one where management was nice. Other one
just seemed angry all the time.

Second was the other HS job when I started college. But the new management had
become a jerk and so I left a month early.

Third was from burn out. Too many long hours that were not appreciated. I
wanted to take 2 months off to get my head straight but they thought I would
not quite. I did.

<insert layoff #1 - 20% pay cut - glad to have a job>

Forth was at a place that treated me well, but was a bit of a drive, and the
pay was slowly going up, but insurance was going up quickly. The kicker was it
looked like my future was ADA. So when an offer came, and it came with more
money, much shorter drive and Ruby On Rails ... I jumped.

<insert layoff #2>

Fifth was a softer exit. I was working for a contracting firm. Well they were
a subcontractor and tended to try and squeeze people. But I nedded to feed the
family. When the contract was renewed, they did a 15% pay cut on people. Tough
times don't you know. Well the company I was doing the work for offered me a
decent job, slightly less money but much better benefits.

------
dee-see
I quit for quality of life improvement (shorter commute, remote possibilities,
fewer work hours).

Also to work on something that has more impact on people instead of only
profiting big corps.

------
triplee
I was way overworked on a way overrun project and since I was one of the most
senior ICs, being pushed into leadership due to literal lack of actual
managers for a while due to turnover and family leave.

That wasn't great, but it was managable because everyone understood our
circumstances. When I went on my own family leave as my daughter was born, and
came back to new management, I shouldered a lot of blame for the project
because I was the last one left (it was a series of bad technical decisions
from before my time) and still overworked despite having a newborn at home.

After finally going live, even when I warned them it would be a bad idea, I
was in charge of the horrible production website. I gritted my teeth and left
when my daughter was 9 months old, with no job in sight because I just needed
a break.

Best decision I ever made. They fired my problematic boss 3 days before I left
(he was one of the new managers, not good at managing or doing his technical
work) and it took months to get the production site working. No idea if the
next phase went through or not.

I had a nice five month sabbatical with my family and educational projects
while I interviewed. It ended up with four job offers, and I'm thrilled with
the ones I chose.

~~~
move-on-by
I was in a very similar situation. Overworked, but got a bit of a break due to
family leave. When I came back, I was met with a lot of aggression and blame
that I had never experienced at that job before. I was still overworking but
not at the same level pre-baby - my wife needed me and my priorities had
changed. It soon became clear that I was being managed out of my position and
I found another job. Several trusted peers agreed that I was being managed
out, but didn't offer any insights into why.

I 100% believe they didn't want me there any more once I had a child. The new
job is very family friendly (not overworking), pays more, and so far is very
low stress. I'm sure the stress level will go up as I become more integrated
in the company, but I couldn't be happier.

------
code_chimp
Internal politics.

I hate them, refuse to play along, and the moment I can no longer keep the
drama at least a meter away from me I start talking to recruiters.

------
keb_
Was not given any meaningful work and felt I was not growing as a developer.

Been at my current job for 1.5 years, and feel the same way. I'm looking
around, but after being a "Software Engineer" for 4 years, employers look for
a particular set of skills and experience I simply have not gained during my
track record. Feels like a catch-22.

~~~
throw_this_one
Same here man. What do you think the way out is?

I'm thinking that you study the big picture stuff by reading HackerNews, and
get good at the "interview questions." Then you build something on the side
with a full modern stack and devops practice. That part is tough.

Then I think you (we'd) have the confidence and the experiences to fall back
on during an interview.

What kind of stuff have you done so far?

~~~
keb_
The way out is as you've said. To fill the gaps, possibly attempt contributing
to an open-source project you feel passionate about, just to demonstrate you
can collaborate in a team and collectively solve problems.

I've done front-end & back-end on web applications, without ever specializing
in either. These days, I mostly write single-page applications with a vdom JS
library.

------
fatnoah
In a move that was later admitted to be a mistake, I was moved into an IC role
from one where I managed several high performing teams. This came after a
successful acquisition.

I was bored, not challenged, and completely disheartened to watch morale
slowly evaporate. Teams were fractured and everyone went from moving fast with
a common purpose to "meh" in a matter of months. New management was assigned,
though they were 3000 miles away and showed a tremendous lack of experience in
anything other than being a medium-sized cog in the big company machine. For
example, the solution to being late on a release with no requires was to both
rewrite it in a new language and build it for a completely different
infrastructure, and with a 5 month deadline. Months later, people are still
arguing about requirements.

------
mieseratte
Had six changes of management in 14 months time, and something like an 80%
attrition rate during that time.

------
blubb-fish
Just had my last day today as the CTO.

I quit b/c we got bought by a corporation about a year ago. The purpose of
this purchase was to integrate our technology and our customers into the stack
of that corporation. So basically we got dumped with requirements to add
features only relevant to that corporation. That totally overwhelmed the
capacity of the IT team which already was working at a limit. Some days it all
felt like a big house of cards just waiting to collapse due to a little
inattention on our side. I mean if an IT department is forced to push the
envelope all your best practices are being thrown over board. That just took a
toll on me. So to protect my health I decided to leave this company I very
much enjoyed working for and help building up for three years.

------
DArcMattr
I was assigned a new manager, and they curbed a lot of the unofficial perks
I'd been enjoying, like being able to work from home some days.

When it came time to turn in self-evaluations, I turned in a quitting notice.
I couldn't bring myself to work through that self-evaluation.

------
PappaPatat
I thought I wanted to work less, with less stress and fewer hours. After 3
years I found that that is not good for my self wort, health & happiness. Soon
I will change back to a more demanding job and compensate my family with more
money and less me.

------
AnimalMuppet
I was working for a medical instruments company. We were FDA regulated, of
course, and had fallen afoul of them in an audit. We were having to remediate
our system, and to increase the rigor of our procedures. The result was that
my job became 90% paperwork. For a software engineer, that's a horrible
existence. I put up with it for three years, and finally left.

Note well: I'm not saying the FDA was wrong. The steps they took were probably
needed. I just didn't like working in the resulting environment.

------
kentbrew
My boss was a screamer/yeller/banger. (There's only one person in the world
who's allowed to use that tone of voice on me, and I am married to that
person.)

------
BrandoElFollito
Too much travel. I was at ~300 days per year and it was too much.

The conditions were excellent (international first class, best hotels,
fantastic restaurants, not much limits) and so was the pay.

But one day I realized that my baby was growing up without me and I quit on
the spot (literally : I was in my way home from the office, turned around and
resigned (very amicably)).

I moved to a job she I do not travel more at all.

------
codingdave
It was a badly transitioned acquisition - I could write up a dozen problems,
each of which may have been enough to quit. But the straw that broke it all
was when, after giving us all zero bonuses and telling us that nobody gets a
raise either, the former owner hit us with: "I got my F-U money, but you guys
just need to put up with anything they throw at you."

------
oldsklgdfth
Complacent attitude, poor communication, chaotic process.

To a much lesser extent, no matter how many times I asked for a new chair I
got the same response - "I can ask. But there's nothing I can do about that".
I would not have decided to find another job if they made this minimal
gesture.

Really the chair thing! I sat in a 15yo hand-me-down desk chair that the
leather was peeling off of. I brought in my $100 back support chair from home
cause I started having back pain. They were like "huh, ok". I didn't ask for a
$3000 herman miller with all the bells and whistles. I asked for some decent
back support while spending 8hrs in a chair. If I were my boss I would have
bought an amazon gift card for a few hundred bucks and said "pick whatever you
like". I would have been forever indented to that guy and probably wouldn't
have asked for anything else.

I still don't understand why people don't pick the low hanging fruit when they
can.

------
swlkr
I landed a remote job, and I've been traveling ever since

------
farleykr
I got an offer to do the same work for more money elsewhere. But if I'm being
honest, the environment at my last job was pretty hectic and I went out
looking for a new job in the first place. I describe my last job to people as
being like working on a pirate ship.

------
thetrumanshow
They closed our small, remote office of 20 people. Work going overseas to the
(now) main development office in eastern Europe, where salaries are 1/3 of
ours (not even SV wages).

Ended up getting paid more at a new company, so it worked out.

------
BugsJustFindMe
The first time it was because I wanted to take six or seven months off and
then come back afterwards but not lose my health insurance during the time
away. They said that they couldn't do it, so I left anyway but then didn't go
back after.

The second time it was because my partner needed to be outside of the country
for an extended period and I wanted to stay with her. That time I asked if I
could work remotely. They said yes as a contract manager but not as an
engineer, so I left because my personal life is always more important to me
than someone's business.

Both exits were on good terms.

------
nonprofitdev
Bad experience at a nonprofit. For all the "you're doing amazing work!" talk
and praise that was heaped on us, there was a lot of fluff and cruft behind
the scenes. Almost everything was geared towards marketing how we were
changing the sector, when almost none of the projects mattered or would ever
be used. And the maniacal focus on getting more money donated when summer time
came around.

Joined because I believed in the mission and thought writing code could really
help in the initial vision. Then learned the dirty secret that most of it was
marketing how great we were.

~~~
27072018
Also leaving another "we are doing amazing work!" job because they can't make
the office be an amazing place for the staff. A non-profit in the humanitarian
space. Ironical.

------
gyvuip68ig6789b
Because it reduced me to little more than an annoying telemarketer, and even
though I had a hunch that this would be the sad truth of the role before I
started, I had to see for myself.

I decided to try it because money. Because even though my previous job was
perfectly fine, I remain emotionally detached from all employers and
coworkers, reducing the situation to a paycheck. One paycheck versus another,
so I quit two jobs.

One perfectly reasonable job, in exchange for what I suspected might be a
demotion to a telemarketer, and when proven right, I quit the second job,
despite the better pay.

Wow. Gee. Oh well.

------
azundo
I quit it slowly to work on my current startup. Went down to two days a week
then fully quit last year. They're awesome and I've still got a desk in their
office!

------
cwt
The company didn't want to invest in my department but kept setting higher
expectations. It caused the team to be overworked and understaffed. You
couldn't focus on a project because you were always needed somewhere else. The
people in my department were great but their hands were tied. The pay wasn't
great and there were some other less important issues, too. I've seen a number
of people leave since me, but turnover was always moderate.

------
huebnerob
Currently on my fourth weekday of freedom from the daily grind! I just wanted
some quality time to pursue my own projects and goals, and I have more than
enough runway to spend a few months figuring out what's next. I actually think
I'd like to get into working part-time/consulting to pay the bills and
spending the rest of my time bootstrapping other projects. Would love to hear
if anyone has any experience or thoughts about doing this!

------
olavgg
My last job was a freelancer, which was fantastic. But then I met three
ambitious guys and we built a company with now over 100 employees in just two
years.

------
Broken_Hippo
The last job I had was seasonal, and the season ended. I doubt this is what
you were looking for, though. It's OK, as it was an accomplishment in itself -
the first job in a country after learning enough language to work somewhere.

The one before that, though, I quit because I was getting married and was
moving overseas. I gave a few months notice and trained my replacement. Best
life change I've made.

------
southphillyman
More money, better title, double the vacation, cheaper health care, and better
retirement contributions were available elsewhere.

------
calciphus
Management. At the C-level were people who got lucky once and were largely
inexperienced, unwilling to take input from subordinates, and convinced they
knew better than their customers. They were wrong. Within a year of my
departure they were out of customers and employees, and ended up sold off for
pennies.

Edit: spelling

------
haolez
Got an offer to become a cofounder in a new consulting company (not a
startup). It worked out pretty well :)

------
bena
I was a contractor/consultant and our client decided to buy out my contract
and hire me full time.

------
nojvek
The product wasn't a money maker for a mega corp. They couldn't justify
investing to make the product better and pay well. It was a fun team, but it
got really boring since we could only ship once every six months with the OS.
I like shipping daily!

------
QualityReboot
tl;dr: Management didn't want remote employees. I didn't want to keep paying
for the privilege of living in the Bay Area.

I'm an app developer and I realized that I really want to work remotely.

Being in an office all day was extremely demoralizing for me. I would
frequently "work from home" to be able to spend a full day focused and
productive. That wasn't a great cycle though, because I'd have crunch days at
home a couple times a week to get my work done, then hang out in the office
and do very little for the rest of the week to get my paycheck. Management was
mostly fine with this, but it was taxing on me because it felt like a stupid
way to live.

I talked to my managers and let them know that I wanted to work entirely
remotely. They weren't supportive of that, but I still don't understand why,
other than a general not believing in remote work. I found a remote gig the
following week and things have been great ever since.

Once I saw the remote job was working out, I moved across the country to a
much cheaper area (well, what isn't, compared to SF). Now I don't pay state
income tax, I pay 1/3rd the cost of living for 3x the space, and I'm happy to
do my work for longer each day because I don't have a commute. I'm producing
better quality software, with less effort, and I'm happier.

If this job eventually ends, I don't think it'll be difficult to find a new
thing to do. But with greatly reduced expenses and no fear of needing a
paycheck for SF rent, I'm also free to take risks like starting a company or
doing consulting for multiple clients.

------
sweml
Lost interest in the type of work I was doing and left in order to build out
something new with a much smaller team on a product that I believe in.

------
jloughry
I was doing a full-time PhD and working. One day my advisor asked, `Are you
working for me or Lockheed?'

I chose the PhD.

~~~
anonytrary
Just curious -- what was your PhD in? I know some experimental researchers who
get 4 hours of sleep _only_ doing their PhDs, I can't even imagine being able
to do both at once.

~~~
jloughry
Computer science. I worked for Lockheed for fifteen years---long enough to see
some programming projects succeed and others fail. I wondered why the
difference. I had access to all the project records, and Lockheed was cool
with it, so I took copies of all the data and found an advisor willing to let
me work on it.

The problem was deep and it ended up taking a lot longer than I expected to
solve it, but that's the way of research. I did eventually discover some new
things in the data, and got the PhD, and my thesis formed the basis of my new
company.

You're right; I didn't get enough sleep. I got into the habit of working 13 to
15 hours a day. But I wasn't making progress on my thesis fast enough for the
university's requirements, so I had to choose. I was still working 13--15
hours a day, seven days a week, but exclusively on my thesis. I finished in
eight years. Without Lockheed, I would have been done in four.

Ironically, my day job for Lockheed was being the PI (Principal Investigator)
for an Air Force research project that was essentially a whole other PhD
thesis. [We took the Google Web 1T 5-Gram Corpus and inverted it; essentially
we were doing adversarial ML (generators and discriminators) before that term
had been invented.] _That 's_ why it took me eight years---because I was doing
the work of two different full-time PhDs at the same time.

(Only one got me a neat robe to wear at the end, though.)

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eli
I quit to start this company :)

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d4rkd0s
Not hard enough. You can't become better if you aren't challenged.

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kengbailey
I wasn't being challenged enough.

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bertocq
A really bad project manager

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Retric
Low pay

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bigoldie
Coming from someone who just quit his job (2 days ago): I was tired of false
promises by my new employer. I already worked for several years at my current
job, ready to quit when a new investor and CEO came in. Based on the promises
I stayed. There would be heavy investments made in our Dev team, but in the
end my team only shrunk because of the lack of improvements to IT and the
missing feeling for IT by the CEO (of an only online selling company). Due to
the shrinkage our team was also only doing maintenance instead of creating
real new products.

In the last couple of months the company was also bought by a bigger
international player. Good for the company, but bad for the IT as this bigger
player already has loads of dev teams in several other countries.

This was the final push I needed to quit. Fed up with the false promises and
the bad outlook for my team I finally found a much better job. A decision I
should have taken earlier.

