When do you leave your job?

What has been a reason for your to quit your job and go after something new? Was it management, employees, pay, hours? Were you just ready to try something new and be in a new environment?

I’m planning on leaving my job sometime after the summer. Been working here for coming up on five years and have lost motivation to remain here, which as a GM makes me useless to my crew.

I quit my job at a restaurant because of drama bs I seen for years. I had enough and quit.

I think it depends on the person... If you are in a bad situation with pay, co-workers/boss, being overworked etc. then obviously you should leave.

I think beyond that, it depends on how career focused you are... I've been at my company for almost 8 years, and even though i'm not super inspired by my work anymore, its an awesome company to work at, fairly low stress, and pays enough to support my life style comfortably. I'm not excited to start my work day, but I don't dread it either. I do my job, do it well, but I don't make a big effort to go above and beyond.

I know people who wouldn't be satisfied with that, who are very career focused and want to get promoted/climb the ladder and be constantly challenged etc. but I'm more focused on enjoying my life outside of work, and not having a job that prevents me from doing that or gets in the way.

I've been at my current job for 11 years. Kind of crazy when I think about it.

To answer the question in general terms, though, I'd say you quit when you sacrifice too much intangible stuff (happiness, stress, etc) for the tangible.

It requires some assessment and the making of a pros and cons list, but if you make 60k a year but you feel that it's taking more than 60k worth of a toll on your mental well-being, then you should probably quit.

And of course there is the objective reason: you got a better offer. If you can get another job doing the same thing but getting paid more, or getting paid the same and doing less, then you should take it.

Loyalty to a company is an illusion and one-way relationship. You might like and respect your boss but when push comes to shove he will can your ass if it makes them more money. Don't show him any more loyalty than that warrants.

i work in tech and left a job i loved to go to a well known global tech company. it was a big step up career wise but i hated it. there's a saying recruitment is like romance, employment like marriage, that's kind of what it was. during recruitment they painted a glowing picture of the org, what i found when i started there was very, very different. i bailed within 3 months i.e. before my notice period went from a month to 16 weeks.

but the company i bailed to, whilst better than the previous in a lot of ways, had a whole other set of problems. toxic at the slt level, highly political, massive mismanagement of projects. within my first month i was engulfed in all that shit and i just could not be arsed dealing with that day in day out. so i just quit.

took six months out of work, was amazing, loved every minute of it.

tech was a very different landscape back then. everyone was hiring. very different landscape today with massive redundancies across big, medium and small tech-alike. thankfully im now back in a job i really enjoy

I actually just quit a job a couple weeks ago and started a new one.

There was several factors. On one hand: I did not like the toxic environment that my old boss created - lots of yelling and berating his employees, etc.

But then on the other hand I left to seek advancement at a better company and a better location.

The last job I officially left was in 2021. My wife had gotten sick the year prior (Persistent postural perceptual dizziness or PPPD) and was unable to work for close to a year or more and absolutely overloaded us with health care bills. I was working at a manufacturing plant about 45 minutes away from my house (hour and a half round trip 5 days a week) and getting paid, but not enough to pay all these new bills. Basically, we were circling the financial drain, albeit far more slowly than we would without the job, for about a year, which ended up being just barely okay as we had saved up so much money from the extra unemployment money in the pandemic relief. For context, we went from about 20k to about 2k in our savings.

I actually spent more time at that job looking for another job then I spent doing the job because it was simply the most financially responsible thing that I could do. I would disappear to quiet spots away from my coworkers to fill out applications, I had an unused, out of the way cubicle to do zoom interviews on, etc. So, yeah, pay was a big reason for leaving, but also the commute was really hard on my body over time (my right knee was really fucked up due to not being able to safely work out at the gym), and the benefits of the job were absolutely awful when I finally got them around 8 months into the position.

I left my first job at the end of 2019 after just a year because I was disappointed by the lack of structure and opportunities to improve.

Now after more than 3 years at my current position I'm once again in search of a new job. I feel like I've still got a lot to learn and my present job has nothing new to offer - I definitely need a new challenge. The salary is not very competitive either compared to industry standards. Hopefully by the end of summer I will be able to start a new job abroad.

When there's no room for development. I turned down a role offering around 50% better pay recently, and one of the biggest motivators was that there was so much needless downtime and easy repetition. I've seen what that does to people in the long run and it's not pretty. It was also kind of a career dead end, so that factored in pretty heavily too.

Yeah, that's a huge turn off as well. No pay level is going to compensate the stress of walking on eggshells 8 hours a day.

@mycatismilk: you should leave your job when you find a better job

Been in my current job for over a decade, but I've learned that it's always good to change things up assignment wise after 3-4 years; if you're able too anyways if you don't plan on switching careers, maybe make changes within your current career. If that's not an option then perhaps look elsewhere to broaden the horizon, but only if the juice is worth the squeeze.

Is law enforcement generally good about moving folks horizontal and/or vertically, i.e. different assignments or promotions?

I've always kind of wondered if you could become a cop and become pigeonholed into something and not really have a way out of it, like a dead-end career more or less. Or can you be like "Hey boss I'm tired of homicide, I want to try narcotics" and they're like "Cool, will do"

I'm a Federal employee, and the one time I left my former agency (since I was an intern in college) for another DoD component was for a 5-year overseas assignment in Germany.

I changed recently after quitting old job.

That *really* depends on your department size. I'm fairly lucky on a huge department that there's a lot of opportunities across many divisions. I was in Dallas last week for a crimes against children conference and I was drinking beer with a dude from a small department in northern Texas of 22 officers. He's one of two generalized detectives for their department and they handle everything from Cybertips from NCMEC to simple theft all the way to homicide. Pretty wild. My department have specialized detectives for every crime category but we also have over a 100 detectives. But to be fair, his case load is tiny compared to major cities/counties.

Tech sounds like one of the more lucrative but also most frustrating job sectors to work in.

My company was purchased by a very large, international corporation a few years back so we went from like 0 IT infrastructure to suddenly having monthly IT training about cybersecurity and what to do with our devices if lost and all that stuff (keep in mind, I work in production, very little actual work with electronics/internet).

Anyway we used to have a crew of folks but then they sort of downsized it so now we have ONE on-site guy helping us out, and most of the service is done remotely by an international crew. It's pretty frustrating because I just want to replace a keyboard that got dirty, but this guy is busy trying to fix like 20 laptops the office folk use (there's about 20 of us in production and like 500 office staff).

I feel like if you find your niche or get a good portfolio so you can be independent, that'd be great...but if you have to work for a large company, it could be terrible.

Then again I suppose you could say that about all jobs.