So who’s done this? What was the result?

Suffice to say things are pretty stressful at the moment. Won’t go into the details but for the first time (well, not quite the first time, but this is definitely at a tipping point) in 11 years at the same company I’m waking up in the morning and thinking that I have much better things to do than drag myself into the office to deal with stuff that is utterly pointless, and with people who are mostly idiots.

Will I just find the same elsewhere? I quite fancy having a go at contracting (web, database development), after the obligatory extended summer break of course. Is the autumn a good time to get into this?

Do you have someone senior who you can speak to at a one-to-one, personable level? If so, raise your concerns. This is exactly the type of feedback businesses want as it’s the number 1 cause of skills leaving en masse. Help them out by making your points heard (in a constructive manner).

And then if they ignore you, walk out.

Is the contracting you want to do in the same business sector as the place you’re currently at (i.e. could you be working there on a contract at some point)? If so, beware of burning bridges with a flounce.

Depends if you mean resign or quit without notice, without notice you are not doing yourself many favours, though I was very close to this in my last job.

I wouldnt without having something to go to.
Whether thats putting the feelers out for contracting or get an alternate job.

Think about it.
leave the job = no income. Do you have a mortgage or other financial commitments? On the other hand contracting jobs will be looking for an immediate start not a month from now so you will be available.
I’d be contacting agencies now asking what is available to get an idea of how likely it is you’ll get a start when you’re ready.
EDIT – yes I did this. Employer stuck me on gardening leave right away (last person to leave took a number of clients with them) which was great, and I got to keep the company car for a month. But I had to give it back and, living in the country at the time was a bit of a wrench. Also, where I had contacted agencies and things were looking good. However, this was in August 2001 and in September 2001 the contracting market suddenly dried up for a while. You need to ensure that even if things look good, you have the wherewithal to withstand a famine, and even during the feast times be prepared for famines.

What’s on the horizon ?

Leave after getting another job unless you can support yourself.

If you are planning on staying in the same industry, I wouldn’t. Paths are likely to cross with someone, somewhere else in the future, or their paths will cross someone who your path also crosses – all it takes is a potential employer / customer to ask their mate “You used to work at X, didn’t you? Did you come across dazh when you were there?” and when the answer comes back “yeah, the bastard walked out on us with no notice” the work / job will go to someone else.

You could always go on the sick until you can find a contracting job.

Well in reality I wouldn’t just walk out, I’m going to speak to the boss and then if I don’t get a satisfactory response I’ll resign with the proper notice. Very tempting to flounce though. The urge is almost irresistible 🙂

I am aware however that the grass is not always greener on the other side.

By all means give notice and quit, better still form a plan to leave in say 6mo and organise yourself as well as possible in the mean time (e.g. apply for jobs, build up a bit of holiday to shorten your notice period, save a bit to tide yourself over). I basically quit mentally in April but stayed to Dec for various reasons (including being pretty well committed to hosting a visitor late in the year, but the summer playing hooky was fun too). Flounce would have been fun (annual contract, could just have refused it on 1 april!) but that would have been hard work in practical terms.

Yip. Had a straw that broke the camels back moment, saw my arse, then had a massive flounce after telling a few people in pretty unambiguous terms what I thought of them (the words ‘circus’ and ‘****ing clowns’ may have cropped up)

It felt bloody great!

So having flounced out of the office, I went for a big walk, went to the pub, had a think about what to do next

It still felt bloody great!

And it still does 2 and half years later. Best thing I ever did, I’ve never looked back, wish I’d done it sooner etc, etc, etc…….

Get on with it you big wussy! 😉

Have always kept 6+ months living expenses aside for exactly this scenario – I find it lowers my stress levels quite a bit knowing that I could just flip the desk and walk out without ending up destitute.

If you’re going contracting then it’s an even better idea – my wife does that and sometimes gets big gaps between contracts if she can’t get them to line up nicely.

Worth putting the feelers out before you do anything drastic though, polish up your CV and get it out to some agencies and see if anything interesting comes in.

I did it a few years back. It was the right decision.

Want to have a chat about it on Monday?

If you can commute, we are looking for good developers in Hyde. PMs welcome.

Well the good news is that I’ve probably got enough cash stashed away to last a year or more. The bad news is that I’ll have to give up on the new road bike I have my eye on.

First tactic might be to demand a short immediate sabbatical to cool off. Got a couple of weeks holiday booked at the beginning of August anyway, if I can extend that for the whole month that might be a short term solution.

You could always go on the sick until you can find a contracting job.

Mrs Daz suggested that but to be honest I’m not really sick so would feel a bit of a fraud. The stress is real, but it’s mostly manageable apart from the odd occasion where the urge to flounce hits epic proportions. This morning being a case in point.

It seems like nice place ^

edit – damn – a minute too slow!

Rachel

I left a job that seemed to be an organisation going down the pan, and taking me with it. I was stressed, not achieving what I wanted/needed to do, and they were wrong side of the Charity Commission at the time (over issue that pre-dated me, but I was then responsible for).

I walked, as I had some alternatives (supply teaching and outdoor education freelancing).

Hindsight was that I really should have stayed, the organisation fired most of the freeloaders and lead weights just after I left. Since then it sorted out its issues and has grown, and to have stayed in stable employment would have been much better than the subsequent own business debacle that I then found myself in…

That said, life took many good turns since then, and I am happy here – just poorer financially.

Essentially, yes, I did this, about 4 years ago.

I left a well paid, easy job for something that could have been the ideal role.

It became fairly apparent, quite quickly that expectation and reality were a little way off the mark, which is being polite.

Clearing out at home recently, I found a notepad of ‘events’, or notable points from the 12 month period I worked there – reading back now, it’s actually laughable.

I think I mentally checked out of that job around the 5 month point. I was somewhat fortunate that my previous employer was desperate for me to return, so always had that in my back pocket which was a lovely position to be in. I basically did next to nothing for the next 7 months. Looking back, I was a total arse. I was pretty petulant on purpose to the point of being difficult and rude. But, it was a reaction to the circumstances & it actually taught me a valuable lesson about managing people and situations – which was along the lines of reaping and sowing. It could have been a script of exactly how not to manage, well, basically anything.

It took them until the year point to have the ‘chat’ & we parted ways. I had a nice 7 months to that point, riding my bike, every day.

It just about sums up how poor the processes were. An effective management team (or even someone with half a clue) would have picked up on an issue within a few weeks & dealt with it. I doubt even to this day they realise the extent to which I took the piss.

I’m going through my every-so-often “is this really what I want to do” phase at the moment. It’s probably not, but I don’t know what is (other than retiring, and there’s a lack of funding for that…)

I thought you wanted to be a spaceman?

to be honest, I quite fancy being a postman

Done in the past as a youngster with no responsibilities over twenty years ago, couldn’t do it now unless someone bought me a lottery ticket that came up trumps.

At the same time I threw my toys out of the pram and walked out, due to being in a working environment that most closely resembled a chimps tea party, Mrs Binners was also having a miserable time at work. She’d ended up as a department manager, by default, after a round of redundancies, in a toxic atmosphere. And to add insult to injury, without a pay rise. She was working crazy hours, and under enormous stress.

Our house was not a happy place.

She also hit the tipping point where something had to give. So she basically also walked out. She then got a job on a considerably lower salary but doing something she loved.

Our house, despite a much-reduced income, is a far, far happier place. In fact, it’s nauseatingly cheerful! 😀

Priorities innit?

Having been a chef for most of my working life and having done relief work for a lot of time then I have always had that option to fall back on and I have walked out of jobs without notice and given notice plenty of times when I had nothing to go to , although chefs are usually in demand so it may not have been as dramatic as it seems . Always found it a really liberating experience . I have also stuck at jobs that i haven’t liked much but didn’t have the money in reserve to allow me to leave as I had a young family at the time . If it’s in your head to leave then I think you should do it and see how it pans out .

I did this and have been freelance for six years (edit: I wanted to walk out, almost blew my top one morning, but gave it a week to simmer, handed in my resignation with a formal complaint, and loaded remaining holiday into the month notice period).

In my case, it was a bad situation: Small company, I only answered to the MD, he had no scruples, was widely disliked in our field, and we didn’t like each other at all. The years since have been up and down, with a couple of really difficult ones, and a couple of really brilliant ones. I don’t regret leaving, partly because I do a lot more mountain biking now 🙂

Sometimes freelancing sucks – you’re either stressing about getting work, or stressing about getting it done. Because it depends on other people, the process of bringing a job in also tends to take much longer than you expect.

Recently I’ve been discussing boom and bust productivity with other freelancers too – we have days with loads of momentum, work late, then get much less done for a few days and feel like shit because we can’t sustain superhuman velocity. Better to pace yourself even if the coffee’s got you motivated…

Knowing you I don’t think you’ll have massive problems with that kind of time mismanagement ( 😀 ), and with your skills I expect you’d get pretty decent day rates.

First proper job I ever had I walked out on, 2.5 years of being so bored, but so heavily managed we literally had to ask to use the toilet made me quite ill mentally. Managed to work half my notice before every last speck of ‘giving a shit’ left me and I just couldn’t face going to work anymore.
At the time I was 19, single, living in a rented house-share you paid by the week and never dared ever have post sent their so I walked out, packed my bags a sodded off to Australia for a year.

Fast forward 13 years and I was equally as unhappy with my last employer, ruthless mean spirited pair of ‘next Tuesdays’ who when I started making them lots of money loved me, but it didn’t last it became “yeah but what had you done lately” when their shit business couldn’t handle the extra customers and they were losing them faster than I could bring them in. I made two really grave mistakes – 1st completely automated the process so it would tick over with minimal input from me and spew out new customers every day, and then telling them so. 2nd when they stole a bonus owed and couldn’t justify why, and then doubled my target for the year after (which would have cut my take-home by a 3rd) I told them to stick it – before I had somewhere to go, they called my bluff and made me ‘redundant’. Worked out alright in the end, I got a job 4 days later, the pay-off was enough to cover the lost bonus, but luck doesn’t make a bad decision a good one, I should have found a job first and avoided all the sleepless nights and stress.

Has anyone just stuck their CV on job sites to see what response they get?

I’m sick of my job – but have no idea what is open to me as a 48yr old bloke with sod-all qualifications but a lifetime of working in and running print businesses!

the-muffin-man – Member

Has anyone just stuck their CV on job sites to see what response they get?

I’m sick of my job – but have no idea what is open to me as a 48yr old bloke with sod-all qualifications but a lifetime of working in and running print businesses!

Yep, in 2009 and I got a flood of replies, all from shady ‘agencies’ who wanted to meet me straight away – sadly they were all in the business of sell half-day courses for a massive fee due to grants the Welsh Government were offering at the time.

More recently I mistaken set my LinkedIn to ‘looking for work’ somewhere in the settings, I got 2-3 messages a week from different things, some good, most rubbish. I’ve deleted my account now.

Has anyone just stuck their CV on job sites to see what response they get?

Depending on your line of work I reckon Linkedin is probably a much better bet. The few recruitment agents I know use it as a first port of call if they need to approach anyone cold. I’m not an active user and haven’t updated my profile in a few years and still get regular contact requests and expressions of interest in my CV. Of course the vast majority of these are time-wasters and I ignore them but if was going to put up information anywhere in the hope of random opportunities landing on me linkedin would probably be the place.

It’s easier to get a job from a job etc. but sometimes you need a kick up the arse – that’s the reason I walked, otherwise I’d still be doing what I was doing and utterly miserable.

Missed this…

I don’t regret leaving, partly because I do a lot more mountain biking now

As you know I’m not sure I could do much more bike riding than I already do, but it’d be nice to try. And I can hear Mrs Daz now saying ‘so you want to give up your job so you can ride a bike more???’.

Knowing you I don’t think you’ll have massive problems with that kind of time mismanagement

Indeed. Danger is that I’d get far too used to the quiet periods 🙂

dazh – Member
Will I just find the same elsewhere? I quite fancy having a go at contracting (web, database development), after the obligatory extended summer break of course.

Ya, always same shite different place.

What you want is same shite different place but get pay even more.

😛

I was in almost an identical situation a year ago, eleven years at the same company, new ways of running the business meant more work being given to individuals, (I had at least five different things I was given to do at different times, some overlapped), with no extra time available, zero tolerance for small errors and continual ‘personal performance assessments, everyone under more and more pressure. I was actually feeling ill at the though of going to work, went to the Doctor I was so worried about my memory, forgetting small things and being criticised for it, had a panic attack in front of my supervisor one morning.
Finally told I was ‘being let go’, because I was “unable to perform to the standards now expected”.
I was never so glad to walk out of a job, although I was terrified about what I was going to do, I’d been in much the same line of work for over thirty-five years.
Got a new job within a month, driving cars for the logistics arm of a major car auction/transport business, and I absolutely love it!

What you want is same shite different place but get pay even more.

Couldn’t really GAS about the money. If that was my motivation there are far easier and simpler (although much more hazardous) ways of doing it than going to work every day.

Had someone do it to me (as an employer) and of course I’d say this but it was utterly unprofessional. First I knew was a big IT problem at 2 am he had fxd off to a far off island with no notice. His cock up cost a lot to fix. What he forgot is that karma is a right pr1ck and for 5 years I have systematically fired him from every contract he has got. I know, unfair but sometimes you need to remember not to sh1t in your bed.
Find something you want to do, make sure it’s not you, then resign gracefully.

dazh – Member

What you want is same shite different place but get pay even more.

Couldn’t really GAS about the money. If that was my motivation there are far easier and simpler (although much more hazardous) ways of doing it than going to work every day. [/quote] If you struggle even to go to work then it’s really time to do something else, as it will slowly get to your health if not careful. Get out quick while you still can. 🙂

NZCol – Member
What he forgot is that karma is a right pr1ck and for 5 years I have systematically fired him from every contract he has got.

NZcol is gooood. 😆

I know, unfair but sometimes you need to remember not to sh1t in your bed.

Totally fair if someone messes you around. 😛

I walked from my last job after talking with the management to explain how I felt. The first time I spoke with them they made the right noises so I hung around. Unfortunately it was clear fairly quickly that nothing was changing, so the second time I spoke to them was simply to state that I was off (after working my notice), no further discussion.

I worked my notice, and didn’t have a job to go to; I wanted to take a few months off after working near on 12 years with the same company.

Fortunately my industry was still ticking over nicely and I had a choice of places to go. Even if I was wanting to move onto pastures new, with the current oil price I wouldn’t consider it without another job lined up.

Bottom line OP is that I’d check out the marketplace for what you’re wanting to do before making any moves.

LittleNose – Member
Bottom line OP is that I’d check out the marketplace for what you’re wanting to do before making any moves.

^^^ True, true …

edit: you job used to be very hot but nowadays I don’t know. Database used to be hot stuff.

I am not convinced by all this “careful word will get out if you flounce” bollocks. It is a BIG world in IT. I have seen many flouncers me include do well post flounce.JFDI