It’s time to quit your shitty job

If it’s been months since you had a day where you feel good—

If you hate getting out of bed in the morning because that means you’ll have to go to work—

If your job is tiring you out so much you can’t get through the day without a nap—

It’s time to quit your shitty job. It’s time to quit your shitty job and go someplace better, a job where a good night’s sleep is all you need. A job where you’re valued. A job where people don’t shout at each other, or demean you, or destroy the project you’ve put all your energy into.

But quitting can be difficult: you have a sense of commitment, the fear of change, the indecision about whether your job is really that shitty. So to help you make your decision, and quit in the best possible way, in the rest of this post I will cover:

1. Identifying a shitty job.
2. Whether you should quit (spoiler: yes).
3. Preparations you should make before quitting: legal, bureaucratic, social.
4. When to quit.
5. How you should quit.

(Note that some of this will be US-centric, since that’s where I live and what I know best.)

Identifying a shitty job

Shitty jobs can be surprisingly hard to identify.

Sometimes this is because you don’t have a reasonable baseline, or the shittiness has become normalized through exposure. I’ve heard of companies with the following symptoms, for example, and I would consider either grounds for immediately starting a search for a better job:

• People shouting at each other during meetings on a regular basis.
• Getting paid late. Money for working hours is the basic contract of employment: if you’re paid late more than once you’re being told that contract isn’t important.

Another reason you might not notice you have a shitty job is a subtle shift over time. A good job slowly gets worse, and your existing relationships and loyalty blind you to the symptoms—for a while, anyway. You might be forced to reconsider due to:

• Layoffs, especially while the company still continuing to hire.
• Managers being hired without being interviewed by their future direct reports.

I could go on with other examples, but there are two core themes here:

1. Your company doesn’t value its employees.
2. You don’t trust company management in the aggregate.

Again, this may not always have been the case. You may trust many of your managers, and know that they value you and your coworkers. But things change, and not always for the better: what matters is the way the company is now, and who has power now, not the way it used to be.

Should you quit your shitty job?

Yes.

But you should do so at the right time, and with a little preparation.

When should you quit your shitty job?

Ideally, you should have another job lined up before you quit.

I once had to give notice of quitting unexpectedly, without prior planning. A more observant coworker gave notice the same day, but they had started looking a couple months before, when we had a round of layoffs. So while I spent a couple months not getting paid, they moved straight on to another job. The lesson: it pays to look for early signs of shittiness, so that you can leave in the best possible way.

Once you realize you have a shitty job, you should start interviewing elsewhere. Having an existing job improves your negotiation position, since you always have the implicit alternative offer of staying where you are. Two offers you can play against each other, or “I’m far along in interview process with another company” is better, but lacking that you need to downplay how shitty your current job is.

You’ll want a break to catch your breath and relax in between jobs: you can easily negotiate a couple of weeks time off in between jobs. A month shouldn’t be much harder to get.

In practice, your job may be so awful that it leaves you with no time or energy to look for another job. In this case you might be forced to quit without a new job lined up. You can prepare for this by living below your means and saving some money.

Preparing for quitting

Here are some things you should do before quitting any job:

• Get non-work contact details for all your coworkers.
• Maximize any benefits you can. When I quit a job with a 401k and donation matches, I maxed those out early in the year. Note that in small enough companies HR might notice when you change 401k contributions.
• Try to get continued access to your company’s open source projects that you might want to work on after you leave. Often asking is sufficient: I once asked the VP of engineering after I gave notice, and was told I could keep commit access (presumably because I was effectively offering to do work for free).
• Write down details about your work that can help make your resume look better: specific numbers you improved (sales, performance, costs), and the like. If the company has an overly broad definition of proprietary information you might not be able to put them on your resume—but the company might fold one day, so it’s good to have a reminder of what you did.

At a shitty job you may also need to make copies of some documents: specifically, any emails or other documents where promises are made to you re pay, benefits, and so on. Once you’ve been paid what you’re owed and you’ve left your job, you won’t need those anymore and they should be deleted or shredded. But when it’s your last day at work and you’re trying to get the back pay they owe you, you want to make sure you have documentation.

Speaking of back pay, if you work for a company that has an “unlimited vacation” policy, take some vacation before you quit. You’re not going to get paid for those vacation days you haven’t taken. (In general, if a company has “unlimited vacations” I recommend taking lots of vacation throughout the year, since it’s use or lose it.)

How to quit

It’s a shitty job, and you may be utterly relieved at leaving it, but—you should quit politely. Your management may simply be misguided, or suffering under pressures you don’t understand (VCs in cover-your-ass mode can be quite destructive). Your manager might grow as a person. Your co-workers might end up working with you again.

So just give your notice, with the smallest possible amount of time you have to stay there. You can tell close coworkers why you’re leaving (they probably already know). And on your last day of work just leave, quietly and politely.

For a while you will feel sad: those projects will never get finished. But mostly you will feel relief.

It’s time—

—time to quit your shitty job.

As I mentioned above, I once made the mistake of hanging on when I shouldn’t have, unlike a more clued-in coworker. (You can hear the whole story by signing up for my Software Clown newsletter, where I share 20+ years of my mistakes so that you can avoid them.)

Don’t make my mistake. I had to quit anyway, and without the benefit of advance planning or having a job lined up. Start looking for a new job now, while you’re still able to hold on—your job probably probably won’t be getting any better.