Why I Quit First Job in IT | My Personal Disappointments

Feb 14, 2023

Hello everyone, nerds! This post will be very personal for me. I want to share my story, my thoughts and feelings about my first dismissal from an IT position. I have an infinite number of thoughts on this subject, however, I want to structure them into a personal story and I think this story can be useful to someone. For example, for those who are just starting their journey in IT or for those who, like me, had their first job in IT.

About Work

After university, I found a job quickly. I had no experience in IT before. Then I applied to a very large number of companies, the number of my applications was about two hundred, no less. However, I found a job very quickly, it took me two weeks after graduating from university. I was full of ambitions and I didn't need any summer holidays, I needed to satisfy my career ambitions.

I think it’s wrong to say the name of the company, it’s somehow unethical, so I’ll say this - this company worked in the travel segment and developed a metasearch engine for cheap flights. In fact, we developed a search engine that included air flight offers from a huge number of airlines and travel agencies and demonstrated these offers to the user in a convenient format without having to look for tickets on the official partner websites. I think at least once in your life you used the services of Skyscanner, and so we were developing a very serious competitor in the European market.

I worked in the b2b integrations team. My job was to establish interaction between the partner's API and our company's API in such a way that we would receive tickets from the partner and integrate them into our search engine. Our team was responsible for the correctness of each ticket transferred to us - it's time, date of departure, availability of luggage, destination, place of departure, class of transportation, airline and so on. The monetization of the search engine was due to the percentage of sales. In other words, if we sent a user to a partner's site and the user bought a ticket, we get a percentage from the partner (airline or travel agency).

What is the Difficulty

In short, there were only 5 of us in the team. Imagine how many airlines and travel agencies there are in the world. Great amount. We have integrated about fifty airlines, and it is difficult to count the number of travel agencies. Each of these partners needs not just integration, which takes a lot of time and effort, each integration needs support, which is even more difficult.

Quit Job Meme

Something constantly happens to someone - the API does not respond, the partner has a new curl, a new API, the site does not work, information is not transmitted correctly through the API, and so on. Moreover, we were also very often contacted by customer support with their problems and a request to help - the client received a ticket with the wrong date, or without luggage, or the wrong airline was indicated on the booking (this means that incorrect information was passed to us in the API).

It is also worth adding revisions. We called revisions comparisons of sales reports from our side (that is, according to our statistics) and from the partner’s side (sales records from partner databases) and in all my time there has never been such a case when the revisions was perfect. The amounts constantly diverged and much more. We conducted investigations, found out what was the reason with each of the hundreds of partners. And all this we did in five. Five people, one of whom was a project manager and did not really participate in the analysis of problems. (I haven't mentioned yet that in addition to flights, we were engaged in hotel integrations, which also requires additional time and partner support)

In short, it was a huge array of work, just unrealistic. If there were about a hundred tickets from partners on Monday, then by Wednesday there will be one hundred and fifty, provided that we work without a lunch break. And I love to eat.

Here you need to pay tribute to the team. I ended up in a team of great specialists, where everyone was a professional in something of their own. I was very glad that I got to them - they taught me a lot and were patient when I did not understand something due to my inexperience. Then the impostor syndrome appeared in me, I thought that I was just lucky to be here, among the people who help me and the tasks that were interesting to me at first. But then, a lot has changed.

Why I Quit

Exactly six months later, I quit. The fact is that at about 3 months of work, new tasks simply ended. You may have already noticed that their number is simply huge, but after three months the variability ended, the tasks began to repeat themselves, and their number was exhausting. In fact, the whole working day was reduced to a routine, to repetitive tasks in huge numbers.

Programming Meme

I began to understand perfectly the internal activities of the company - I understood how it works, what approach to each partner that we integrate and how to correctly get new partners, how to communicate with them and persuade them to integrate with us. I didn't want to give it up. It's like buying a new house and moving in a couple of months because you're tired of going to work on the same road.

It was a tough decision. Stick to certainty and complete tasks that I already do well, or keep looking for myself and finding a job that doesn't make me feel like I'm learning something new every day. I opted for the second option.

I Regret

Only now I realize that I regret it. Yes, this story has a sad ending, but very vital. I left my first job in IT at the height of the crisis, when many IT companies were laying off their employees, thereby struggling with crisis conditions. Because of this, I could not find a job for a very long time. Any job in IT. I was ready to do anything, study as much as needed and devote at least 60 hours a week to work, just to find something.

Yes, the end of the story is sad, but such is life. I was striving for something new for myself, for opportunities and unique experiences, and received 4 months of unemployment, longing and regret that I quit working with a team that I liked for the sake of diversity that I will not get in any workplace ( I am only now coming to this conclusion).

Unfortunately, sooner or later, tasks that once seemed diverse become monotonous, boring and routine. Yes, it's terrible, but it's true, regardless of where you work. I understand it only now, but I'm glad I understood it now and not in retirement.

Conclusion

I have a very personal story about why I left my first IT job. If you are planning to change your career path and go to IT, then keep in mind that in this area, as elsewhere, there is a lot of monotonous work that requires a lot of your time and attention. There is always an infinite amount of work, and there will only be more.

The whole image of a freelancer in shorts by the pool with a laptop, unfortunately, is just a myth. At my first job, I worked remotely and spent only half an hour working in shorts by the pool and only during my lunch break. This is all a myth and there is no such work. Working in IT is hard work, where you constantly need to sacrifice your personal time to meet deadlines and very often do monotonous work, and it doesn’t matter who you are - a developer or a support specialist. You'd rather be sitting in a dark room with no light ruining your eyesight than by a pool in the sun.

I do not want to alienate anyone, but this is the reality of working in IT and there is no getting away from it. I just want you to keep this in mind as you choose this path for yourself and prepare for what you will have to put up with monotony and overwork. That was my experience. I hope it was helpful to you.