When I Say Goodbye: Top 5 Signs It's Time to Quit Your Job. My Experience
On our site, we often write about how to get an interview in the company of your dreams, how to behave, what to do, and what to avoid when dealing with HR recruiters, but today I will share with you my opposite experience about what signs your work and interaction with the team indicate that it is time for you to change your place of work.
I recently did this analysis myself. I remembered all my jobs, remembered how I worked in the last months before my quitting, and compiled a small list of things that clearly pushed me to such a difficult step as quitting. After doing a little analysis in my head, I'm ready to share my findings with you. You can treat this list like a checklist and mentally check the boxes next to the items that you yourself have encountered.
Overworking
The most, perhaps, unpleasant factor in my entire career, I think is overworking. I work in the field of IT and for this area overworking is a common occurrence (I had such a stereotype in my head), but remember, this is not normal for any area and not normal for a person in general. The 8-hour working day was invented for a reason, it fully reflects the productivity of a person. A person is simply not physically capable of maintaining a high-quality pace of work in any field.
Overwork Statistics - Spiceworks (source)
I was sure that this was normal. I was young when I worked nights when I worked weekends and holidays. I was interested in everything, I wanted to learn new things or impress someone, but here's a little secret for you - this way you don't impress anyone. So you only leave an opinion about yourself as a person on whom you can dump part of the monotonous work because he is ready to work both on weekends and at night.
Overworking can be useful only in the short term, for example, in order to have time to hand over the project by the deadline, but in the long term, it will not lead you to increase, or to increase competence, or to increase wages, but only to worsen your health and psychological states. That is why it was the first point for me to quit.
Cutting Initiative
In any place I work, I, first, want to work with the team, not with the client. For a while, after graduating from university, I worked as a technical support engineer in a small team of 5 people, 5 experienced professionals. I learned a lot from them and adopted their experience in order to grow professionally and communicate with them in the same language, understand them from half a word.
Professionally Acceptable Quitting Reasons - Recommended Reddit Thread (source)
Over time, when I learned a lot, I began to offer initiatives to optimize some processes. Those who have ever worked in technical support know that this is a huge amount of work, which, as a rule, falls on a small team. Therefore, the optimization of processes and their acceleration is so important and beneficial for the team and the company as a whole.
I offered the team my solutions, my scripts, and my business solutions that could speed up projects and work with clients, but any of my initiatives were rejected. I would understand if my initiative was inefficient and stupid, but I've been getting extremely positive feedback from the team that my scripts do speed up the process - not much, but still some work is cut. Not bad.
However, neither our team leader nor our project manager accepted my initiative. It did not require any computing power, did not require any resources at all, but, nevertheless, it was still not even considered for use, for absolutely no reason. This was the second point for me, after which there were thoughts of quitting. I was a young specialist and new and fresh ideas that I wanted to translate into reality, and if they don’t let me do this, then I will look for those companies that value the initiative of employees - I thought.
10 Minutes Before Lunch
While studying at the university, I did an internship at a small IT startup. I was not paid for it and I worked there solely for my resume and portfolio. Everyone understood this - both me and my managers. There, I had a monotonous job, like any other internship, no matter what field or company you are an intern. I was not interested in working there, there were no opportunities for growth, there were no people from whom I would like to learn something, and there were no interesting projects, nevertheless, I worked with them because of an extra line in my resume.
While working there, I found another point for myself that clearly screams to you that you do not belong here, and it's time to quit - you leave for lunch 10 minutes earlier. It may sound silly, but that's the way it is. It is very difficult to force the human body to do what it does not like, and even if you lie to yourself that you like your job, that you have to be patient a little more and everything will be fine, your body will not lie to itself, and you will not even notice how to go to lunch break 5, 10, 15 minutes earlier, thereby skipping working minutes.
This point also includes early leaving for a smoke break, to the toilet, or a coffee break with colleagues. Anything that distracts you from work. A truly enthusiastic person is very difficult to distract from anything, especially for such trifles as a smoke break or lunch. If you have noticed that you are shirking work with such trifles, then if I were you, I would think about whether it is worth staying at this job at all and whether you really like it.
The Lack of Possibilities
It would be too easy to say that one of the reasons for quitting may be a simple inability to get promoted. This, of course, is true, because if you try, to help the team and a really valuable and irreplaceable employee, but they don’t give you a promotion, then you have a reason to leave. However, here I mean something a little different. Here I am talking first of all about the impossibility of the company itself to grow further.
I have already talked about how I worked as a technical support engineer after university. Then I understood that the integration and support team hit its ceiling and simply could not grow and develop further. Every day the team did the same thing, without any desire to improve or change something in their work, there was no desire to grow. I looked at other teams - development or marketing and saw exactly the same thing.
People did not want to keep up with the times, learn something new and apply what they learned in their work. This conservatism is very harmful to businesses, especially to IT companies, which should now develop like crazy. Be sure to look not only at yourself and your abilities and knowledge but also at the team and the company in which you work - and can they also take the initiative and learn as quickly as you?
Misunderstanding with Team
Internal communication is often underestimated when talking about the productivity of a company and its employees. Very often, such problems are trying to be solved by group trainings and even psychologists. Once, due to a misunderstanding within my team, the project manager organized a group session with a psychologist for us, and once a week we attended classes with this psychologist online.
Why People Are Quitting Their Jobs - Statista (source)
The result was that for several months we communicated as friends, set quite clear and realistic goals for ourselves, achieved them together, and our Jira board was empty faster than usual, but this continued for about two months and the misunderstanding problem returned. Once again, we looked at the solution to the same problem in different ways, and opinions again diverged on some business decisions and competent spending of the company's budget.
This misunderstanding greatly affects not the work process (although it also), but rather the psychological state. After a working day, you are squeezed like a lemon, not because there were many difficult decisions made and problems solved, but because you spent more time on disputes and persuasion than on the implementation of the project itself. This is also a very important item in our checklist - reasons to say goodbye to the company and quit.
Conclusion
This list does not include items about wages, promotions, and other things that you already know very well and understand everything about. Here we just tried to speculate about what reasons for the departure of valuable employees may be related to the team, motivation, and the desire to learn and develop professionally. I hope I managed to share my experience with you and from now on you will spend your time only on something and on someone who is really worth it.