Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
Three years in I think our company is, on average, as good as the best 'out there', but when individuals hit rough patches (stress, poor growth, low autonomy, etc.) they often start looking for a new job. Even if they decide to stay put, they sometimes plow on with low morale, berating themselves for not trying a new gig.
I believe other good software companies would have just as many problems - though maybe not the same ones as us - and that some of my despairing colleagues would be happier if they had that mindset, focusing on making the most of the opportunities they have and driving change instead of pining for a nirvana. But maybe my expected cosmic background shittiness is too high, I'm romanticising pointless suffering, and we should actually all bugger off.
How can first timers make better judgements about their situations - both in terms of being grateful for what's good around them and critical of the genuinely bad?
PS: For those who have been at one company for most of their career, but who felt like quitting for one or more reasons, did things get better or did you just accept the tradeoffs?
Have you ever truly regretted quitting a job - why?
Money aside, did you ever leave a job you were happy with to find one where you were even more happy? Did that work?
59 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadIf you are unsure if its worth to stay, do some interviews.
I recently did 3 interviews and found out that my current job was better than the offered positions.
After 2 years I switched jobs (thanks to a friend) to get a better salary, less pressure, but also a bit more boring, and too much paperwork.
After 2 more years the huge amount of paperwork started to really bug me. Fortunately 2 job offers came from former colleagues and I accepted the second one.
This job was really awesome and I stayed many years and did not follow up on any jobs that were offered to me.
After these years however some changes in management above me led to significant shifts in my projects and suddenly I was interested again in job offers, and this is how I ended up at my current 4th full time job.
I'm quite content at my current position, still I interviewed with 3 positions that were relayed to me by a headhunter. All 3 offers had at least one catch (the ones I did not interview with were even worse), so I agreed with that headhunter to not contact me again.
I've never regretted quitting a job. The pay rises have often been surprising - the funniest one was returning as a contractor to a workplace I'd gotten bored and frustrated with as a junior/intermediate engineer, getting paid 3x what I was paid before. That was eye opening, and a lesson about negotiation and market rates I wish I'd learned years earlier.
If you are interested in switching track into management or technical leadership, and have no prior experience in those roles, it may be much easier to do this while staying within one org for a longer period of time, assuming the org has such roles to fill (growing company etc) and they are open to mentoring you.
Another aspect is that different colleagues' subjective experience of the same work situation can vary wildly. I've joined teams as a contractor in somewhat challenging corporate environments and projects and had a lot of fun, where some of my colleagues who had already been there for several years had a lot of emotional baggage, and would react to day-to-day situations with much frustration and pessimism. Even if the company is objectively a pretty good place to work, individual workers can end up completely sick of the company's particular problems / politics / failures.
If you ever find yourself obsessing over thoughts related to work, and it impacts your mental health and enjoyment of life outside of work -- that is perhaps a signal of looming burnout, and that it could be a great time to take care of yourself and find a different job. Even switching to a job that is worse on paper in some respects can be mentally like a holiday if it lets you completely refresh and clock off work each week with no mental baggage. Sometimes in larger orgs it is possible to get some of these benefits if you can jump sideways onto a different project.
I have, once. About 10 years ago. But I ended up returning to the company I left and keeping the 20% pay raise I got when I came back. I was happier my second time at the company, after having experienced a truly toxic work environment when I had left.
I stuck around another 9 years. Just left in December. New job starts Monday. Confident I won't regret it this time.
I understand you said money aside but money is genuinely all you should care about. You are trading decades of your waking life to the rat race. It should be your first, and in my opinion, most imperative concern. If you were truly a generous and austere person you'd be a volunteer.
Frequently. I've only recently maintained "tenure" in my later engineering years. Mostly because I don't want to fight with scrappy new grads for positions anymore. First piece of advice I can give you is ignore anything about "fun tech stack" or "culture". It's all bullshit. Of course, parrot the lines they want to hear about how these are the things you look for. Appear fun and excited to work in their "fun stack" in their "culture". Use this as cover for what you really want: money. At the end of the day money may not buy happiness but I have rarely met a happy person that can't afford to be comfortable. Beer coolers, pizza, ping pong, and "fun activities" don't buy you time with your family, friends, and neighbors. Money does.
Second piece of advice: never fall for the "find a job you love" trope. Remember this: if you do not own the company you will never love it. You may like it. Hell, you may enjoy it. But the specter of a layoff, getting fired due to a bad review, etc will always be just a few steps behind you. Always remember as a software engineer the pinheaded MBAs have you squarely under the "cost center" line in the balance sheet. And no, getting shares in a company does not imply ownership no matter how many times HR tells you so.
Fact of the matter is for the first two decades of your career you should honestly be looking to move on from any company in <= 5 years. So, a minimum of 4 companies in 20 years. You'll want to reduce that to a move-on-rate of every 3 or so years if you're in start up land. Loyalty is not awarded. Not here, and not anywhere else. That ship sailed 50 years ago.
The reason? More money and more responsibility. You have a chance to redefine yourself at every new job. These redefinitions can bring you more money and more power. More money and more power is very "sticky" and you'll find people who "fail up" execute this strategy brilliantly. You are more likely to see a significant raise via quitting than by staying around. This advice is universal. It applies equally to tech as it does to landscaping.
Of course, this is just a rule of thumb. Don't leave a company that values you and gives you good raises every so often. Evaluate carefully the opportunity cost. One example from my career: I had a job where I made $X where $X was a little below average. I liked the company and the people. I interviewed around after I got my second or third "money is tight" in a review (despite others seemingly getting rank and pay). I found a company that I could tolerate willing to pay me 1.3x $X. That is a slam dunk. Without question I put my two weeks in and GTFO. Especially when you are young this is very important. If your raise is 10% and a competitor offers you 15% you may want to weigh other facts. But when you're talking multiples of your potential raise...just leave. You are not married to the company and they are CERTAINLY not married to you. If you like your coworkers that much get their phone numbers and meet them at a bar. Despite the himming and hawing from your boss they're probably doing the same thing as you.
There do exist companies that value tenure more than others. An easy example to describe is that Amazon backloads their stock awards so if they say they will give you $X over 4 years when they hire you, you might get (made up numbers) 30% in the first two years and 70% in the next two. One explanation is that this is to make it cheaper to hire people because many will hate the job and quit after two years, but another is that it expresses that the company values long-tenured employees. One can survey salary reports online and get an impression of whether the company more values people with a lot of experience at the company or people who were recently hired.
Like most engineers I didn't start out that way so perhaps you are right and a few grains of salt would make it better. However, I do not think the average HNer represents a weird aberration of happiness on the scale. I think most companies that hire on this site likely chronically underpay people. Not their fault most likely. HN caters to early stage startups.
However, I think my overarching message is clear. Happiness is entirely relative. At any rate, you should never prioritize happiness over financial security because you should be well compensated, first and foremost, for the time in your life you will never get back. Your compensation should be even better for dealing with a bad company. You might argue that spending those hours of your life in a relative happy state is healthier. I'd agree. But to me, that eventuality comes about after establishing good pay. I don't plan on retiring extremely wealthy but I think I'll be okay looking back at the sacrifices I've made sitting on the veranda with fewer financial worries. Perhaps this is a uniquely American perspective. I don't know.
Certainly, trading $100k and a good job for $150k and a job that gets you yelled at all the time is not a very good trade. Analyze the opportunity cost. The big point here is two things I think and I think you'd agree:
1. Analysis of opportunity cost is important. That means, to me, quantifying "happiness" with some dollar value. Is happiness worth $10k to you? $30k? I guess it depends. I'd actually quite enjoy a research position, for example, but I cannot take the make-ends-meet-and-no-retirement pay that most academic positions give.
2. People are often afraid to leap into a new position. To me, this is because they fail to quantify happiness with some dollar value. People often use qualitative metrics. Those are useful but only in the context of the quantitative reality.
Personally, I think most people don’t quit because of a lack of quantitative approaches but rather because they are afraid about losing what they have, ending somewhere else that’s worse, making big, irreversible-seeming decisions, etc.
And truly the right reasons are whatever you want them to be. It could be solely pay, wanting to try something new, or being tired of your current job. If you're sick of your current job, as you've noticed with your coworkers, it doesn't really go away. Sometimes the only way to see how good you have it is to leave and experience it yourself. You either stay miserable or take a chance elsewhere.
Just make sure you leave in good standing and you likely could even come back down the line, hiring is infinitely easier when you've worked with the candidate before.
On average, people who flip a coin to decide whether to quit are much happier when they quit.
To be precise, if we define H as self-scored-1-to-10 happiness six months after the coin toss, then B_wald = (EV[H | heads] - EV[H | tails]) / (Pr[quit | heads] - Pr[quit | tails]) = 5.203.
> The results of this paper suggest the presence of a substantial bias against making changes when it comes to important life decisions, as evidenced by that fact that those who do make a change report being no worse off after two months and much better off six months later. The results of this paper are, of course, merely suggestive. If the results are correct, then admonitions such as "winners never quit and quitters never win," while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.
Also, based on the GP’s formula, maybe the effects look large because people don’t do what the coin tells them very often so you are dividing by a small number?
The size of the effect is much larger than I'd expect.
> Also, based on the GP’s formula, maybe the effects look large because people don’t do what the coin tells them very often so you are dividing by a small number?
I don't think so. The same "small number" exists implicitly in the numerator, since (EV[H | heads] - EV[H | tails]) = 0 for anyone ignoring the coin.
For example, imagine quitting really does make you 5 points happier, but a random 99% of people ignore the coin, and 1% follow it.
The numerator would be (EV[H | heads] - EV[H | tails]) = 0.99*0 + 0.01*5, since happiness is unaffected by coin toss for people ignoring the coin. The denominator would be 0.01, so we'd get B_wald=5 as desired.
For the first few moves I doubled my salary. That helps a lot.
You grow a network too, you see things from different perspectives, get variety, learn new tools. A change is as good as a rest. And when all is said and done, if it doesn't make you happy, just take the extra experience and increased salary and go back.
But look around you, how many people who left the company ever came back?
IME the advice was good because companies tend to value you as little more than who they hired, the jobs market values you for who you are now, which changes quickly early in your career.
Good luck either way.
When your vacation ends, do you just quit and not give 2 weeks notice?
If your gut is saying it is time to move on, you should probably listen.
But it wasn't because the work was unfulfilling. I've never really given that any thought because I was working to earn money and agreed to do what they needed done.
I have worked at a couple places where someone with a much higher pay grade quit and I was asked to take over their position but not offered a raise in pay. I quit on the spot when that happened. I have never felt anything close to regret over that.
But I have known friends over the years who have. They had a sweet gig at a great company and they didn't really realize how good they had it until afterwards.
I tried to talk a few of them out of that who, after they quit, came back and told me they regretted not listening to me.
Personally, I have had a pretty hectic, but also "rewarding", life. I'm 63 now and just getting by. Others I know who got and stuck it out working for a company that paid them well are doing much better.
Don't get me wrong, I have no regrets. I'll just say that if you have it pretty good, ride that for as long as you can cause shit happens.
I have never regretted quitting a job I disliked.
I asked for my old job back (remotely) and have been there since. I now realize that if I rule out any job with any web or db’s in it then I likely rule out 99% of all dev jobs. And that’s fine.
My first job out of school was at a really top-notch place. I grew a lot early on but growth started to slow a bit already by 1 year. I became frustrated with things and wanted to leave. In retrospect, I still think that was probably fine / the right move for me at the time - but what I'd really like to have known is how to make better of the current situation. I lacked the emotional maturity and perspective to take things more into my own hands. Admittedly, I've gained most of my wisdom from job-hopping and seeing things at different places.
I would advise you to be prepared to leave, but have an honest conversation with your manager about your frustrations (and also what makes you happy there). If it's a good place, they'll reciprocate by helping you towards your goals. If not, then you tried, and you can feel good about leaving.
Also just in general, I find average tenure is a very strong indicator of things. Crowd wisdom is important. If most people leave after X time, there might be good reason for it. If your company's average tenure is much longer, then you should try to figure out why those people are happy to stay so long
If you ever suspect you might get laid off or forced out via an unacceptable change in your working conditions, start looking immediately. As stupid as it sounds to anybody who hasn't accepted it as normal, its an open secret that many companies consciously discriminate against unemployed people so it's easier to find another job if you're currently employed.
Those companies are generally terrible places to work with toxic people.
I think it’s important for your career growth to get experience with different teams, different products, and different verticals. It’s always a gamble, but it’s also one that makes you stronger every time.
Bottom line, whether you're happy or not with your job, you should probably move.
There are some downsides. Engineers are far removed from the money and complex problems often require the work of many people. Some of that work is 100% necessary and sometimes not valued (writing tests). The typical mistake I see is companies rewarding people who delivered big greenfield projects before the projects have been proven to actually work. A few people on the lucky team get raises, bonuses, promotions, and then more then half the time, the project fails and the older stand-by that was being supported and slowly improved by the less-cool engineers continues to being in all the money. Those engineers then get pissed and some fraction quit.
So a few major caveats * correctly identifying the top 3% is difficult for upper management * identifying too early leads to false positives and backlash * because it’s far from the money, many programmers are quasi-communist in terms of thinking about team deliveries, so highlighting the output of a single engineer makes one person happy but half a dozen mad. There are many companies that don’t announce promotions too far and wide for that reason
Maybe people leave after getting a bonus because they postpone leaving until they get paid for their work.
Did you check for confounders?
I was miserable at my first software job. I liked the people I worked with, the company was small/casual, I thought I had it pretty good. But underneath I was deeply unhappy. So I saved up some money, quit, and tried freelancing for a few months. Parts of that were great, I learned things, but overall it wasn't for me. So then I went back and looked for a new full-time job. That one ended up being the best job I've had, and really showed me how much I can love my work in the right circumstances.
None of that would have happened if I'd just stayed and gritted my teeth
I would ask yourself: are you really happy? If so, great! But if part of you is unhappy or even just curious, go see what else is out there! There's very little risk if you wait to quit until you've found a job, especially if you're young and without dependents. Don't assume what you've got is the best you can hope for. Take an abundance mindset, and go learn about yourself and your field! You can't predict what will happen, you just have to go out and see
I am not talking about job hopping, not at all, but after 20 years in a company it becomes a sort of a marriage and this is not healthy for you, even if it is great for the company. Your marriage is for life, your employer is not.
Another moment to leave is when you did not learn anything new in the past 6 months. In IT, this is not good.
Even if your first job is great, you just have no basis for comparison. If your next job is great too, then swell - now you can work there confidently! If it sucks, you try again. The knowledge you gain by trying a few places is better than sitting in one place, even if that place is actually really good.
For me, my first job was ok. My second job was ok, but in different ways: some things it did way better then job #1, some things way worse. By the end of my second job, I have at least the start of an idea of what I liked and disliked, and used that to inform my third job search.
Really the third job search is where it's really at: you have a lot more options (as a mid or senior engineer) and you have two data points about what you want and don't want in a job. This allows you to optimize around what the best job for you is. My third job lasted my about 5 years until an acquisition because I had dialed in what I liked by that point. If I'd stayed at my first job, I'd never have found that.
You don't know, but it very likely will.