Don't get me wrong, I perform! And they've let me make a lot of changes that fix many of the problems they've had.

But my mind's always on my side jobs and how fast I can grow them into a business that can support us full-time. The inefficiencies at a mature business just bug me so much.

I know that there were quite a few problems above me. Lack of leadership carries far and wide and there was a disconnect between what the products did and what the management thought it did. Lack of money (think lack of compensation, lack of tools, lack of time for anything but immediate returns) did not help either. I do keep questioning whether I was doing all the wrong things or if I was put in a situation designed for me to fail, or perhaps both.

After I left I understand the company hired three different people to replace me: a manager, a dev lead, and a support engineer. I suppose that's some kind of a sign that I was trying to do too many things at once. Most of the engineering team also left after I did. The least I could do is give them the great recommendations they all deserved so all of them moved onto exciting new pastures. However, I cannot help but feel like I failed at this task that I felt sure I could tackle and I don't understand why.

Please excuse the rant. These types of topics always trigger those same feelings in me.

Edit: now I work as a developer on 2-3 person teams. I have no reports. I get to be productive again! I can write code that doesn't have to suck to compensate for poorly chosen deadlines. This is good for the soul. I do miss leading a team though; not managing but really leading. One of my proudest moments was when I was allowed to follow a system of estimates and sprints I put together and for 8 weeks my team delivered on schedule and exactly what was promised. That was one of my more joyful moments.

In the end the company screwed my over. But I have a better job now so it worked out ok.

Ultimately, after a year, I decided to step back into a normal software engineer role after getting the team pointed in the right direction and getting someone else lined up to handle the management.

Here are some things that led to me stepping down or that I noticed along the way.

My biggest issue was with communication. There were some people on the team who were dying for feedback on how they could do better, but I wasn’t in the habit of looking for those thing when someone was doing well, so I never had a good answer. I was never good at giving praise or any kind. I would also put off the hard conversations and bad news never gets better with age. This made issues (generally minor ones) go on longer than they should have or turn into bigger ones.

I tend to hold myself to an impossible standard and didn’t think it was fair to hold others to it. Part of me knew that as a manager, delegating work, that there would be mistakes and I had to accept that. However, I would let way too much slide and lowered the bar more than I should have. I thought I was being nice, but all it did was stop the team from getting better. I don’t think anyone outside the team noticed, my boss and other leaders in the company would always give us outstanding feedback, but I always knew things could be better. When I was just a guy in the team it was easy for me to throw out things or nit pick, but it felt different as “the boss”. Thankfully, a lot of the stuff was already pretty well tuned from my previous nit picking or various templates and systems I setup. When I think about it, every time I nit picked something, but acknowledged I was just being picky, everyone on the team always wanted to fix it and make it right. They liked that I did that stuff, but I stopped to avoid feeling like a micro manager.

When I told the team I was stepping down, they were all pretty upset and told me they wanted me to stay in the role, but it was stressing me out too much. I don’t know that anyone else noticed all the stuff above, but it weighed on me a lot.

On the other hand, I have a decade of full-time experience and I've been happy for about seven out of ten years. All things considered, that's not too bad. The other way to look at it is that I've had maybe five roles at one company, two another another, and one at a third, and I'd say four of those have been good. That's only 4/8, but it's possible to bail on bad roles and stay in good ones, which is how it's worked out to being good 70% of the time. Considering how other folks I know feel about their job, I can't complain about being happy 70% of the time.

In retrospect, some of my decisions have been really bad. If I could do it over again, I'd bail more quickly on bad roles and stay in good ones for longer.

My dumbest mistake was the time I was in an amazing position (great manager & team, really interesting & impactful work), except for two problems: an incredibly arrogant and disruptive person whose net productivity was close to zero who would derail all meetings and weird political shenanigans way above my pay grade. When I transferred, management offered to transfer the guy the guy to another team so I'd stay and I declined because I felt bad about the idea of kicking someone off the team.

From what I've heard, the problematic dude ended up leaving the team later anyway, so not having him kicked off didn't make any difference, and the political stuff resolved itself around the same time. The next role I ended up in was the worst job I've ever had. And the one after that is my current job, which is, well, at least it's no the worst job I've ever had. Prior to leaving the amazing job, I thought that it was really easy to find great jobs, so it wasn't a big deal to just go find another one. Turns out it's not always so easy :-). If I hadn't bailed on that and just fixed it, I'd be 4/6 and I could say I was happy with my job 80% of the time. Oh well, lesson learned. Looking back, I was incredibly lucky to get the roles that I did, but that same luck blinded me to the fact that it was luck and that there are some really bad jobs out there.

I used to dream about leaving that job, and I guess I just finally reacted in a way that got me out of it, even if it wasn't ideal. After I lost the job, my girlfriend explained that "for as much as you bitched about that job, you were never actually going to quit." and she was absolutely right. The fear of quitting and having to find a new job was too much for me.

I've been out of a job for a bit more than a year now. I see ads all the time that maybe I could do, but I don't always apply because I don't feel qualified for them. It's really starting to get to me.

I imagine some employees have left my company, too, because they were unhappy with the way I ran things. However, I have never resorted to lies and making promises I never meant to keep.

The world is big, and the chances that you happen to be in the optimal role at the optimal company are vanishingly small. In my book, a category of management failure is letting someone doggedly clutch on to something that's hard on both themselves and those around them.

I went on a medication with a side effect of anger. I was told that at the beginning, I was told that there were other drugs I could use instead. I dismissed the concern, I'd be fine.

I got cocky. I got complacent. I convinced myself that the company needed me and would never dare replace me. I started to get a really bad attitude - openly sneered at projects that I didn't think could succeeded. I was probably right but I didn't help anyone by my griping.

I lost the job. Technically I was 'laid off' but it was that or simply get fired. I lost friends with my unpleasant attitude. I made statements that made me cringe with embarrassment now.

I'm doing fine currently, and am on a new medication. I'm making less though that I would have at my old job, and if I'd stayed there I'd be a lot less worried about my future. They did hang on to experienced engineers and for some people it was their last job before retiring.

I could blame the medicine entirely, but the truth is I'm still an arrogant asshole and I still fall into the trap of believing I'm irreplaceable and can get away with whatever I want.

I wish I'd changed medications. I wish that I'd listen to people who tried to help, who told me that there were teams that didn't want to work with me. I'd be in a lot better place.

People should complain less and quit, and go get that dream job.

After I left, I realised how much of a negative effect the company was having on me. I had coworkers point it out and say they were sad about it but I never realised it myself until after I left and realised the difference just in my dreams nevermind all the other stuff.

After leaving a certain well known tech company, I also wanted to reflect honestly on the experience of working there. I tried to be honest, in a blog post you can probably find, about the problems with the place as well as moments when I wasn't at my best and could've done better.

Later, when I decided to go back to work, a prospective boss found the post and basically didn't hire me over it.

In this case, I felt fine about it. I could stand by what I wrote, and this person's not getting it was a signal for me that he wouldn't be a great boss.

But if I had written a rant and dropped some f bombs, I might have felt more silly.

Great respect for Rachel, I love her blog and she's clearly an amazing person and I wouldn't presume to tell her what to do. But, other readers, you're not Rachel. Consider your actions.

After quitting my job I set all kinds of expectations on myself. None were reasonable. Every time I had coffee with friends or past colleagues I would get asked how well I was doing and when I might be complete. From day one I felt pressure to achieve some milestones and when these questions came up I inevitably declared unrealistic targets. Worse, after I declared these targets I would feel like crap as began to realize I was nowhere close to meeting them. It got to the point where I would just stop working.

At one point, I stopped for 2 full weeks before deciding to face up to the truth: I obviously wasn't prepared for what I had decided to do. I was failing...

I then realized that even before I quit my job I had been in the habit of biting off way more than I could chew. See, these big corporations I had previously worked for had instilled some really bad habits. They would intentionally give employees more work than they could actually handle, with the idea that they were challenging their employees. No big surprise that every year the performance reviews would tend go the same way. Managers would identify with all the achievements and show understanding on initial goals that were not reasonable to begin with. It makes the employee grateful to manager for the big bonus and also makes the manager out to be a keen observer with great understanding. Certainly fosters a good relationship. The downside in all this is that they establish a really bad pattern/behaviour to have unreasonable goals with reasonable outcomes. I'm not going to get into the good and bad of the practice suffice to say it didn't help me when switching to a start-up. In fact it made me feel like shit along the way.

So I decided to stop and made a huge list of all the obligations in my life, and I mean everything. From family time to shovelling the snow, mowing the grass, and paying the bills, but more importantly I then prioritized them with a cost ranking. I discovered something interesting. It turned out the things I perceived as small or insignificant we're consuming large portions of my thinking time. While they would only take a very small amount of time to deal with, they had a big 'nag-effect' until they were done. For example: doing taxes. I spent months with background thoughts focused on my changed situation and wondering how optimize any re-situated tax implications. This item was always way down on my list in importance and should have been much higher had I understood myself well enough to identify it was costing me more than I realized.

I continued on by spending the next two months really simplifying my life. I took my list of 100+ ongoing obligations and reduced it to 10. ONLY 10: ongoing.

Afterwards, I got back to work and became really productive. These days I make sure I set small goals with really lofty timelines. I'm pretty sure some people will find faults in this new practice, as I can see obvious faults myself, but that's ok. I'm now the happiest I've been in 10 years and I don't fall into anymore motivational ruts. Week by week I'm consistently happy with my accomplishments and for the last 5 months or so I've maintained enthusiasm with almost everything I do.

So I'm not sure if this is helpful, but here's the advice:

Allow some time for understanding who you are and how you best operate. It's really important to get your head in the right place, before you start and along the way as you observe problems. Be aware of your thinking patterns and don't be afraid to make really big changes if that's what is required to get you there. Only set timelines that are reasonable to accomplish. Review all timelines/expectations and spend some time trying to call bullshit on them.

When I quit (due to stress, in a high work load phase of a project), he included my phrases verbatim in my written job reference (these are common in Germany). He literally wrote that I was unfocused and easily overworked. When I complained, he made sure to let me know that the stated issues were just what I told him in our 1:1 meetings. I can only assume malice, since they were really unhappy about me quitting and they expected the project deadline to be missed because of it.