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On Quitting My Job
“What makes you think you were doing bad work?” Asks the psychologist. Not a real one, just the call-and-response in my cranium.
“Well, there’s only so many hours a workday you can spend on Ricochet when you ought to be doing other things and still think you’re a good worker. I’m not going to sit here taking their coin forever when I’m not providing commensurate services in exchange. It’s dishonest.”
“Has your boss talked to you about this?” Pretty much the first check to perform when someone talks this way. It goes this way with depression; the disease feeds and grows off of lies you tell yourself. Maybe I’m doing bad work, maybe I’m only depressed and think they’re doing bad work.
“No, last annual review the boss man said he was pretty happy with the work I’ve been providing. Frankly, that was a surprise to me. I wasn’t happy with the value I’d been adding at that point.” The hope here is obviously that I’m lying to myself about my poor job performance. If that’s a lie then as soon as I disbelieve I can stop worrying about it, be a little happier about life, and importantly, not have to quit my job. But is it a lie?
“And your coworkers? Have they noticed anything?” Gathering more evidence.
“Noticed? Can’t say that they’ve noticed. Can’t say that they haven’t, either. Hasn’t gone far enough that anyone’s said anything, at least in my hearing. Still, I’ve left them plenty to notice.” I expect people to notice a great deal more than they let on. I assume no one’s spoken up out of a certain amount of politeness or unwillingness to stir up trouble. Or maybe they haven’t noticed; people really don’t think much about other people. Not something I’d like to presume on, however.
“So if the ‘boss man’ hasn’t told you you need to shape up, and none of your coworkers have complained about the quality of your work, what makes you think you’re doing a poor job?” And that’s the meat of the question. If I’m lying to myself then quitting the job is a large scale act of self-sabotage. If I’m not then… well, as long as we’re being honest it’s not a great scenario. You want to quit a job when you’ve got another one lined up already.
“I can measure, can’t I? This isn’t a case of ‘I feel like I’m worthless.’ This is me calculating time spent on the internet versus time spent doing something productive. This is me measuring my rate of progress on projects versus similar projects a couple of years ago, and coming up short. This is me counting the times I’ve switched from working on necessary projects to working on fun projects because at least that way I might get something done. Look, one of my assets, I’ve got an extremely logical, scientific mind. I trust my own ability to objectively evaluate these things more than anyone else’s, and that’s even taking the crazy into account.” Perhaps a touch arrogant, but I’ve been measuring my mind for years.
“Let’s take it as read that you’re right about that. What makes you think about jumping ship to any other job is going to give you better results?” A fair question. If your problem is in your head you can’t walk away from it.
“Because my job is in Industrial Engineering. Nothing against the discipline, but it ain’t me.” I may hold some things against the discipline, but nothing personal.
“When you say ‘it ain’t me…” Ah yes, the old ‘repeat the last three words back to him’ school of psychoanalysis. Hmm…
“Have you ever studied economics?” Being an inhabitant of my skull I’m going to assume she has at least a passing familiarity with the subject. “F. A. Hayek: ‘It’s the curious task of economics to show man how little he knows about what he imagines he can design.’ I believe that wholeheartedly. Industrial engineering is… not that. Working on a factory to make it more efficient, yeah, that’s great. No problem there. Modeling a factory ever more accurately in order to make predictions about the future? I don’t really believe that’s possible past a certain point, and I think our department passed that point a long time ago. Centralizing decision making around product flow in order to maximize output? Practically gives me hives thinking about it. What you’re doing is you’re assuming your model is more accurate than the real world out there, and asking people to dance to it. Just a bad idea.”
“So you have philosophical objections to the work, and that’s enough for you to quit?” Might be?
“Well, that’s not all. The other thing is I like a bit of chaos in my life. Okay, more than a bit. I’m more comfortable with disruptions to a daily routine than having a daily routine in the first place. I like unusual circumstances, I appreciate having to think on my feet and having to adapt the plan. I’m all about building capability for dealing with unforeseen circumstances. All this? Anathema to the Industrial Engineering mindset. It’s inefficient. I’m not knocking that way of thinking; it’s very useful when you’re looking to maximize a factory. I’m just built wrong for it.”
“When you say you’re built wrong—“
“Not in a ‘woe is me, why did God make me broken like this?’ sense. The Good Lord built me the way I am for a purpose. That purpose doesn’t seem to be Industrial Engineering. I’m just slotted into the wrong category in the working world.” Honest truth. I try very hard to understand the different ways people’s minds work, what motivates them, what they enjoy, how they play the game. I should have a decent idea of how my motivations work by now.
“Okay, okay. You’re set on quitting your job. Why not wait a bit, find a different, a better job on the side, and only make your jump when you know you’ll stick the landing?”
“Because I have been waiting a bit. I’ve been waiting too long already. I’ve weighed and dissected the question. And the longer I stay at this job the worse I do. Job-hunting without already being employed makes that game harder. But job-hunting, while employed, is proving impossible. I’ve spent so much of my energy by the end of the workday, by the end of the workweek, that I just can’t handle the emotional Hindenburg that’s the job hunt.”
“Okay, let’s say you get another job. What does it look like?” Now there’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
Just a quick note: This is, as they say, based on a true story. I quit my job, I don’t have another one lined up yet. While the long term prospects of shiftless bumming are sour, in the meantime I’ve got plenty of seed corn to eat. I’m confident that I’ll be able to get a better job, just as soon as I figure out what that better job is. Is highwayman still a valid profession?
Published in Economics
I still use ZIP discs for most of my important documents. I have been through half a dozen drives, but the one I have now is reliable and works fine.
I had one at work when I worked at a print shop. We used it to take large files to another service for higher-quality printing of printing negatives.
Eight times out of ten our discs wouldn’t work with their drive. It was ridiculous. Something about the way the heads align was very suspect.
Back those up. They are making my palms itch.
We’ll, then. I guess living under a bridge is in my future.
We’ll, mine got jeopardized for me.
I’m not saying that you can’t make money consulting (insert Arahant here), but it is a fair amount of work.
I bought mine new in 1987. It’s still a hoot to drive.
Not as easy to get in and out of as it was when I was 25 though.
On the subject of outdated storage media, I still have a fondness for thumb drives, even though they’re the security equivalent of reusable heroin needles.
Either he’s talking about being homeless or moving to the lower half of Michigan.
Tough choice.
Yeah, you got the shaft, both in terms of getting let go in the first place and in job market lottery.
I hope your consulting is successful.
The ZIP disks were funny – their reliability depended so much on where and when they were made. The original 100s were OK if you confined them to what they were good at – periodic backup, not heavy use. The early 250s were, by contrast, terrific if your drive wasn’t one of those affected by the “click of death”. The 750s at the end tended to be unreliable crap – both the media and drives.
The first time I got laid off (I’m a corporate intellectual property lawyer) our children were in 4th and 7th grade. We had saved up a good sized cushion of money, and I decided to try solo law practice. The solo law practice was a business failure, but I was amazed at how our children learned about “the real world” through the experience – the need to offer something the market wants, the need to find the people who value what you have to offer (the constant hunting for work was the part I disliked the most), the importance of controlling cash flow, the importance of completing projects, of billing and collecting. Our children were in turn surprised to discover later in school how little their classmates understood about the connection between work and money.
So although my foray into “consulting” was for me a failure, I am pleased with the learning our children got out of it.
Reminds me of the follies I dealt with negotiating software contracts in the 1990’s. “Source code escrows” were all the rage – the buyers insisted that the source code for the software be stored (“escrowed”) in a place the buyer could get it if the seller went out of business or stopped supporting the software.
I kept asking my software buyer clients about whether it would really do them any good, I found out, no.
The source code in storage was probably not the latest production version.
The source code would probably be on a media for which the buyer didn’t have equipment to read.
Even if they could read it, no one in the buyer would know enough of the program structure to understand it.
Even if they could understand it, finding the specific point of the program to address the issue needing support would be very time consuming.
All of the above was so expensive and would take so much time that if the software vendor stopped supporting the software program, it would be faster, cheaper, and easier just to go find a new vendor and change whatever needed changing in our (the buyer’s) product needed to accommodate the new vendor’s software.
Well, we will see how it goes. I am optimistic at the moment. It worked for TKC
Most authors of fiction do it eventually.
You might want to check with your county clerk’s office. It may not take much, especially as a sole proprietorship.
And it is a different kind of work. Depending on whether you mainly contract through other companies or you are directly selling. Contracting, you still have to interview and sell yourself occasionally. Going directly with short jobs takes a lot more selling to a lot more clients. I happened to prefer it, because like Hank, I’m easily bored and like a bit of chaos. Working for three different clients doing three different services within the same week was fun. Longer gigs usually made me cranky, mostly because they were larger projects that meant more time was spent herding the cats than having the cats actually do any work. The longer projects could have been done in the same timeframe as the shorter projects, but they had too many folks in the way.
The lower peninsula really isn’t too bad.
Amen. One learns a lot and gains a whole passel of skills running a small business, even when it fails. (Or maybe because one survives the failure.)
I liked TKC and miss him being around. He was the one-man Welcome Wagon for reluctant supporters of President Trump. I used to joke that Father TKC would absolve you of your sins after confession and reciting twenty Hail Donalds.
Having said all that, he was too rough on the mods, and I understand why he’s gone. It’s a shame, though.
He is a great part of ratburger and on almost every Tuesday call.
Multiple simultaneous clients is the only survivable model. I have five serious clients and a sixth contemplating the plunge. Every client goes through waves of funding availability, pseudo-randomly. It tends to balance out. And it definitely prevents boredom.
I’ve been at it for 16+ years, now.
In what I do, it’s mostly either long-term contracts where the client expects you to behave like one of their employees (timesheets, training, every “diversity” seminar, etc) up until they finally offer you a job (which I have never taken), or they need about twenty minutes on the phone while you politely explain to them that their idea is terrible and to please pull their heads out of their rectum.
For me, there is no in-between.
That’s unfortunate. I don’t accept such work. There is a fair amount of T&M work in my schedule, but I take care to stay away from behaviors that might trigger “statuatory employee” rules. Most importantly, I absolutely refuse any “work made for hire” copyright clauses in my contracts.
i need to come pick your brain
Good idea as long as it’s not the kind of pick that was used on Leon Trotsky’s brain.
Is murdering communists a viable career choice? Cause I’m down.
Could be the next decade’s growth industry.
Well, the CIA is always hiring, and that’s pretty much their gig.