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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 think you mean MVS, not VMS.
I’m not aware of any banks running VMS. Engineering firms, sure. Banks, no.
If so, then BAL must be Sanskrit.
I don’t even want to think about RPG II
Anyone still speak PL/1 or ¬?
I haven’t used PL/1 since freshman year in college.
Complete waste of time learning it, as Data Structures (the next class) was in another waste of time, Pascal.
In my second year of college, I did a summer research project at Notre Dame. The professor was quite old already at the time. The only language he knows is Fortran. So all of his scripts and scripts his previous students made were in Fortran. So I quickly learned Fortran that summer (not fun) just to read them. Before I left for the summer, I made sure to convert everything to C++, just so they could be more relevant in the 21st century. Of course, this was before I discovered Python. I like to think I made the codes more readable for future human beings.
I believe Oracle’s pl/sql is based off of PL/1
I haven’t used it since my days at Chevrolet.
PL/1 was the first language I learned in College. We were told that we would never need to learn another language after that.
I never saw it again.
I don’t know if this is a nation-wide trend or if it’s just a Minnesota/North Dakota thing. Apparently the practice of including references on resumes is fading away. Many people don’t put them on their resume because many businesses don’t call them anyway. I would have thought that references would be a useful tool in the hiring process, but I found out just this week that it’s no longer considered useful.
When last I was searching for a job I think they asked for them, but as I understand it the general practice is to only provide them if asked for.
You’re right. It was late, but my mistake.
Over the last 10 years or so, it has been strongly suggested at if we get a reference check regarding a former (or perhaps soon to be former) employee, we only confirm that the person worked here and for how long, and nothing else. Out of fear of lawsuits, I suppose. But the employer who does this really can’t put ask another employer for more information than they are willing to provide. So, if you aren’t going to get useful information, asking isn’t useful.
I suppose that on the other side is you give a good review to someone you’d like to see leave, voluntarily. Lately the only question I’ve heard on a reference check is whether X is eligible for rehire.
Yeah, that’s the standard explanation. And I get that someone is not going to say, “Clark was a drunk who messed up most of his job assignments. Furthermore, he seduced my wife and she left me!” Even if it’s the truth, there’s a chance Clark could sue you. By if you had an employee who was excellent and left under cordial circumstances, why should you be afraid to say so? Calling references probably won’t let you know that someone was awful but I would think that positive reviews would be useful. But perhaps former employers these days are just afraid to say anything.
As an old VAX/VMS guy, I am aware that one of the diehard VMS guys on an online DECUS user group that was lamenting the slow death of VAX/VMS in the early 90s was working for a big bank in Canada, and I seem to remember checking back on VMS things some years later, and he and his bank were still doing VMS. I was not aware that it had a major presence in the banking industry, though. We had some VMS in our shop into the early 2000s, but it no longer played a major role in our department, and was one of only two (2) VMS systems still in operation at our university.
Sometimes you have a special inside connection with the individual or company that might provide the reference. In that case you might get someone to give you more than confirmation of employment, over the phone and off the record. (I have had that happen.) But it goes against company policy.
That policy works out well for people who were lousy employees. It’s a shame that someone who was terrific can’t get confirmation to potential employers.
I think it works both ways.
its pretty standard now now that any company that has spoken to a lawyer won’t do more than confirm dates of employment
I suppose you might find a company who’s willing to give back-handed reviews like “you’d be lucky to get him to work for you”
I know some hiring managers who still use them and they are very important.
For my most recent employments, I know that the hiring parties did call the people I had listed as references. I mostly listed previous work supervisors (rather than HR people) on the job applications, not on my resume. Of course, you’ll want to ask the people you’re listing as references for permission to do so beforehand.
Maybe there is room for a come back? I see OpenVMS has been ported to x86-64. So almost any recent PC would be able to run it.
Not really relevant to what we’ve been discussing, but I saw this photo and thought what a thing!
One of the last places I worked, we were told to refer the caller to HR if we were called for a reference and not say anything else. That seemed like an equal “kiss of death” to both a good and bad employee.
I wonder if that is what has made LinkedIn so popular. I know I joined it so I could write a glowing review of one of the better members of my ex-team after I left that company.
And that raises a point I haven’t seen which is relevant to the OP – make sure you are on LinkedIn with an up to date resume. Even after I retired, I was getting job offers through my LinkedIn resume.
In my last job I was the manager of the user group for a database program on which our company had done a lot of customization. The table name acronyms never made sense to me or any of the others in our user group who had to construct search queries using the table name acronyms. Finally, I learned that the original database had been written in French. The table name acronyms then made more sense – if you knew French.
There are several factors at play.
For several recent hires we have paid an HR firm to do reference screenings for us because they have people who actually know how to talk to references, and before doing the reference calls they make any prospects go through other personality and critical thinking screenings, and this tells the HR firm what areas to probe.
And all this can be done without violating the various state and federal discrimination or privacy laws.
I can see why a lot of employers don’t bother with references now – too much work to do it right, and you can probably spot potential red flags online (for good or ill).
Stack overflow error?
I hate the necessity of being on LinkedIn. It’s been marginally better since Microsquash bought them, but that’s damning with faint praise. I keep my activity and my connections there to an absolute minimum.