4 ms·

Employees quit their bosses not the company.

by vkat 10y ago

VikingCoder 10y ago
Maybe sometimes, not always. I quit to go to a new company, but I would have gladly kept my boss. Actually that's happened to me a couple times.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  I've got a "me too" comment. In my first job post university, after about two years, the moment I realized "I don't belong here" was when a coworker in the 80% underground open plan office stood up and asked in a loud voice to be heard by everybody "Does anybody need a few project hours for billing? I've got some hours left in my project that you can have." My boss responded "Yes! I'll take whatever hours you can spare for myself and for [Noseshine (me)]". We had to have a billable customer project for each and every hour of our time at work. My boss was great, the "system" sucked.
  - T-hawk 10y ago
    I'll me-too your me-too. I had that exact same situation on a job and left because of it. The only question I ever heard from my boss was "Are you billable?" She didn't care anything about technical quality, career development, tooling, architecture, morale; the only thing that mattered was billable billable billable. It wasn't entirely her fault, it came transitively through her from upper management, the entire division only cared about billable hours, but she sure didn't do anything to help either. Classic "shit pipe" rather than "shit umbrella". The product had a hideous installation process involving hundreds of manual edits to settings in IIS and configuration files. I was deliberately told not to try to improve that via scripting, because they wanted to keep being able to charge customers dozens of billable hours for each installation.
    - mgkimsal 10y ago
      One of my early software jobs was at a shop and we built conference registration 'pages' (a big form with a bunch of perl stuff behind it). Each project was... a lot of hand-customization, and usually took 8-12 hours, and we did a few dozen per year (IIRC) and that number was growing. But each one was... a pain. I spent some time putting a lot of configurable stuff in a a config file, and some runtime checking of the configs, and dynamic behaviour, and... we had something that would make setup of the form and most 'custom' requests down to about 1-2 hours max. I wasn't filling out my timesheet, and someone said "you have to put what project you were working on"... so I filled in 42 hours (over 2 weeks - part time here and there) for "project X" and... holy crap I got a verbal beating. We're going to lose this client - we're overbilling, we're gouging, etc. I tried to very little avail to demonstrate that... we can keep charging 12 hours ($2500? IIRC) for the pages in future, but now they'll only take an hour or so. Apparently I was talking to the wrong people because they thought I was advocating fraud, and I probably almost got fired over that. My code was erased, everything was put back the way it was, they 'ate' the overage to the client (read... I just had 42 less billable hours for 2 weeks) and ... I was sort of 'demoted'. Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it.
      - flukus 10y ago
        > Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it. He probably didn't know about that situation, but he should have been aware of the billable hours culture and the problems that was causing.
        mgkimsal 10y ago
        agreed, although... in his defense, it was a crazy time and crazy growth - they were hiring and putting a lot of policies and structures in place at that time, and I know some things got lost in the shuffle. This was definitely one of those "hindsight" insights from me years later though...
    - VikingCoder 10y ago
      > because they wanted to keep being able to charge customers dozens of billable hours for each installation. Wow... I'll just stick my toe in the water... At what point are we as an industry going to call that fraud?
- jon-wood 10y ago
  +1 on that - the last job I quit it wasn't really my boss but my commute that I was quitting. If I could have worked remotely more I'd have leapt at the chance to stay.
  - jon-wood 10y ago
    Time for a follow up on this long dead thread. Between making that post and now some changes in my original job made coming into the office less frequently viable, and I'm going back.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  Often your direct boss is a good guy but if the larger organization is dysfunctional there is nothing he can do. Unless he is way up in the hierarchy.
marcosdumay 10y ago
Employees quit because they have a better place to go than their current job. (Or, at least, they think so.) If boss (really boss^n, for any n) makes them miserable, if just make more places relatively attractive. But there are always people quitting from good work places.
- aetherson 10y ago
  Yes and no. Most people, if they're pretty satisfied at their current job, won't seek out other opportunities, even if ones exist out there which would plausibly be incrementally better than their current job. And they'll tend to be more pessimistic about the qualities of other jobs. Sometimes, an undeniably amazing opportunity falls into the lap of someone who is overall quite happy at their present job, and they quit that job. But that's a fairly rare case.
  - johnward 10y ago
    >Most people, if they're pretty satisfied at their current job, won't seek out other opportunities Is that true? I don't know of any studies but I give a new company like a year before I start looking for something better. Now I've been in the same position for 6 years but I've been looking for something "better" the entire time and actually turned in my notice twice but ended up staying. No offense to any employer but they have never shown loyalty to me. I'm not giving it to them.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Personally, all the jobs I quit were because of salary. None because of bosses or work conditions. (I've had bad bosses, fight them and saw they being let go. My satisfaction was indeed very dependent on them, but none become reasons for quitting.)
    - initram 10y ago
      I quit my first job because I had other aspirations. I quit my next 2 jobs because of management. This article certainly feels true to my experiences.

Employees quit their bosses not the company.

by vkat 10y ago

Employees quit their bosses not the company.

Maybe sometimes, not always. I quit to go to a new company, but I would have gladly kept my boss. Actually that's happened to me a couple times.

Noseshine 10y ago
I've got a "me too" comment. In my first job post university, after about two years, the moment I realized "I don't belong here" was when a coworker in the 80% underground open plan office stood up and asked in a loud voice to be heard by everybody "Does anybody need a few project hours for billing? I've got some hours left in my project that you can have." My boss responded "Yes! I'll take whatever hours you can spare for myself and for [Noseshine (me)]". We had to have a billable customer project for each and every hour of our time at work. My boss was great, the "system" sucked.
- T-hawk 10y ago
  I'll me-too your me-too. I had that exact same situation on a job and left because of it. The only question I ever heard from my boss was "Are you billable?" She didn't care anything about technical quality, career development, tooling, architecture, morale; the only thing that mattered was billable billable billable. It wasn't entirely her fault, it came transitively through her from upper management, the entire division only cared about billable hours, but she sure didn't do anything to help either. Classic "shit pipe" rather than "shit umbrella". The product had a hideous installation process involving hundreds of manual edits to settings in IIS and configuration files. I was deliberately told not to try to improve that via scripting, because they wanted to keep being able to charge customers dozens of billable hours for each installation.
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    One of my early software jobs was at a shop and we built conference registration 'pages' (a big form with a bunch of perl stuff behind it). Each project was... a lot of hand-customization, and usually took 8-12 hours, and we did a few dozen per year (IIRC) and that number was growing. But each one was... a pain. I spent some time putting a lot of configurable stuff in a a config file, and some runtime checking of the configs, and dynamic behaviour, and... we had something that would make setup of the form and most 'custom' requests down to about 1-2 hours max. I wasn't filling out my timesheet, and someone said "you have to put what project you were working on"... so I filled in 42 hours (over 2 weeks - part time here and there) for "project X" and... holy crap I got a verbal beating. We're going to lose this client - we're overbilling, we're gouging, etc. I tried to very little avail to demonstrate that... we can keep charging 12 hours ($2500? IIRC) for the pages in future, but now they'll only take an hour or so. Apparently I was talking to the wrong people because they thought I was advocating fraud, and I probably almost got fired over that. My code was erased, everything was put back the way it was, they 'ate' the overage to the client (read... I just had 42 less billable hours for 2 weeks) and ... I was sort of 'demoted'. Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it.
    - flukus 10y ago
      > Had only been there a month or so, and I think had I been able to explain to the owner (a tech guy, and decent business guy) what I'd done, he might have understood. My cube was only 30 feet from the guy. In my eyes at the time, though, I thought this wrath was coming from him through someone else. Looking back now, I doubt he was even aware of it. He probably didn't know about that situation, but he should have been aware of the billable hours culture and the problems that was causing.
      - mgkimsal 10y ago
        agreed, although... in his defense, it was a crazy time and crazy growth - they were hiring and putting a lot of policies and structures in place at that time, and I know some things got lost in the shuffle. This was definitely one of those "hindsight" insights from me years later though...
  - VikingCoder 10y ago
    > because they wanted to keep being able to charge customers dozens of billable hours for each installation. Wow... I'll just stick my toe in the water... At what point are we as an industry going to call that fraud?
jon-wood 10y ago
+1 on that - the last job I quit it wasn't really my boss but my commute that I was quitting. If I could have worked remotely more I'd have leapt at the chance to stay.
- jon-wood 10y ago
  Time for a follow up on this long dead thread. Between making that post and now some changes in my original job made coming into the office less frequently viable, and I'm going back.
maxxxxx 10y ago
Often your direct boss is a good guy but if the larger organization is dysfunctional there is nothing he can do. Unless he is way up in the hierarchy.

marcosdumay 10y ago

Employees quit because they have a better place to go than their current job. (Or, at least, they think so.) If boss (really boss^n, for any n) makes them miserable, if just make more places relatively attractive. But there are always people quitting from good work places.

aetherson 10y ago
Yes and no. Most people, if they're pretty satisfied at their current job, won't seek out other opportunities, even if ones exist out there which would plausibly be incrementally better than their current job. And they'll tend to be more pessimistic about the qualities of other jobs. Sometimes, an undeniably amazing opportunity falls into the lap of someone who is overall quite happy at their present job, and they quit that job. But that's a fairly rare case.
- johnward 10y ago
  >Most people, if they're pretty satisfied at their current job, won't seek out other opportunities Is that true? I don't know of any studies but I give a new company like a year before I start looking for something better. Now I've been in the same position for 6 years but I've been looking for something "better" the entire time and actually turned in my notice twice but ended up staying. No offense to any employer but they have never shown loyalty to me. I'm not giving it to them.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Personally, all the jobs I quit were because of salary. None because of bosses or work conditions. (I've had bad bosses, fight them and saw they being let go. My satisfaction was indeed very dependent on them, but none become reasons for quitting.)
  - initram 10y ago
    I quit my first job because I had other aspirations. I quit my next 2 jobs because of management. This article certainly feels true to my experiences.