4 ms·

This really hits home for me. I've been in a similar situation for more than a year. Extremely overworked, understaffed team constantly missing deadlines. Endle

This really hits home for me. I've been in a similar situation for more than a year. Extremely overworked, understaffed team constantly missing deadlines. Endless pointless meetings. Managers don't care. Even my short and long term memory has taken a toll, although its probably due to another chronic health issue. I want to quit and stay unemployed for a while, but that's frankly just scary. Good job.

timcavel 4y ago
bogota 4y ago
I always want to do this but health insurance always keeps me from never going a day without being employed. Im fortunate to be able to have that kind of job stability but the anxiety of being out of a job and then needing any kind of medical care is real.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  At least in the US, you can use COBRA to keep your insurance for a little bit. It's very expensive though, so it's still not a great option.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    You can often do better on the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges.
  - throw8383833jj 4y ago
    COBRA is a disaster. its often more expensive than when shopping around for insurance by yourself.
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      Kinda sorta maybe. Yes you can get “cheaper” plans through private insurance but the trade off between lower premiums vs higher deductibles makes the equation a bit more complex. That being said… yes cobra is usually insanely expensive. But that might be market rate for whatever “all you can eat low deductible” health plan your employer was offering.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
    its expensive, but that's how much your employer is paying for your health insurance. The hidden costs keep growing and force people to keep jobs...just to have health. But rest assured, this is a government problem that can be fixed. If you take the employer payroll tax subsidy away, plus take mandatory healthcare insurance requisites and poof, this problems go away. There would be tremendous disruption for sure, but we need to get away from "insurance for everything" when in reality it should be you have "insurance for disaster situations"
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      Or we could realize that we already have socialized healthcare, just in the stupidest most expensive way, at the ER (who can not refuse anyone service) and change it to a more effective way. No one is arguing that ERs should turn dieing people away, so we not only have it, but it's pretty much universally supported. Now we just need to agree to have it in a better form.
- gopalv 4y ago
  > health insurance always keeps me from never going a day without being employed. There's no way to cap the actual health care costs, but the health insurance is about 30k/year for a family of 4 on COBRA. That is a lot or not depending on how your job is affecting your health. I'm right now spending a year off work and leaving my job has definitely improved my life more than paying me 30k would (of course, there are other expenses too - it's like a 120k/year burn rate in the bay area). My father ended his life from issues related to work stress (it had to do with violent naxal robberies and being personally threatened, but still no sleep for 3-4 days messes you up), so I might have a very skewed point of view on this, but the lesson was to never take the "retire and do hobbies at 60" for granted & to draw-down the financials into time spent when you can keep up with your kids on shared things.
- Cd00d 4y ago
  You should know that COBRA can be retroactive. You do not have to sign up when you terminate your employment. You can sign up when you actually need medical care that you want to be covered. Though, at that time you have to pay back for the time since termination. It makes it a little easier to walk away and "hope for the best" on the healthcare front.
TremendousJudge 4y ago
>I want to quit and stay unemployed for a while, but that's frankly just scary I don't know you, but if you have the savings to do it, I'd say go for it. I've done it and it was wonderful. The day I realized I could just quit my job without having another job lined up a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I couldn't manage to find the effort needed to go through a job search while still employed, and taking a six month sabbatical also was great for doing a lot of new things I didn't usually have the time for.
- bitwize 4y ago
  That's great for you. Not really feasible for the likes of me, who have a girlfriend and 3 animals to support. To say nothing of those with actual, human kids.
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    Yes, that's why I made clear that money is an issue. It's not common to be able to take a sabbatical, but our area is usually well-remunerated enough that it is an option for many people, at least with proper planning. Someone else mentioned that in the US, healthcare is tied to your job, which is something I never really considered.
  - sanitycheck 4y ago
    Having enough savings to not work for a year or two is a good thing to aim for, and should be feasible for a lot of people in our industry. Just knowing I don't need to stay in a job if it starts to suck badly is probably the thing that's had the biggest positive effect on my mental health.
kevingadd 4y ago
If you can manage it, my advice would be to just start quietly looking for new opportunities on the side. You may be able to make a pivot. Putting your health first also means trying to make the safest choices so you don't have more stress to deal with.
- lostcolony 4y ago
  Put a month in between starting something new, too. Depending on the particulars of the healthcare involved that might not even require COBRA (many cover you through the end of the month rather than ending the day you leave; many also cover you day 1 of employment rather than starting X days after, so you can quit on the 1st of one month, start new job on the 1st of the next month, or similar), but even if not, one month of COBRA and missed expenses isn't that bad. But, that way you can actually have a breather, get back into a healthy headspace, etc, before starting in. My best job transitions have had a break in between; my worst were quit job 1 on Friday, start job 2 on Monday.
  - endemic 4y ago
    Yeah, I'll second the recommendation to quit early in the month, take some time off, then start the next job before the next month.
rhizome 4y ago
>Managers don't care. It's funny how concepts that get repeated a million times in "how to be a boss" type threads are completely forgotten in "my job sucks" ones. Case in point: CULTURE COMES FROM THE TOP. Your managers are the ones closest to you in setting the culture, and they're telling you to stop caring. Take the hint, just like they'd want you to take the (common at many many companies) hint that they aren't going to fire you, but it's time for you to move on to your next job.
- Verdex 4y ago
  This is an interesting statement to me. I have a potentially crippling difficulty in understanding people and relationships. It's not entirely clear to me what I can do to help work through it or increase my skill levels with respect to it. At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. That is to say, object level is what people actually say and do and meta level is like the subtext to borrow a literary term of what people say and do. The boss saying, "let's all work hard and do what it takes." Is something that I want to take literally. What they mean is, "Just put in 8ish hours a day and don't take a two week vacation right before a release." However, I'm deeply uncomfortable with taking the meta version. When the meta version is totally divorced from the object version is where things completely go off the rails for me. "Let's all work hard and do what it takes." => "Don't rock the boat because none of this was ever going to work in the first place." Fortunately for me, I've only seen such bosses (or I suppose scenarios) from afar. As far as I know I've never worked directly for one.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    > At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. This is a really common failure pattern of people with a history of excelling in relatively explicit systems (e.g. grades at school). Reading can actually help a lot here. "Influence" by Cialdini, "How to win friends and influence people" by Carnegie, or the "Gervais Principle" by Rao decent intros to some relevant concepts (though each has problems, particularly Rao's book). Once you have a framework of understanding incentives, cognitive traps, and the tools most people use to navigate these kinds of political games it gets a lot easier to grasp what's going on (being a good player is, IMO, much harder)
magicalhippo 4y ago
> Endless pointless meetings. Normally I have few meetings, but recently it's gone up a bit. I told people I'll be available so they can call me in if they have a specific question. Suddenly I got stuff done again. > Managers don't care. This is part of the reason why I looked for a smaller company, where passion is required to survive.

timcavel 4y ago

bogota 4y ago

I always want to do this but health insurance always keeps me from never going a day without being employed. Im fortunate to be able to have that kind of job stability but the anxiety of being out of a job and then needing any kind of medical care is real.

kevingadd 4y ago
At least in the US, you can use COBRA to keep your insurance for a little bit. It's very expensive though, so it's still not a great option.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  You can often do better on the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges.
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  COBRA is a disaster. its often more expensive than when shopping around for insurance by yourself.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    Kinda sorta maybe. Yes you can get “cheaper” plans through private insurance but the trade off between lower premiums vs higher deductibles makes the equation a bit more complex. That being said… yes cobra is usually insanely expensive. But that might be market rate for whatever “all you can eat low deductible” health plan your employer was offering.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  its expensive, but that's how much your employer is paying for your health insurance. The hidden costs keep growing and force people to keep jobs...just to have health. But rest assured, this is a government problem that can be fixed. If you take the employer payroll tax subsidy away, plus take mandatory healthcare insurance requisites and poof, this problems go away. There would be tremendous disruption for sure, but we need to get away from "insurance for everything" when in reality it should be you have "insurance for disaster situations"
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Or we could realize that we already have socialized healthcare, just in the stupidest most expensive way, at the ER (who can not refuse anyone service) and change it to a more effective way. No one is arguing that ERs should turn dieing people away, so we not only have it, but it's pretty much universally supported. Now we just need to agree to have it in a better form.
gopalv 4y ago
> health insurance always keeps me from never going a day without being employed. There's no way to cap the actual health care costs, but the health insurance is about 30k/year for a family of 4 on COBRA. That is a lot or not depending on how your job is affecting your health. I'm right now spending a year off work and leaving my job has definitely improved my life more than paying me 30k would (of course, there are other expenses too - it's like a 120k/year burn rate in the bay area). My father ended his life from issues related to work stress (it had to do with violent naxal robberies and being personally threatened, but still no sleep for 3-4 days messes you up), so I might have a very skewed point of view on this, but the lesson was to never take the "retire and do hobbies at 60" for granted & to draw-down the financials into time spent when you can keep up with your kids on shared things.
Cd00d 4y ago
You should know that COBRA can be retroactive. You do not have to sign up when you terminate your employment. You can sign up when you actually need medical care that you want to be covered. Though, at that time you have to pay back for the time since termination. It makes it a little easier to walk away and "hope for the best" on the healthcare front.

TremendousJudge 4y ago

>I want to quit and stay unemployed for a while, but that's frankly just scary I don't know you, but if you have the savings to do it, I'd say go for it. I've done it and it was wonderful. The day I realized I could just quit my job without having another job lined up a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I couldn't manage to find the effort needed to go through a job search while still employed, and taking a six month sabbatical also was great for doing a lot of new things I didn't usually have the time for.

bitwize 4y ago
That's great for you. Not really feasible for the likes of me, who have a girlfriend and 3 animals to support. To say nothing of those with actual, human kids.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  Yes, that's why I made clear that money is an issue. It's not common to be able to take a sabbatical, but our area is usually well-remunerated enough that it is an option for many people, at least with proper planning. Someone else mentioned that in the US, healthcare is tied to your job, which is something I never really considered.
- sanitycheck 4y ago
  Having enough savings to not work for a year or two is a good thing to aim for, and should be feasible for a lot of people in our industry. Just knowing I don't need to stay in a job if it starts to suck badly is probably the thing that's had the biggest positive effect on my mental health.

kevingadd 4y ago

If you can manage it, my advice would be to just start quietly looking for new opportunities on the side. You may be able to make a pivot. Putting your health first also means trying to make the safest choices so you don't have more stress to deal with.

lostcolony 4y ago
Put a month in between starting something new, too. Depending on the particulars of the healthcare involved that might not even require COBRA (many cover you through the end of the month rather than ending the day you leave; many also cover you day 1 of employment rather than starting X days after, so you can quit on the 1st of one month, start new job on the 1st of the next month, or similar), but even if not, one month of COBRA and missed expenses isn't that bad. But, that way you can actually have a breather, get back into a healthy headspace, etc, before starting in. My best job transitions have had a break in between; my worst were quit job 1 on Friday, start job 2 on Monday.
- endemic 4y ago
  Yeah, I'll second the recommendation to quit early in the month, take some time off, then start the next job before the next month.

rhizome 4y ago

>Managers don't care. It's funny how concepts that get repeated a million times in "how to be a boss" type threads are completely forgotten in "my job sucks" ones. Case in point: CULTURE COMES FROM THE TOP. Your managers are the ones closest to you in setting the culture, and they're telling you to stop caring. Take the hint, just like they'd want you to take the (common at many many companies) hint that they aren't going to fire you, but it's time for you to move on to your next job.

Verdex 4y ago
This is an interesting statement to me. I have a potentially crippling difficulty in understanding people and relationships. It's not entirely clear to me what I can do to help work through it or increase my skill levels with respect to it. At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. That is to say, object level is what people actually say and do and meta level is like the subtext to borrow a literary term of what people say and do. The boss saying, "let's all work hard and do what it takes." Is something that I want to take literally. What they mean is, "Just put in 8ish hours a day and don't take a two week vacation right before a release." However, I'm deeply uncomfortable with taking the meta version. When the meta version is totally divorced from the object version is where things completely go off the rails for me. "Let's all work hard and do what it takes." => "Don't rock the boat because none of this was ever going to work in the first place." Fortunately for me, I've only seen such bosses (or I suppose scenarios) from afar. As far as I know I've never worked directly for one.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  > At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. This is a really common failure pattern of people with a history of excelling in relatively explicit systems (e.g. grades at school). Reading can actually help a lot here. "Influence" by Cialdini, "How to win friends and influence people" by Carnegie, or the "Gervais Principle" by Rao decent intros to some relevant concepts (though each has problems, particularly Rao's book). Once you have a framework of understanding incentives, cognitive traps, and the tools most people use to navigate these kinds of political games it gets a lot easier to grasp what's going on (being a good player is, IMO, much harder)

magicalhippo 4y ago

> Endless pointless meetings. Normally I have few meetings, but recently it's gone up a bit. I told people I'll be available so they can call me in if they have a specific question. Suddenly I got stuff done again. > Managers don't care. This is part of the reason why I looked for a smaller company, where passion is required to survive.