Know When To Quit

I didn’t know when to quit. Quitting with no other job lined up is risky and frightening, and there seemed to be so many reasons not to. But we should all know when it’s time – to quit.

I had good reason to stay. It was a small town with few comparable positions, and I’d moved there to spend time with my aging parents. I didn’t want to pack up and leave during the last years of my mother’s life.

But I should have known when to quit anyway.

Probably when my manager, interviewing me for a promotion, said, “I don’t care how you think.” Or when, after another interview, she told me that anything I’d done more than eighteen months ago didn’t matter because corporate guidance prioritized only recent experience. My years in senior staff and management training meant nothing – they were older than eighteen months.

I definitely should have quit when I asked for more responsibility, was denied, and two months later was asked in an interview to describe how I’d demonstrated that very responsibility.

What’s For Dinner?

A familiar nightly exchange:

“Honey, what’s for dinner?”

“There are carrots in the vegetable drawer.”

Wait – what? Am I supposed to eat a bag of raw carrots? Are you planning to make something with them? Are they going bad and need to be used up? What do you mean?

That was the template for many conversations at work. Ask a question, get back indecipherable bafflegab. I should have recognized, after years of “carrots in the vegetable drawer,” that I needed to quit. When management “communication” is syntactically correct but logically empty, it’s time to move on.

No Goals, Zero Metrics

Writing my resumes now, showing prospective employers how I can be the solution, I’m struck by how little I can prove I accomplished. An organization with no definable goals and zero metrics was a warning sign. Even when we improved efficiency substantially, it wasn’t measured. I have some numbers from my own tracking, but on what the team accomplished in eight years I’ve got nothing because the department measured nothing. (Except for customer satisfaction surveys designed to return the answers management wanted. See my essay on why surveys returning satisfaction scores of 95% are meaningless.)

I Should Have Known When to Quit

I should have quit when I proposed changes to reduce manual labor by half and there was no interest.

I should have quit when a reorganization left system menus wrong for two years and nobody fixed them. I should have quit when I recognized I no longer had the will to fix it myself.

I should have quit when a new contract broke a process and management “solved” it with a five-year manual workaround ending only because the contract expired.

I should have quit when I found the root cause of a recurring data error, documented a solution, was was told I was right but “it’s not your job” to be right about that.

I should have quit because I wrote the department’s first automation software on my own time saving $900,000 in labor and operating above my pay grade for eight years I was laid off anyway. In an organization with no measurements and no values, nothing counts but the union’s seniority rules.

I should have quit because I lost my job, we moved and I was thousands of miles away when my mom died anyway.

I should have quit because the most useful takeaway from eight years was that there are “carrots in the vegetable drawer.”

But that’s something – I’ve learned when to quit.

Quitting when there are reasons to stay, or before a new job is in sight, is hard. Having any job feels safer than not having one. But if that job is telling you, over and over, that it’s the wrong place for you, maybe it’s keeping you from the one you should be doing.

We all need to know when it’s time to quit.