Have you ever quit within the first month?

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flp619@reddit

I quit a job on day one, at lunchtime. It was with a collection agency, one of the especially sleazy ones.

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Suepahfly@reddit

Yes, it was a shit company and I already had new work lined up

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> already had new work lined up Very important to do this first. The word “quit” is unfortunately overloaded in the way we talk about it. Some people say they “quit” when they really meant they left for a new job. Other people see “quit” and imagine walking out the door into unemployment. In some past economies you really could quit your job and have a new one in a week or two. Now is not one of those times. Set some boundaries at work and focus on your job search. You don’t have to worry about performing well on the job if you’re leaving anyway.

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yxhuvud@reddit

I mean it depends on what kind of buffers you have. If you have good buffers and can survive for years, then quitting make sense. But if you live paycheck to paycheck, then that isn't an option.

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PragmaticBoredom@reddit

Quitting only really makes sense if necessary to avoid a dangerous or illegal situation. For other times, it’s better to just put in a casual 40 hours, ignore pressure to do more, and focus on your job search.

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Minimum_Elk_2872@reddit

The bad stuff rarely gets better, you should know that

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Western_Objective209@reddit

I disagree. Most jobs feel terrible when I start, but once I get used to the way they do things it's not that bad

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Minimum_Elk_2872@reddit

What if they have no way of doing things? What if it's up to you to draw the rest of the owl, forever?

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flmontpetit@reddit

I've worked for shiny companies with modern tech stacks and practices who were otherwise completely set in their ways, and companies with tons of muddy legacy baggage who were in the moment highly interested in modernizing and with the approval of non-technical upper management. There's no doubt in my mind that I would rather work for the latter. I will happily sift through arcane BASIC code older than myself if there's meaningful progress being made towards replacing it.

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Lanky-Ad4698@reddit

Almost, I wish I did. It have nothing else lined up…sigh

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1234away@reddit

yep. hated the way the team worked, codebase was a nightmare. just said "hey I don't think its a great fit, people are great but not what I expected, thanks for the opportunity".

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Lanky-Ad4698@reddit

I wish I could that with my current job. But didn’t have any other options. Dealing with atrocious codebase now

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drnullpointer@reddit

Yes. I lasted three weeks. On week one I was assigned a new boss. That boss was openly and unashamedly claiming he is best programmer in the world. Initially I thought it is some sort of running gag, because the owners of the company thought very highly of hem. They acquihired him with a bunch of software that he wrote that I was supposed to maintain. The first real red flag was when I was not given access to the code because I needed to "prove myself" to be bestowed with the access. The second real red flag was when the software failed and my boss was on the call and was explaining that "he isn't making mistakes and that's their fault to change the format of the API call". "API call" was minutes later revealed to be an email with XML in its body and the format change was they changed the XML from being pretty printed to just a single line. Apparently, his "perfect" software was parsing out strings specific lines and offsets (line 6 offset 12 until first opening angle brackets to get customer name, etc.) I quit when he tried to blame yet another failure on me, even though I have not yet modified the codebase.

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Lanky-Ad4698@reddit

God that sounds awful

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exneo002@reddit

have you considered submitting to the daily wtf sounds like a candidate.

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INT_MIN@reddit

> I quit when he tried to blame yet another failure on me, even though I have not yet modified the codebase. That's wild.

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rdem341@reddit

I don't understand how people like this get into positions where they are trusted to execute on projects.

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yxhuvud@reddit

They talk to nontechnical people that don't know better and that doesn't have a good frame of reference.

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drnullpointer@reddit

I do understand how this happens. It is quite simple. When you are a high level manager in need to hire a specialist, the basic problem is that you do not have the knowledge and experience to verify if they are really any good at what they are doing. So you make your decision by judging the person by some other qualities that you consciously or subconsciously think are proxy for the expertise. Maybe you hire a good looking, well versed, well dressed individual because that's what your subconscious brain tells you. Or maybe you look at bunch of other stuff that are not really what you are looking for but you think they are close enough. Do they advertise they were doing the thing in their previous company? If they did, they must for sure have at least \*some\* knowledge in the topic. Etc. Usually, this works at least a little bit. But sometimes it fails spectacularly.

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kobumaister@reddit

I have a running joke like that with my boss, we laugh and have fun... I can't imagine what a douchebag you have to be to think that...

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hangerofmonkeys@reddit

You win for the most interesting story.

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csanon212@reddit

Companies when they do acquisitions don't care if the software is well architected or resilient. It's sad.

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ntzm_@reddit

I wish I did but I stuck it out for 6 months. Quit one day before my probation period ended with no work lined up because I hated it so much.

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AdministrativeBlock0@reddit

I quit after four hours once. Sometimes you just know.

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drguid@reddit

Yes (or was fired) many times. I did quit one place a couple of years ago. It was my highest ever salary but the code was awful. It was written by a guy old enough to me my dad. I'm not exactly young either. It was very well organised but completely non-testable. It had also missed the window Microsoft had to upgrade the project to a more modern format. Consequently testing anything took forever. The database structure was also incomprehensible due to some weird naming convention that was a carryover from the 1980s.

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simulakrum@reddit

Yes: after a layoff at the end of 2023, I got a job just to have an income source. It was hybrid 2x week, so the moment I got a 100% remote wirh better pay, I switched without any remorse. Be selfish with your career. Switch as sson as you have something better - which can be higher salary, healthier environment, closer to home or fully remote, whatever is best for you.

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Loud-Necessary-1215@reddit

Yes and during crisis 2009. They lied about the project, about the language... I guess some people could not afford to resign and they counted on that to happen. I resigned before I received my first salary and went to a much better project.

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camelCaseCoffeeTable@reddit

Never in the first month, but I did quit a job within 5 months. They had a consultant come in and try to pitch pair programming. Was told my team would be one of the trial teams. I went to my manager and told her very clearly: I left my last job because of pair programming, if it gets implemented here I’ll leave too I was told that we should at least try it out. So I found a new job. She was *shocked* when she heard I was leaving. Told me we could have talked about it, maybe worked something out. She shut up real quick when I told her I did talk to her about it, she told me we couldn’t work something out, and that I had told her this is exactly what I’d do. I don’t regret it for a second. Probably should have never joined that company, but it was during COVID and I got laid off so needed a job. My new job is awesome, I love everything about it.

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dllimport@reddit

What do you have against pair programming?? Was it not just a couple hours of pairing up with someone else to teach/learn/collaborate where one person is typing and you're both working on it?

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camelCaseCoffeeTable@reddit

That is pair programming. And I have a problem with any type of work style being forced on me. If you were working in the late 2010’s and early 2020’s, it was the big thing for consultants to recommend: all day pair programming. 2 devs would work on one story. All day. At the end of the sprint, your swap partners, and now you and your new partner would work together, all day every day, on the same tickets. Doesn’t matter if it’s a complex bug or updating copy, you and the other dev are pairing. I generally work best alone. I rarely need someone to hop on and help out, and I’m fine to hop on and help out with someone else’s problems. But telling me I’m required to do it, all day, regardless of whether there’s a need is a hard no. The hardest of nos.

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dllimport@reddit

I have never heard of anyone being asked for all day every day pair programming before, so that's probably where my confusion is. I know it as an occasionally planned but mostly adhoc thing people do to usefully collaborate, train more junior developers, or knowledge transfer.

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camelCaseCoffeeTable@reddit

That’s how it should be. Go let consultants into your business and see what it becomes.

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padetn@reddit

Yes, at a major bank. Banks suck, 99% process, 1% product.

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tofous@reddit

I didn't quit, but I started looking for a job in the first month and finally quit after 5 months. The reason was that they did not use source control, testing, backups, etc. They expressed some interest in source control and using a forge of some kind. But, it was never enough to actually pull the trigger even after I saved various customer production sites 3 times from personally versioning code regularly just on my own. So basically just a mismatch in the desired level of engineering professionalism.

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newyorkerTechie@reddit

Three times.

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sonobanana33@reddit

Yup. Twice :D First was after 2 days. They had some problem with sqlite, which was happening because they were passing an entire table as query parameters rather than join 2 tables. I told them to fix the damn query (I actually did fix it), but they said that instead we (me) should patch sqlite forever to bump the memory limits instead. I quit because if they were so stupid on my 1st day, I wonder what would have happened after. Another I quit after 3 weeks. They were racists, sexists and incompetents. Also were relaying to the boss things I never said.

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lookitskris@reddit

Yea. I know other Devs who have quit after a few hours

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DigThatData@reddit

No because I'm stubborn, but if I was smart I would have.

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riotshieldready@reddit

Yeah quit after 2 weeks at a crazy place I worked. Fortunately found a new job quickly, but the ceo treated everyone like his own indentured servants. Saw him throw his car keys at his assistant sitting 20m away and scream at her to make sure his car doesn’t get a wheel clamped, saw him force multiply people cancel their holidays to come to the office for meetings just for him to not show up. My boss found it weird when I only worked 9-6 on the day after Boxing Day. And these are the more tame things that happened on those wild 2 weeks.

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csanon212@reddit

That's a precision car key throw

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toadkiller@reddit

Yeah, 60 feet? Hot damn

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Radinax@reddit

I was close, they put me to use Webflow and I hated that shit. But they listened and put me where I wanted, stayed there for a year.

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PositiveUse@reddit

We had one colleague quitting after two weeks because we as a team did too much collaboration (pair programming, knowledge sessions and dailies)

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thodgson@reddit

Yeah, some people really hate working with other people...or, they just really dislike being around people.

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thodgson@reddit

Yes. I was laid off April 2020 because of the pandemic; the company I worked for lost nearly all its contracts, so I lost my job. Within 30 days, I took a job at a law firm that had a small IT group. There were red flags: I was one of 3 developers. They had some formal process in place, but it was clear that it was a revolving door of decisions. There was on QA person who didn't really understand how anything work and was hostile to most of my questions about how things worked. Nobody seemed to know how anything worked functionally or technically. I could have stayed, but I didn't want to put forth the energy it would take - been there, done that. The pay was excellent, and the benefits were great. It was WFH until sometime in the future when I would have to go into the office 5 days a week with a horrible commute of over an hour. I stayed long enough to get another job, which was one month.

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Herrowgayboi@reddit

Yes. I got hired under one manager but then worked for another without any mention of this.

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cakekid9@reddit

I quit within the 1st month (or close to it) because I was hired for one company but was tasked to work on a different company/product (it was all owned by same parent). I didn't like the bait and switch and I got equity in one but worked on the other.

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Turbulent-Week1136@reddit

I quit within 3 months. I gave them 2 weeks notice but my boss was so mad he said I don't need to bother showing up. I was completely okay with that.

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LeHomardJeNaimePasCa@reddit

Eh, I wish I had.

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tittywagon@reddit

I saw someone show up for one day before they left. I think they landed another offer.

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tomqmasters@reddit

No, but I definitely should have. learning about red flags is a right of passage.

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Snakeyb@reddit

Yup. Was working remote for a "scaleup" in London and in tail end of 2022, they did the cool kid thing of a round of layoffs. I wasn't directly impacted, but the whole way the thing was handled put a really sour taste in my mouth, so I chose to leave. Quite quickly found what seemed like my dream job. Working on internal tooling for a pretty big engineering (as in, brick and mortar) company. It was a jump from mid/senior to principal, they were really keen for someone with boots on the ground SaaS experience, the team seemed great and the domain was right up my street. I handed in my notice and basically spent my time from then til starting boning up on engineering concepts. When I started, it was a bit stop-start. Barely had a laptop ready for me, nothing really setup, but I'd worked in big non-tech companies before, so it wasn't that surprising. I got settled in and started digging into what they were doing. Two things quickly transpired: - I was principal in title only. I think it was tied to their whole internal hierarchy for paychecks. In any regard, I was essentially the junior on the team of 5. One person on the team was particularly grating in this regard - I was treated like I'd never written a line of code before. - The tooling was essentially a long running R&D tax write off no one used. They'd been "developing" it for over three years, and despite various internal initiatives to promote it, not a single site/office/person used the damn thing. I could have stayed and just milked the place for the paycheck - it is still the most money I've ever been offered - but when the C-suite started making RTO noises 3 weeks in (it was a nearly 2 hour round trip commute, and it would have been public transport to boot), I pulled the ripcord and noped out of there. This is where my rule of "fuck you" money came in very handy - I always aim to have 3-6 months of cash on hand to cover expenses, so if life goes wrong I can just deal with it instead of having to tough anything out. I did learn that if you jump out of a job instantly, you come out of it looking... Neutral? rather than bad. Obviously if you did it constantly that's a problem, but I had a decently long career of solid tenures, so all the conversations about it basically just went "it wasn't a good fit" and we talked about the rest of my experience.

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Wapame92@reddit

Yes, i'm actually in this situation. After 2 months in my company I had a better opportunity elsewhere. I didn't really like my current job so I took advantage of my trial period to go for interviews and be able to leave quickly. I'll get a better salary with better conditions so all is good for me. The company I'm quitting hasn't taken it well at all, but i don't care it's my career and my choice

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Zulban@reddit

Briefly worked for an economics professor doing analysis on road networks. I was brought in for software quality and graph theory. The guy hated software, hated the notion of improving code even though it was inevitably the foundation of all his research. Their research hit a brick wall because of software quality and maintenance. I have a background in tech teaching and wanted to help the team learn and grow, but he refused to even put me in contact with the grad students who were writing such bad code because he just wanted me to "get everything working". Rude to me, dismissed my excellent refactor and simple demo because cleanup wasn't real work. In one of our meetings a grad student came into his office and he publicly belittled her. Funny too, I was finishing a master's and was earning 2-3x the pay per hour elsewhere. I just liked working with universities and in research. He had zero budget to hire anyone but the most junior of juniors. HR required I write a resignation letter. It was very short and scathing. Baffling.

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software-dev123@reddit

Not in a month, but after 4 months. It was chaos. Managers literally screaming at other workers. People crying daily. Married IT manager openly flirting and carrying on an office relationship with a subordinate. After 4 months I said fuck this, packed my shit and left at lunch. Didnt say a word to anyone. Just walked out. Best I had felt in 4 months.

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ass_staring@reddit

I've quit a job at the month mark, another one I hadn't even started before I said I quit, and the most recent one I was there for a week then quit. The first time I felt so awkward quitting I made up a lie about loosing my partner and wanting to move to another city. I probably looked like a clown. The second one was easy since I only emailed them that I wasn't going to show up for my first day. The last one was difficult because it was a startup founded by a very wealthy and successful guy known in the tech scene. They really wanted me to be part of the team so did felt bad for wasting their time. And that's on me, I should have never taken that offer to begin with, or at least I should have aggressively negotiated WFH days, more options and a higher salary. I was on vacation on the other side of the world so when I received the offer letter (they didn't even ask me if I would accept it for X comp) I just signed it. Suffice to say, WFH is golden. Going to the office 5 times a week is a relic of the past and I'm not going back to that BS. Especially when the office is actually a really fancy but old house in a wealthy area of town full of other tech workers and only two bathrooms without ventilation. Nah dog, keep your startup, this shit stinks.

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JabrilskZ@reddit

Yeah one time a company fuked up and promised one role and gave another. After they onboarded me i was out. End of the first week i made it known i was not staying so the devs would stop having to waste their time teaching me and could get their actual work done. Then went to ally bank for a year. Great spot to work btw.

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InfiniteJackfruit5@reddit

I quit within the first week once with no new job lined up. Just knew it wasn’t right.

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bloodstarvedfan@reddit

I got fired within the first month (maybe a week or two over) because we had this “final exam” thing after training and someone else sitting this “exam” asked a question on slack or something, and without thinking I answered. Lmaoooo. Literally the most toxic place ever so they did me a favour.

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sakkdaddy@reddit

My first job out of university, yeah. The recruiter hyped up what I would be doing as “data management blah blah”, and when I arrived, they had a team of people copy pasting values in spreadsheets all day. I asked for admin access to write a script to automate this work, and they said no. I finished out the day, found a new job fairly quickly at Cisco, and quit. The recruiter tried to give me some lip about a 2-week notice, and I calmly explained that I did not spend 4 years on a computer science degree to copy paste excel cells and be prevented from using my skills to solve problems efficiently, and that they misrepresented the job to me. Later I realized that if that manager had told me “yes” then I probably would have accidentally automated away 10 people’s jobs, including my own, in a day or so. Of course that wasn’t in their personal best interests. 😅

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08148694@reddit

Yeah, not a good culture for

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Careful_Ad_9077@reddit

First week even. First day inside the usual. Second day they wanted me to work over lunch time to deliver something that day , I also.fuck it, had lunch , then came back to a sermon so I quit. And nope ,it was not production code or a fix, they just wanted to flex.

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Ok-Hospital-5076@reddit

Once I joined a company to work on a certain pilot project, by the time I joined that scraped the idea and accommodated me in a different legacy project which was also about to get decommissioned if it didn’t generate enough interest within stakeholders. I was very unsure about my future but then they laid off my manager in a restructuring and that was final nail in coffin. I worked there for 3 weeks .

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GreedyCricket8285@reddit

I'm overemployed so yes, I've done this. Anytime a job isn't what was advertised its a great feeling to just walk away. I made a post about one I dropped after about 90 days: /r/overemployed/comments/1gc4s0b/update_3js_need_to_drop_1_for_my_sanity/

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_AndyJessop@reddit

I resigned about 2 months in (probationary period was 3 months). There were lots of reasons, but the main one was time tracking for everything (including ad hoc meetings).

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bytedeer2@reddit

Yes, I joined a company as a "Senior Cloud Developer". One week before joining, they call me and tell me I need to sign a contract update that my job title is "Consultant". Shortly after joining, I was told I will be outsourced and it is my job to interview with customer companies which I can sell myself to. The customer's projects were about legacy database management and had nothing to do with what I applied for. I left this shithole within 1 month, back to a proper development position. The good part of the story is that I got a salary increase with each job switch.

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shirlott@reddit

ok... let's hope

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hangerofmonkeys@reddit

Does 2 months count? Was looking for new roles in the first week. Just got a new one. I got given a second hand Latitude that barely works, struggles to run productivity apps and the EDR let alone coding. Asked for a replacement, got one, another 2+ year old Latitude. Started looking for a new job. This is day three. Asked what I need to do to get a capable laptop, got sent on a wild goose chase eventuating with me writing a business case. It had been 6 weeks and my bosses boss told me it was with the CFO for approval. This is a $30B company btw. Found out it was approved but procurement and delivery meant it was still a few weeks away from being delivered. It's been two weeks, got a new gig, so I resigned. Found out my boss cried when she read it after I'd called my tech lead to tell him. She was heart broken and she was worried I thought this whole process was a reflection on her and she's been batting for us since the day I asked. We announced $1B in profits for the last 6 months a week ago and we're spending millions to tens of millions on consultancies. This company is absolutely allergic to internal, technical talent. What's contradictory is I got the biggest pay rise I've ever had coming when factoring in equity and bonuses. Still, stoked to be out. New gig looks exciting, grounded, I asked much better questions during the interview. And they asked me back for a fourth and final interview after I completely shit the bed in an online live coding exercise in the third... I struggle a lot with anxiety and I actually fucking forgot python syntax I was that anxious. Slight tangent on that for a moment. I've performed in a consulting role and I'm capable presenting in meetings, even conferences, but put me in a live coding env in an interview and I'm surprised I don't forget how to breathe. They agreed in an email that I totally fucked it up but they trust and know there's capability there. Had a fourth interview with a change in evaluation and got offered a role not much less than current (no equity though... sad ). And they're a scale up of like 15ish Devs, been around for 5 years. So the CTO is clearly awesome. I could not have less regrets that I resigned if I tried.

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poolpog@reddit

Yes but only if I have something lined up. So technically no. But I've known withing the first month of a place is not right for me. No shame in it

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moduspol@reddit

I think it was the second month, but it still sent a message because I had a sign-on bonus I was giving up by not staying at least three. It was pretty clearly my boss’s first time being a boss. This was at the tail end of COVID so everyone was remote. They asked me to refactor a part of their system, but it was a very technical and jargon-specific component, and nobody could tell me what some example inputs and outputs should be. The only way to come up with any was to run some giant integration tests that would test the whole system, but they had only one “dev” cluster that had everyone working in it at the same time, so those tests didn’t always work. And it was a nightmare to debug because they used some proprietary event-based mechanism for passing messages between components, so it wasn’t like HTTP or REST. The DevOps was COMPLETELY siloed in a way that they already understood, but that meant all the developers I talked to didn’t understand anything beyond their own code. They don’t understand how it’s built, packaged, or talks to other components. It was a bit of a nightmare. I found a new job and put in my two weeks.

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Make1984FictionAgain@reddit

Second or third week because of a toxic / hostile / demeaning Tech Lead. Every time I think of him I get irritated, as I am right now.

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warmans@reddit

Yeah, although I didn't end up actually leaving at that point. They were talking about staying late and working Saturdays and I was like... no, I don't think I will, I guess I quit then?? It was a weird company. I got some sort of agreement that I wouldn't actually be working longer hours than contracted and stayed about 6 months, but it was a fucking awful job. In retrospect all the warning signs were there from the interview process and I ignored them so I only have myself to blame.

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Embarrassed-Sand5191@reddit

What warning sign you could have picked from the interview itself?

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warmans@reddit

IIRC they literally said "some people work weekends" or invited me for an interview on a Saturday or something. This was only my second job out of university and I was excited to work in a "start-up". I think I just let myself assume the best. Ten years later and I still tend to assume the worst, because of that experience.

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pedso@reddit

Not me but I had a new hire quit on me after less than a week. My company had decided to shut down a subsidiary/incubation arm division and gave the devs there the option to interview for a position internally. I interviewed this guy, seemed very promising, explained to him our tech stack and he seemed interested. Full remote too. On day two he already said he made a mistake because we weren't on Linux (the previous place was). We supported both Windows and Mac development. One of my senior devs spent some time to ensure we could do all development through Mac's Unix system and walked him through it Nope, Linux or bust. I made sure to be extra clear to any candidates the OSs going forward. The other crazy thing to me was that he was offered severance or a chance to hire internally. Accepting the offer forfeited his severance.

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Fspz@reddit

They paid peanuts, and acted like they owned me. I was in online advertising(think thousands of ads and algorithmic bid adjustments), and was instructed that in no circumstances was I to look in the change log, which imo is pathetic because it makes it harder to find mistakes just to avoid knowing who made them. That told me they didn't really care about efficiency, they cared about politics.

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Mooshufausa@reddit

Yea I did this back in the 2017. Got in with one of the bigger consulting firms but it was clear that they had no work life balance and a lot of mismanaged resources. I called back another job I had interviewed with at the same time and asked them if their position was still open. I had a new offer and a resignation letter within 48 hours lol. I was at the consulting firm for 3 weeks.

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JobanCheema@reddit

It wasn't me but three employees at one of my past employer did. They all quit within 10 days of employment. My past employer is well known to be a bait and switch, and as soon as the employees realized, they quit. The company probably won't hire them again but I think it is for the good of both parties. I believe it was a right decision for them to do it. Better earlier than later, saving time for both.

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clearlight2025@reddit

What kind of bait and switch?

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BomberRURP@reddit

Yes. Joined a small team, and was going to work with the guy who interviewed me (seemed nice), and who wrote the entire code base. Anyway first week was just getting shit shipped, setting up, filling out forms, etc. second week I got some small tasks mainly to get familiar with the codebase. The code was built with tools that I knew very well (why I got the job), but I had questions about the domain. The guy who wrote it also had some unique approaches. Anyway I sent him a few questions on teams. Dude doesn’t reply for 3 hours ( although he was online the whole time and posting on the team channel). Then he sends me a message saying “write down all your questions for the day and send them as an email”. I was taken aback and replied okay. Then about an hour later I get a link on chat. All he says is “you should read this. It’ll be helpful”. I thought “oh maybe it’s done theory that explains his approach? Or maybe it’s more about the domain and how it works, etc”. Nope. It was a long ass article about why interrupting engineers is HORRIBLE and you should NEVER do it. The project was under an NDA so other than technology I actually had no idea what we were building. Salary was good, and the gut seemed nice, and I was tired of my job. Once I joined I realized the project was very unethical, so I was already thinking of leaving. The shitty interaction with master dweeb was the final sign I needed. I called my old boss and said “I’ve made a huge mistake”, told him what happened, he laughed, and I had an offer (with a raise) the next day. I had to drive to the office to drop off the equipment and the guy inside asked me why I was leaving. I just said it wasn’t for me. He said “oh I figured it was due to billybob (the guy I worked with)” then I spilled the beans and he goes “oh man what a dick. I don’t blame you, if I had to work with him I’d quit too”.

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No-Presence-7334@reddit

I did once. It was because they switched the job location from a site that was a short commute to a place that had the worst traffic in the area.

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ButWhatIfPotato@reddit

I only done this once, and I hope to not do it again but I have quit within 2 hours of starting a gig. They were supposed to launch something within a week of me joining so literally everybody was running around like headless chickens. Before I joined I send them 3 emails reminding them to send me over the contract, which they did not. I arrived on my start date and told them we need to sign the contract before I start. They sat me down in front of a workstation with instructions on what needs to be done and told me they would come up with a contract ASAP. Sat down there doing nothing for two hours, then I just walked out and left. Never heard from them again.

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szescio@reddit

I wish I did. It's completely ok to get out before you get indoctrinated to shit culture. Just say you suddenly got a better offer and don't want to waste their resources

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thatVisitingHasher@reddit

Yeah. I was sent a random IM by a developer because a service was down on my second week on the job. I worked with that developer to bring the service back up. It was like 4:30pm and i was the only person in the office. I emailed my boss to let him know what happened. I felt pretty good about being able to update the service and fix a production issue for a service i didn’t even know existed that day. He called me at 9pm telling me I’m never to have contact outside of him. If anyone ever contacts me, i need to contact him. I called my old boss the next day and said i need to come back. I don’t work that way. I can’t work for an organization that relies on obfuscation, has that much politics, and doesn’t allow people to talk to one another.

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annoyed_freelancer@reddit

Yes! I quit without a job as the workplace had a deeply toxic and dysfunctional team whose conduct tripped off my anxiety in a bad way.

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Wishitweretru@reddit

Quit the first hour once. Arrived to a bait and switch / power play.

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General-Jaguar-8164@reddit

Tech stack was from early 2000 (office servers, data in the hard drives closet, windows PC desks, 2 hours commute, etc) Before quit I spoke with the second offer I got and make sure I had that aligned Only reason I accepted that job was because machine learning projects, but their state was laughable for modern times

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bladedancer661@reddit

Yeah, I have. Sometimes you just know a job isn’t the right fit. I quit one within a few weeks because the work environment was toxic, everyone was miserable, turnover was high, and the training was basically nonexistent. No point in sticking around if it’s making you miserable. If you’re already feeling like quitting, trust your gut.

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edhelatar@reddit

Yes. Actually, more got myself fired. Took the team to the bar on second day and got them drunk. They spilled the beans. The company was using scummy tactics to promote scummy products. None of that was listed on their website, but I learned the legit stuff they were selling was only few percent of sales. Told them next day I am working from home even that I wasn't supposed to and told them I am not doing the stuff the way they want me to do it as it's stupid ( it objectively was ). Next day got an email about how bad of a coder I am from an owner ( who does some coding ). I changed a font by mistake on internal tool used by 3 people because no one put a stupid lock file and i didn't notice that. That one was a fuck up, although reasonable. Then larger list of bunch of things like rewriting his code ( it was doing 2k DBs request on single URL and it took me a second to fix ). Unwrapping js files ( there were multiple jQuery libraries conflicting with each other, so the solution was to just nest them in more ready brackets than reasonable ) and my favourite not following code styles ( which were nowhere defined and very much not industry standard ). The biggest pleasure gave me taking high ground. To massive email I just replied "No worries, thanks". It was loads of money, but fuck doing work like that.

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mailed@reddit

I've had more than one job where I wanted to quit on the first day. lol

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Cool_As_Your_Dad@reddit

Not quit.. but started looking again. Twice. First company I was still jnr. Its was a crazy place to work. 2nd company told met .net dev etc. Get there... just do javascript. I was no thanks. That was in 20+ years

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flakeeight@reddit (OP)

Yep, going through that now 🥲 I’ve been there for nearly 3 months but recall opening LinkedIn again and applying on the first week

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Sunstorm84@reddit

Same here, but only once. Within the first week I noticed that almost all commits by the lead developer were accompanied by a comment saying it was a dirty hack. The codebase was an utter mess because of it, and getting worse on a daily basis.

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_TinyRhino_@reddit

3 months. Did it right, gave two weeks, etc. Poor work / life balance, 'kool-aid' culture, 9pm meetings due to distributed team, horrible QA and release process, expectations to be immediately proficient in languages and frameworks I was not hired for and had no background in, completely 'checked out' eng manager who'd been promoted but was still fulfilling the role until a new hire could be found. Felt like I was lied to about it all. I kept my options open and continued to look for other places. I found a local smaller shop with a real need for my type of work and a tech stack I am intimately familiar with. I don't keep the last place on my resume. Just a blip in my life really.

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hobbycollector@reddit

Didn't write a line of code in a month, it was all devops on some weird system. A recruiter reached out to me with my dream job and off I went.

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thekwoka@reddit

I started with a client that a friend of mine worked at that was doing wordpress stuff. They had no version control or any kind of real tooling going on, I even told them it was something they should have, they gave me a task with wordpress, I did it, then I fired them as a client since wordpress is a nightmare and all their code stuff is terrible. They then complained I made changes without making a copy so now they need to hire someone to undo it.... Man, I wonder if that could have been avoided somehow?

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jrodbtllr138@reddit

3 months if that counts. Job was fine, but I had a new job lined up with better pay/benefits. Always TRY to find another job before leaving.

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RandyHoward@reddit

Yes, the electric company literally showed up to shut off the electricity in my second week. If they’re not paying for basic utilities I wasn’t sticking around for them to not pay my paycheck

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ScriptingInJava@reddit

Started at the new place, was given a company handbook in physical and digital form to read as my work for the first 3 days. I read it in 20 minutes, then sat doing nothing for the following 23.8 working hours. Came in day 4 and was given access to the company's internal sites, including an employee health one which publicly listed all medical conditions on profiles. I'm disabled (ADHD) and do not want this public, but without it listed there they refused reasonable adjustments (later learned this was illegal). Later that morning I was taken into a meeting where I was "onboarded" (forcibly given) a project that was 3 months behind, built using MS Access years ago, and told the customers are already unhappy and I needed to deliver. The one and only other dev was leaving for a months holiday the next day, and it needed to be completed when he returned. I went out to lunch, got a bus and went home. Never went back and had to take them to small claims court for the 4 days of pay they were refusing to pay me. Recently checked Companies House (UK listing of all registered businesses) and they've gone bust and dissolved!

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Fit-Eggplant-2258@reddit

Twice: 1) Hated the subject, ok money, left cause i could not figure out what was going on in it 2) Cool subject, ok money, left cause the manager was a piece of shit that time tracked us

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findanewcollar@reddit

Trust your gut and quit. Even better if you have something lined up.

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agumonkey@reddit

it feels a bit childish to say this but sometimes only staying where you feel super happy is useful, of course we rarely have access to this, but it's a good goal to keep in mind

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Rosoll@reddit

Yep. Once on day three because it was just wildly boring and another time I started looking from the first week because it was incredibly toxic - but didn’t find another, less toxic place to go to till three months later

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MostlyAUsername@reddit

Not in the first month, as I've always found the first month to be onboarding and getting my feet under the table. I've always felt like everyone is on "their best behaviour" around a new starter for the first month too. For me, the 3 month mark is always when I really got a feel for everything. I made the decision to leave one job 3 months in but actually exited around the 5/6 month mark, when I found another job. Luckily probation was 6 months and I only had 1 week's notice (as opposed to 12 if I tried to leave after 6 months) so it was a very fast move. Other than that job, I suppose I've been lucky enough to work at places that I've been comfortable staying at for a few years. I have a couple of friends that have left jobs within weeks though as they realised that the role was wildly different to what was advertised, discussed and offered. Which never made sense to me from the companies standpoint tbh.

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thelochok@reddit

Should of, didn't. Didn't make it through probation, but found a very good long term role shortly thereafter. I had bizarre ideas like wanting some idea of requirements, and wanting their internally developed 'low code' system to have some documentation beyond the developer's head.

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Minimum_Elk_2872@reddit

Sometimes I wish I did

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JobanCheema@reddit

I wish that too.

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