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It's the end of 2024 and I have two offers, both alike in dignity, one of a FAANGy sort the other of a start-up-y science mission driven sort. The latter feels more noble, more interesting, and christ almighty but it is reveled to be a shit show from top to tail not one month after I step into the role. It's half way through 2025 and I spend everyday regretting that I took the job I took when I took this job in September. In spite of some truly heinous leaders, I ship three very high profile features that I designed from scratch, all using technology of the bleeding edge variety, and it hurts the whole time. I file the first hostile work environment complaint of my career. I am miserable. I don't want to have such a short turn on my resume so I am rationalizing staying on a near daily basis. I am barely hanging on.
It's the first week of June and I am in Toronto, on site with the whole company, and it's revelatory to meet all the people, all the people I work with daily, and find that they are all lovely and all miserable in the same way that I am. All bosses suck, but ours are... unhinged and aggro in a way that they make Anne Hathaway movies about (not that one). Over drinks and in some conference rooms we all dip our toes in the "so how... are yall feeling about... things?" and we all reveal that we are desperately looking for escape routes.
It is Thursday and I am walking up Simcoe and a friend & former boss who works at the place I turned down to take this chicken-shit-gig texts me a screenshot of a recruiter email from my current chicken-shit employer and asks if I referred him. "I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy and you can quote me if you respond" is my reply and he calls me then and there to ask would I reconsider coming to work for them? And two working days later and it is Monday and I have the offer and I quit. It turns out that three others from my team are quitting also.
I am starting my new job next week. I have this week off. I spend it mostly by upgrading my desk setup and buying new glasses and cute outfits because I truly, really, honestly need this to feel like a new beginning.
Look, I am giving it six months. Six months to decide if I stay, and if I don't stay here, at the modern tech co equivalent of Spacely Space Sprockets (I'll be working on widgets and dashboards and data displays: rectangles and words, on screens of many sizes, my bread and butter, my daily grind), then I'm just out altogether. Done with this whole industry. I will go back to school. I will go all in on tattooing. I will become an electrician. I will turn tricks down at the dock. I don't care. I just have to be away from all of...
...this. The internet-as-job. The screen-as-workplace. The phone-as-feudal-lord.