My answer is yes, but I’ve quit many of my jobs the absolute wrong way.

What made me think to write this post was a call I got from someone I’d worked with in my prior life. This guy is a VP at a software company where I used to be on the board and he was calling to get my advice on the best way to leave his job. He got offered an amazing opportunity at another company and has decided to move on, but wanted to make sure he was going about it the right way. The team is small and a lot depends on him, the CEO has a lot of trust in him, and he has visibility to board level.

My few points of advice were: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been about a year since I last had a boss.

The boss I had at the time that I made the whole steady-career-to-full-time-entrepreneur change wasn’t a nice one. He was passive aggressive, liked to embarrass people, always blamed me or someone else if anything went wrong, and gave very little credit if things went right. I never cried at work — mostly because I think it’s bad for women to show so much emotion in the workplace — but I often ran to the bathroom or came home on the verge of tears from dealing with him.

Not having this person in my life has been a relief. But let me come clean and tell you that sometimes I really miss having a boss. Yes, even a boss who drove me nuts for five years. And here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »

I get to write a post like this because:

• I’ve quit many jobs I hated and many of those were for the wrong reasons

• I’ve not quit two jobs for some of the reasons I list below and I think it was the right thing for my career

Now that we got that over with, here are 5 reasons why you should not quit a job you hate:

1. It’s a means to an end.

I once quit a job I hated 2 months before my contract there was up. (Long story, it wasn’t a contract job but I was hired for a certain period of time.) At the time, I thought I could not take it any more and another opportunity came along. But I lost a lot by not waiting an extra 2 months: My bonus, but more importantly, a great relationship with this particular firm. My career turned out fine and I ended up going in a different direction all together, but if I’d wanted to stay in that field, I would have had a harder time getting a great job at another company.

A job is a way to make a living but it’s also often a means to an end. Sometimes you have to pay your dues for a while before moving on to a different position, one which you will like more. You might have to work for a company where the culture is hideous but one that has great reputation, which will help you with other jobs in the future. You might be learning a great deal. Think about this before you quit.

2. It pays well and you need to save up money. Read the rest of this entry »

At one of my past jobs I worked for someone I consider a truly toxic person. He would go out of his way to make people feel bad, embarrassed, insecure, and he would often talk about doing this intentionally. “I like to put people off-balance and see how they react,” he would say.

Once I’d made a mistake in a document we had to send out. I’d emailed him the document to review and instead of emailing me back to let me know about the mistake, he forwarded the document to our client, with the mistake in it, saying that I’d’ authored it and if they had any comments, to get back to us. When the client responded, they pointed out the mistake and my boss came into my office to tell me that he knew it was in there, but he didn’t correct it because he wanted to me to learn from the embarrassment of my mistake. (I don’t cry at the office, as a rule, but I came close that day.) Read the rest of this entry »