About five months ago I left a relatively secure and well paid job in a large UK charity to join a much smaller one on a lower salary. I did this because I was frankly sick and tired of the politics at the last employer and the new role was for a cause that's close to my heart and was billed as a development opportunity.
Was it bollocks. From very early on working there was like being in a mosh pit. Senior staff and trustees displayed appalling people skills and the lack of clarity about job roles meant that colleagues were horrendously stressed, falling out with each other, and leaving continually. I pushed back against the worst of it and found myself effectively demoted and sidelined. Then a massively underpaid administrator left and I found myself doing her job, one that I in no way signed up for and wasn't much good at.
I put up with this for months while the senior leadership whined about their 60% staff retention rate whilst pissing off on foreign holidays every month. The trustees agreed to a 5% pay increment because of the cost of living crisis; because of the high staff turnover among junior staff the only people who benefitted were the seniors who were mostly on £50k+. The CEO was a master virtue signaller who would wax lyrical about the trust she had in her staff while popping up at random intervals to micromanage and fuck things up.
The crunch came when I was competently managing a piece of work that required no input from her but somehow ended up with an inference that it wasn't being done properly because it didn't include a gantt chart. Nobody asked her but she did it anyway. I was dealing with a virus at the time and had a few days off because it was like swallowing a golf ball. I turned my computer on the following Monday, stared at the screen for 30 seconds and said out loud “fuck this”.
I wrote a brief letter of resignation and sent it to my manager. This led to a somewhat hostile response and a meeting about an hour later in which I calmly deconstructed the ludicrous behaviours and culture that they'd created. She tried to imply that I was stressed because I hadn't taken much leave, and I responded by pointing out that she was responsible for that by being on holiday all the time. She had nothing to say about that or the dozen other toxic behaviours I outlined. She did have the grace to look embarrassed, not least at the point I told her that I thought they were likely to have a suicide among the workforce in the next year.
I gave a month's notice as per contract and did the square root of aslittleaspossible for that time. My last day was yesterday, I don't have another job, and I've never been less sorry in my whole life. I'm a kick in the arse off 50 and I'm done with this kind of bullshit.