Yesterday, I finally sent my notice. I've been working here as a developer for 1.5 years and I was always criticized, I was told that “I don't bring enough value to the team”, I was told that “I did not deserve a raise” (even though I normally work in one of the best paid areas in my country, here I was still paid like a retail worker and whenever I tried to object I was told that “I still had a lot to learn to get a raise”), I was forced to work with outdated technologies that I hated, my company did not provide me with any sort of learning materials and no one took their time to help me learn new things and develop professionally because I guess, to some extent, they didn't want me to learn new things so that they couldn't pay me more. Yesterday I had enough and told my manager I'm leaving.
His reaction was not at all unexpected. Of course he started guilt tripping me again, telling me how I'm being a “traitor” and “how much he's helped me” and when I tried to tell him respectfully what I didn't like, he got into a 2-hour discussion with me trying to prove how he was right and I was wrong. He then proceeded to show me a table with data of “my productivity”, trying to explain that I was not making profit for his company, but he took it even further end EDITED the data in the table as we were talking, without any proof of that data, just to show me “how unproductive I am and how I'm dragging them down”. However, he's always done this while I worked there, so I already knew I was just a number to him. Still, the straw that broke the camel's back was that he would talk for 5 minutes straight and then, when I tried to say something, he always told me to “let him speak first” even though he was the only one speaking! That just shows how much of a narcissistic bastard he is.
Of course I'm eternally relieved that I'm leaving this company. But I also regret it. I am scared I might now find another job as a developer, and it's literally one of the only fields that pay decently in my country (Eastern Europe). I am scared that I don't have enough experience to find another job in this industry and the job requirements are literally BRUTAL here (you need years and years of experience, you need to know a lot of technologies, frameworks, methodologies, etc) and I fear I might have lost my chance to earn a decent income. But at the same time, I feel like that idiot shouldn't have profited from my work and my effort anymore. Has anyone else been through similar struggles? Does the regret lessen with time?