Obviously if I didn't have to have a job I wouldn't, but you know, gotta work within the confines of this capitalistic hellscape.
Background for context: I’ve been working at a software company for about 4 years, where I’ve bounced around in a few different positions and departments. I worked my way up the ladder from an entry level position, to one of the few people that know the most about the software our company sells. It was a relatively small company when I started, and I like to be good at my job, so I quickly became sort of a “cornerstone employee” as me and my buddies like to say. As in: if one of these five people leave the company then shit is gonna start toppling. I’d give more details about the job, but it’s sort of a Chandler Bing situation where it’s hard to explain and ultimately no one outside of the industry really cares.
In this last position I was in, I was tasked with setting up accounts for our biggest clients that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to use our software for their entire company. I’m talking about nationwide brands with thousands of users that take like half a year to launch. The problem was that our company had only just started to get clients that huge, and really had no structure in place to know how to successfully launch huge accounts like that. It was very “you’ll be the guinea pig for these new mega accounts, and after you do it we’ll see what we can improve”. Needless to say, I was stressed. I had no idea what I was doing at some points and we were all kind of making it up as we went along. Couple that with the fact that literally everyone at the company including me was feeling overworked and underpaid, along with talks about several other accounts that were even bigger coming down the pipeline, and I finally had enough. I wrote up a resignation letter and quit on the spot with no notice. It honestly felt so freeing to take back control of my life.
The management team immediately was trying to talk me back into staying, and I basically had to spend a day telling them all “Sorry I’m not interested in a pay raise, I need to take time to take care of myself”. My friends and coworkers honestly all got a kick out of it because a lot of them were feeling just as overwhelmed in their jobs and thought it was cool that someone important basically told them to suck it.
Fast forward a couple weeks and now they’re offering me a new position in a different department with higher pay (higher than what they were offering me to stay). Apparently my leaving sent a bit of a shock wave through the company that reached all the way to the CEO, and now they want to focus on creating a bunch of new automation that will make it so that other people that work in my old department don’t get as stressed out as I was. They want to hire me back on because I obviously know a lot about what it takes to launch an account and they want me to help coordinate the effort to make it easier. Part of me thinks it’s cool that I kicked off a chain reaction and that they’re fighting so hard to keep me on board. But then there’s the antiwork part of me saying “fuck that capitalist bullshit, they didn’t treat you right, and now they have to pay for it”.
I haven’t put any effort into finding another job yet, and I’ve realized there are a lot of big life changes coming that I would need the pay raise for. I was just on the phone with them today and I let them know that I would need a couple weeks to think everything over and come to a decision. I’m left wondering if I should do the safe/easy thing and just go back to working for them until I find something better or if I should dive headlong into finding something else? Would going back to my old company make me look like a sell out, or is it “a sound business decision”? One thing I know for sure is that whether I go back or find a new job I will not be working nearly as hard as I was.
TLDR; My job sucked, so I quit. Now they want to hire me back with a new position and more pay. Should I take them up on it?