Disclaimer: I have only ever left jobs for one reason: what management is asking me to do isn't compatible with my beliefs. Period. Never fired. Never laid off (even when I begged to be because of the payout and disgust with the company).
While there are a lot of examples, I'll share this one as the most frustrating.
Worked in local government – was hired to basically build and develop a new team for something this government entity had failed at three times before. Took a slight paycut and had to relocate 1 year after having bought a house in a different state. I did it because the CIO was directly telling me that I had the chance to positively impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens.
Started with a project, planned for 2 years by the vendor. I took it over and got it done in 1 year.
Within 2 years of start (so 1 year later), we had an engagement increase from approx. 20-30 concurent daily users, to over 1500 government employee users, out of 2,000 total, and so much work in the pipeline (that I managed) that I got them to agree to hire a guy, which I personally selected and positioned.
Manager wants to retire, so they now make me officially a supervisor, him my peer, and they hire a new director over all of us (there are about 7 supervisors now instead of 1 manager for everyone). Director came from the blue collar, not white collar.
I propose a new project that has the opportunity to dramatically change not only that entity, but the entire state, using Master Data Management, something they'd never even thought possible. All I needed them to do was stay out of my way and let me guide the development via waterfall (the users would NOT embrace Agile, based on past projects) and I'd have had the entire thing done in 6 months, maybe less.
Director and another guy colluded with the main business group to force Agile against my directive, and allowed that group to dictate what they wanted (i.e. “we want a blue button over here”).
The first subproject (total of seven) we did, which I'd originally scoped at about 2 weeks and about $5k, wrapped up 6 months later and was final budgeted at $100k.
The CIO wasn't happy. I told him – that's what happens when you don't trust your experts and you let the business run roughshod like Homer Simpson in that episode with his brother and the “Car of the Future”. Same thing. Steve Jobs knew what he was doing.
I called a meeting with the Director and told him to his face: you need to fix this and get us back on track like I laid out, or I'm out of here.
This guy laughed in my face. Ok.
We started scoping the second project while the support team and my new hire were slammed with support calls from the first broken project. This while I have to manage my team plus the pipeline, and I'm doing a major build for a different group that's much more involved.
Went to my desk, wrote up a resignation with 3 weeks notice (didn't want to leave my team hanging right before Christmas and needed to shore up the knowledgebase for them) and left it on the Director's desk with a copy to HR to make sure they got my notes, which were crystal clear that HE was the #1 reason I was leaving and if they ever wanted to get back on track, they'd get rid of him before he wasted more taxpayer money.
He comes back, calls me in and claims to be “shocked” and “insulted” that I would blame him. Told him directly, I warned you…problem is you didn't believe me. Now, let's see if you can make it work without me since you thought it was a big joke.
Two of the four people involved with the debacle (Director being one of them) are no longer with that entity after I'd left, and the new hire that I brought in managed to finish my final project, which was a complete transformation of the way the locality citizens could pay their property taxes at a fraction of the time and cost vs. the previous, and he was honored on the entity's site.
Moral: as I told my two staff members, if you ever feel like you're not be respected and/or what you're being asked to do doesn't align with your moral compass, tell them. Be open and tell them. If they still don't listen, leave. It's not easy. But sometimes, a kid has to burn their finger to learn that fire hurts.