TLDR: wanted to share how free I feel after my last day at a job that I was at for 2 years that just kept getting worse.
This was a white collar desk / computer job with a great salary when I joined. When I joined it was on a team of ~10 folks that all shared responsibilities to execute different customer projects. Over the last 2 years,
5 of them quit (citing burnout and company not staffing the team to succeed since we were basically asked to do the job of a 25 person team)
3 of them moved to other groups that were focused on “higher priority” efforts
That left only 2 of us carrying the load of 10 for about the last 6 months. At one point they decided to hire a new guy – but when he joined they used it as an excuse to offload work from one of the executive team members to him – so no actually help to us.
So for those six months we did our best and I was working a lot of unpaid overtime (as a salaried employee) to keep things afloat – but all the projects fell behind schedule – as should be expected.
Last month I told them I was quitting. Nothing else lined up – just wasn’t worth it. They asked what they could do to keep me – I told them I wanted an 8% raise for inflation over the last two years (didn’t receive any increases in salary since joining) and a 8% increase on merit (always received 4s and 5s on performance review scale going to 5), plus I wanted a commission for new projects that I personally captured for the company (asking 3-10% based on our company paying that already to outside firms that brought us clients).
They said we hear you – let’s revisit in 6 months.
I said no thanks. I’ll be taking two weeks of vacation (they needed to keep me on to ensure customer accounts could transition since specific personnel are assigned – so I had nice leverage) at the end of which my employment with you will conclude. Today was the last day of that two week vacation and I’m FREE!!!
Don’t know what I’ll do next but have had a number of the customers I supported already reach out on back channels asking me to work with : for them – so sort of kicking myself for not doing this sooner – but after joining /antiwork about 6 months ago – so happy and relieved to be Free.