LEAVE Your Misery Behind: When To Quit Your Job And When To Stay

There are varying degrees of misery in the corporate world. I will write about a few of them here, based on my own experience. Some warrant a departure from the job. Others do not. I will provide a rating for each with Low for Don't Leave Your Job and maybe find ways to mature personally, Medium for Look For a Lateral Move or a Better Job and High for RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. I mean that last one. There are some jobs that are absolutely toxic to who we are as humans and everything we stand for.

When I say 'Run For Your Life' I mean that in order to preserve your humanity, dignity, self-respect, confidence, to protect or recover the trust you had in yourself and in order to invest in your future by nurturing your present: You have to get away from your job at any cost.

(a) Occasional Annoyance (Low): It happens. There is always an annoying co-worker who rubs you the wrong way 20% of the time. This is okay. It just means that you have an opportunity to open your mind to a different personality. It also means that you're human and that you are perfectly OK as you are. You don't need to like EVERYBODY and they don't need to like you either. You do need to get along with everyone at work in order to finish a project satisfactorily. So do it. Read some books on personal development. Or ignore your undesired people. Focus on the things you love about your life, your job, your routine (or lack thereof), the people you love in your life (or lack thereof). Take vacations, enjoy life, treasure your good days at work.

(b) Serious Disagreement with A Co-worker (Low): If this person is an equal in your company's hierarchy, and you are working with more people that this one person, learn to grow from this experience. If they are an equal, learn better communication techniques. Open your mind to new ideas. Hate his guts? Try to stop focusing on him when you are on your own. Don't just foolishly ignore him/her. When you are with him, observe his behaviour objectively. When we see someone we hate, we see something inside them that we dislike about ourselves. This is the rule, not the exception. Use 'The Work' by Byron Katie and open your eyes to something very deep and profound within you. This is an opportunity for Enlightenment. Don't pass it up.

(c) Occasional Disagreement with a Senior Co-worker or Supervisor (Low): This is actually a learning opportunity. The assumption here is that there is no verbal abuse involved, just disagreements. The situation is that your supervisor wants something done a certain way, you disagree, you have voiced your opinions (or not) and supervisor sticks with his decision. In life, this happens. If you are a junior or intermediate engineer, this happens a lot. You have a lot to learn and a senior engineer has a lot to teach you. Learn, learn, learn. You may be confident, but be grateful that someone may show you the ropes. Your ego is good and serves a purpose, but there is no need to stroke it 24 hours a day. Healthy self-confidence is to be applauded. But blinding conceit (which happens to us all) can be met with a healthy alternative of objectivity and a curious nature. Nurture those good qualities in yourself.

(d) Frequent Disagreements with multiple co-workers (Medium): This is a sign. It's a sign that you have values, a method of doing things, and those are incompatible with the people you work with. It's natural. It's human. It's draining for the black sheep - but there is nothing wrong with you. You just quack when others neigh. Find another job. Try out a different department within the same organization. Change is inevitable. It's hard to accept, but try it. You are bound to grow - whether you initiate the growth opportunity or the growth opportunity comes to your door step.

(e) Disagreement with Company Policies (Medium): This is a deep problem. If you see that your values, ethics, reasoning, judgement are being opposed or violated, it's time to find an organization that is compatible with who you are. In a shitty economy, don't quit your job. Keep applying for new jobs and keep looking for the right place to be. If you are in a large corporation, find a small company. If you are already in a small company, try for another small company. NEVER will I recommend that anyone move to a large corporation to find people who honour values, ethics and sound judgement. It just doesn't happen.

(f) Tough Commute (Low - Medium): I've spoken to people who have moved jobs to accommodate their daily schedule. I was actually stunned when I heard this. But I later realized that some people don't really give a shit about what they do all day as long as the hours are reasonable and they get a pay check. Weekly donuts, monthly birthday parties, all these contribute to their overall happiness. They don't take life too seriously and are happy. If you are one of those people, then sure... find another work place to improve your commute. If however, you value your work, do get along with your co-workers, are challenged with your work or are pretty okay with your salary - then don't change jobs. Having even a few of the things I mentioned above is a stroke of luck. Consider moving residences.

(g) You Want A Little More Money (Very Low): This is the worst reason to quit your job. I'm not talking about a $50,000/year raise. I'm talking about $2,000 a year. You'll not even see it on your bi-weekly pay check. I only listed this point because my father's ex-coworker did leave a decent job for a raise of $2000/year. 8 months later they laid him off. Needless to say, this is a stupid reason to leave.

(h) Over Work (Medium - High): I have been overworked most of my life. I have traditionally worked 50-60 hours a week, and got paid for 40 most of the time. It set a very bad foundation for my adult-life-experience. But strangely enough, back then I didn't really mind it. I got paid for it some of the time (when budgets allowed) and I learnt everything very quickly. I managed to keep my work quality high, which was important to me. I occasionally worked the 80 hours, but it was a one-off incident yearly, which I thought was a "no biggie" sort of deal.
Then I joined that last company I worked for. By week 3 (after starting), I was working 60 hours a week. By the end of the second month I was working 80 hours a week. I didn't complain until 2 weeks later when I was given even more work. 100 hours a week. At last, when I realized that I would have to stay a total of 120 hours at the office that week to finish the work, I protested. For the remaining 9 months I worked 80-100 hours a week. I spoke to management every month about reducing my workload. On month 7 or 8, I developed chest pains. When I asked for help, they laughed at me. The most senior manager never got to work a minute before 8:00 and never left a minute after 5:00. But he laughed when I said that I can't do anymore 80 hours weeks.

(i) Abuse (High): Any form of abuse will destroy you.
You know why abusing children is heinous and infinitely worse than abusing adults? Because adults have the ability to walk away from that situation. If you being abused at work, recognize that you are an adult and that you are in a position to walk away. Take ownership of the situation. It would be best for you to leave the job.
Verbal abuse (in private or in public): Verbal abuse is intended to diminish your importance, make you feel smaller, and wrench power away from you. There is no circumstance where suffering abuse is a good idea. There can never be a holy intention where you were meant to suffer.

Bullying (being treated badly, being singled out):
    Group Bullying: You will lose this battle. You cannot fight group bullying. You just have to protect yourself and leave. If you have been targeted by someone who feels threatened by you, and you are new to the organization - you are going to lose this fight. I do not believe that any institution has a system in place for you to be able to fight this.

    Individual Bullying: If you have just one bully, you are not working regularly with your bully, and if they are an equal, then if you stick it out with your organization chances are that the bully will either leave or will get out of your way. I have seen this happen countless times. The bully tends to leave because they are more miserable than you are. Instead, focus on yourself: establish your reputation, your quality of work, and people within your company will value you for the work you do and what you bring to the table. When everything else is working out for you at this job, then don't let one bully deter you from building a successful career at this organization. You can even switch departments or offices if it still bothers you.

Life is meant to be good. There can be challenges now and then, but life is not meant to be excruciatingly hard. Suffering arrives in unpredictable ways. When people have to go through genuine suffering there is nothing they can do about it but accept it. And by this I mean things like war, holocaust, colonization, death of a child, being orphaned.
But for ALL THE OTHER TIMES there is choice. You Must Leave the abusive situation.

If you live in a first world country (like I do), and you are not leaving your job because of poor financial choices you have made, or low self-esteem then you have to take responsibility for your situation and face the fact that you are choosing to be abused. And you can CHOOSE TO GET OUT. Choose to honour yourself.

(j) Slander (High): If you are a professional, this is a career killer. If you have someone out to get you, you better get out. Run. Especially if this person is more powerful than you are and has a long reach within an esoteric community that you work in.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. 

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Engineering Rewards Negative Thinking

I wonder if there are any professions that reward Positive thinking.

The health profession? Where you have to help the patient visualize their own healing...

The finance sector where you day dream of making lots of money...

Not the day-trading world. I see how obsessive and negative that environment has become (or maybe always was) since everyone there operates either out of fear or greed. Tsk tsk.

The tourism industry perhaps, where you help people have a good time. I know that under staffing and the resulting frustration is an issue in that industry too.

The fitness industry is definitely powered on positive thinking and all sorts of positive pop-psychology. Of course, human nature intervenes and we do have the over-competitive people. But I can see this industry benefiting from positive thinking.

All this to say that the Engineering world directly benefits from negative thinking. The more doomsday scenarios one can cover for, the better the Engineer.

It is fucking draining. Constantly thinking of how something is going to break or fail, is hardly an objective exercise. I have spent several (meaning thousands of) imagining scenarios of 'operator fault', 'manufacturer's defect resulting in catastrophe', 'possible major and minor failure', 'past catastrophes and how they could have been avoided', etc.

After 13 years, it's not fun. Actually, it started getting painful after year 4. It's one thing to build a model toy car or to build a bridge from spaghetti. It's another thing to make a living incorporating solutions to a myriad of failures that may happen, day after day after day after day...

At first it was gratifying to see, at the end of a project, that no catastrophe had actually taken place - as a result of my work. But the novelty wears off. Then I started looking for recognition from my peers and managers. Tumbleweeds rolling in an abandoned dusty wild west town there.

It's tiring. It's not for everyone.

The older engineers I've worked with get accustomed to the finite number of scenarios they have encountered in their career. Their designs were not the best. They did what they had done for the past 25 years. The covered for some scenarios. And they turned a blind eye to the new scenarios. It was as if the new scenarios were in their blind spot. They had become complacent. The field technologists were different. They thought on their feet and did a really good job even after being on the job for 30+ years. But that was probably because they did not bear the direct responsibility of any failure - which is what the engineer bears - direct responsibility for failure.

High paying professionals like Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, Accountants don't get payed high salaries because their task is complex. They get paid to take the blame. They get paid to hang by the noose one day. And maybe that is why there is a pandemic of disillusionment among those that practice these professions.

40% doctors leave their profession in the first 10 years. There is a whole industry dedicated to help lawyers transition out of their practice. Engineers... no statistics there... because they keep bloody getting laid off and being made redundant. Not sure how accountants fare, but I have a couple of accountant friends that are well on their way to being professionally burnt out. I should include professors and researchers in this ocean of disillusioned people. They don't bear legal blame for catastrophes, but they are so over-burdened with work that many of them look (and act) broken.

What is wrong with this scenario?

Engineering Is A Highly Vulnerable Profession

....or rather, Engineers will almost always find traditional engineering jobs in volatile or vulnerable industries.

How do I have the confidence to say this?

Because if you look at most of the industry collapses in the last 50 years, you'll notice a trend. Although people from all walks of life are affected when an industry takes a hit, the ones that take the 'hardest' hit are the ones that trained specifically for that industry. And Engineers do just that.

Aerospace engineering takes periodic hits all the time. Even wonder what happens to people in the industry? It's not exactly an up-and-coming field. People who have the experience and manage to hold on to their jobs during the downturns are lucky. Those that accumulate, say, 10 years of experience and then sadly lose their jobs... what do they do? Wait around till the industry returns? Fat chance of that happening in a predicable fashion.

Nuclear engineering. There are 'n' number of people working in this industry. It's a non-growth industry. After Fukushima, this field became extremely unpopular, and many people lost their jobs. Let's follow that thought to completion - many people - mostly engineers - lost their jobs permanently. So now, after 4-5 years of education and highly specific nuclear-engineering training and experience, these people are left without a job and without any foreseeable job prospects. What a sham. I sound disappointed because some part of me was convinced when my University implied that after I get my degree, I'll be employed in my field for as long as I was going to work. What an utter lie. These lies are especially true for highly specific areas of expertise. Nuclear engineering is not an easy program to get into, nor is it an easy program to complete.

Electrical Engineering: Let's take this broad field as an example. People that get a job in a utility company after graduating end up staying in the field of utility and power transmission all their lives - if they don't get laid off. Can they transition into another area, like say, Oil and Gas? The truth is NO they can't. If a person with 6 years of Utility and Power transmission experience applies to the Oil and Gas industry, they will be rejected due to lack of relevant experience. I tried to make a transition from the Municipal industry to the Power transmission industry. 3 interviews later, I gave up. Despite their 'need' for people and my extensive knowledge and experience in the relevant field of Industrial applications, they did not want me. And that was during a boom. There is no way, NO WAY people can make a transition from say Oil and Gas to say Municipal during an economic downturn. I used to listen to my boss' conversations when they screened applicants. Utterly stupid things like this were said, "Although we're working our staff to the bone and we have the budget to get a couple more guys on the team to meet these deadlines, all the applicants are from the Oil and Gas sector. I don't want to hire them and then have to lay them off in 2 years." What a joke. They overworked their employees and didn't hire enough personnel because they included "Overtime Exempt" clauses into the contract. That's it. The bottom line is sweeter with one less employee on payroll. And for the guys working themselves to death, there's the Employee Assistance Program with psychologists to help you 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. So fuck off.

Anyway, my message is this: There are many, many, many other industries that are far more stable and versatile than engineering for the amount of effort that goes into becoming and engineer and for the luck that is needed to stay active as a practicing engineer. The medical industry is always flourishing. HR, Accounting, Marketing and BD are ever-versatile: You can piggy-back on any industry and not only save your career, but flourish in it.

If you don't LOVE engineering, don't get into it. If you do get a job after graduating, you are most probably going to lose that job in 5-10 years. Then, if you want to keep working in the field, you will have to move or retrain yourself. Or if you are like me, you will never want to return to the field again because you will be so burnt by it.

Economic Downturns I've Experienced and Witnessed

I got into Engineering school dewy-eyed about the promise of eternal employment and supernatural job satisfaction and fulfillment. That was in 1997.

I participated in the University's Cooperative Education Program that found me 4-months contract work after the completion of each 4-month study semester to get a taste of the employment market. I tasted the joy of making money and being a student who had minimal expenses, I was able to pay for my education and living expenses.

I had no trouble finding work between 1997 and the year 2000. But at the start of the year 2000, reality winked at me.  The technological giant Nortel Networks burped. It had acquired too many companies too fast and stock prices started sliding. In 8 months, the share price fell from roughly $125 to $10. I was shocked and thought - like many, many others - that it was a temporary event, and that Nortel would inevitably recover. This giant castle that was built in the clouds couldn't possibly come crashing down. But it did. And many were devastated. My devastation was only emotional and psychological. For others it was financial and professional. My personal banker lost her life savings because she didn't follow her own advice: Greedily, she put all her retirement money in tech stocks. All of it.
Closer to the epicenter, my ex-boss at Nortel who had only worked at Nortel all his working life (for 20+ years) was laid off, along with almost all the employees of Nortel.  I doubt he found another job in the same industry, if he did in fact decide to stay in the same city.

That calamity lasted for …. well, the hi-tech industry in Ottawa never recovered, actually. All that work migrated to India and China. All the classmates I graduated with, never had the chance to truly enter the industry because it collapsed before they could even get their first full-time job in it. Disastrous. And this disaster was completely Engineer-specific.

I moved Provinces to Oil & Gas country, but found work in the Municipal world which kept me safe from recessions. I still thought what had happened to me in Ottawa was a one-off, an exception rather than the rule. But I was wrong.

In 2004, round about the time my sibling graduated from his grueling engineering program at a prestigious university, the automotive industry in Ontario collapsed. Tens of thousands of people were without a job. For a second time, the hardest hit was taken by the engineers - because it was an engineer-centered industry. Suddenly I suspected there may be a pattern. People with automotive-specific skills were left utterly stranded. I didn't worry so much about the young and middle-aged people that had a chance to retrain themselves. What about the people nearing retirement, which included a huge baby-boomer population? They couldn't retrain, and they couldn't afford to retire. So what did they do? Move? Work at Walmart?


In 2008 the whole world sort-of collapsed. The souffle built by the lies of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve collapsed. Alberta went through a brief spell of mass unemployment and obscurity. Tens of thousands of people were laid off with no foreseeable hope in sight. But things did pick up eventually. All industries suffered: Housing, Financial and Engineering. Engineering was not immune.

And here we are in 2014, 2015. Oil prices have stayed steadily low for 2 years now. And there is no hope of any recovery in the oil and gas sector in Alberta. Russia predicts this spat of bad oil prices will last at least 7 years. So what do oil and gas industry people do? Retrain? Work at Starbucks for 7 years? Again, the downturn is Engineer-specific. Admin staff can work anywhere. HR can work anywhere. Marketing people can work anywhere. But Engineers are fucked. Proper fucked.

Still want to do engineering?

Acting from Fear or Enthusiasm?

I have been catching up to social media over the last 3-4 weeks and have caught up with many of my old friends. Catching up also means waking up to 222 unread WhatsApp messages. This morning I had a thought, "If I just keep checking my messages every 10 minutes, then I won't have to catch up with 700 messages when I miss a night!"

Wow. Really?

I've made my life choices by playing a chess game of, "That path looks less painful than that path." The trouble with it is, I'm busy walking down less painful paths while entirely joyous paths are passing me by. I think this sort of thinking is rooted in the belief that we live in an uncaring universe.

How many of us think in this way? I feel that there's something inherently incomplete in that singular method of making life decisions.

Is the Universe caring or uncaring? Or no wait... Do you Believe in a caring universe or an uncaring one? Good question Einstein. Here's a brilliant article on that:
http://geoffolson.com/page5/page11/page34/page34.html
The world needs more thinkers like you Geoff Olson.

After picking a career that appeared to be less painful than all the other careers out there, here I am. Working in a soul less job that pays well. Hmmm.... what other profession does that remind me of....?

One of the reasons I picked engineering was because the job prospects were supposedly good. I was avoiding homelessness. Is there a conspiracy out there? Why are so many people out there to paint the engineering profession something that it isn't? Job prospects were crap when I graduated. And they were crap for 10 of the 13 years I've been working as an engineer. All the engineering companies WISH they had more engineers to work on the projects... but it's not the shortage of engineers that stops them... it's the limited budget or poor management decisions.

The alternate path to living out of fear-based, doomsday-based questions is to try the other side. I've tried the uncaring universe theory, and it's really not making me happy. So how about the caring universe theory? I think it's time to give that a try.

What if I followed my heart? What if I picked a job that looked even slightly interesting or peaked my curiosity in the least? Would the universe conspire to make me successful? Would engaging myself in something interesting entice me to do a better job than just mindless drudgery?

I know there are enough naysayers on the internet to quash that. Maybe their lives are miserable and they just want to convince others that this is all there is to it. Or maybe they believe so deeply in the uncaring universe that nothing else can be fathomed in their minds.

I suppose it's that naysaying thinking that has made me a good engineer. The Doomsday mentality.

But I'm not going to turn into Nietzsche. I'm also not going to turn into those apathetic soulless engineers haunting those cubicles and corridors. I am at a point where I would rather try something I like and see where it takes me, rather than exist successfully and live miserably.