Got sick of dealing with assholes. One weekend, a director said that we all had to come in to finish the last features for a Monday launch, so we all came in ten hours both days and finished the parts necessary for the feature. He never showed up in the office. Monday rolls around and we find out that he knew on Thursday that the launch wasn't going to happen.

I had been at the company for over a decade, and had gotten quite lucky in the RSU lottery & thought, wait, I have enough money to last forever, so why do I do this to myself?

My health was bad, I was overweight, smoked, was depressed. I felt like it was going to kill me if I stayed another decade.

So I quit. In the years since, I stopped smoking, lost 1/3 my bodyweight & really got my shit together. I dink around on personal projects and learn new things. I follow HN because I'm genuinely interested in tech & now I can pursue what things I want, rather than those I need for $JOB or $NEXT_JOB.

I miss the good people I used to work with, but this is almost completely offset by how much I don't miss the assholes and the hassles (annual review, recruiting, meetings, explaining basic math to MBAs, etc).