Ask HN: What's your “that's it, I'm leaving” story?

I pulled a company back from the brink, they paid everybody happy. Six months later they want to re-engage me, I made it clear beforehand that I would just save their bacon and after that they'd have to find new people to run the place but they point blank insisted that I had to take the job 'because now I had a responsibility towards them' and 'I owed them'. I laughed at them, put my lunch fork down and walked out.

Nobody owns me, you can ask politely and I just might say no, or yes. But to ask a question when you believe there is only one possible answer that is valid is not a proper strategy. The main reason for refusing is that the CEO of that company was a jerk, and I just didn't want to be exposed to his antics again, chances are you'd build something up on one side and on the other side he'd be tearing it down. The good news is they ended up finding someone long term and as far as I know he's still there and they're still in business.

Another one was a customer that started to treat me as their in house IT guy whereas I was doing tech DD for a living, and always arguing about every invoice that I was too expensive. Customers that don't value your contribution you can do without so I fired them ;)

Worked for a company where everyone logs time, the owner occasionally scans time logs and without knowing the context mains about how long something took, gets other staff to judge me based on criteria I know nothing lo about.

For example as a team lead am i still getting enough coding hours in. Am I mingling with other team leads and coming up with biz dev ideas despite wading through massive backlogs of badly scoped work that needs to be delivered yesterday.

Starts firing people and a decent clip and then I’m told via innuendo that eyes are on my performance.

Quit the next morning. To save money they offered zero notice and I was happy to accept.

Easy decision. If he fired me it would be around Christmas. Quitting increased my chances of finding a next job before then.

I was cleaning offices for ServiceMaster. I came across a toilet with diarrhea sprayed all over it. I thought, this is not my destiny, walked out of the bathroom, drove the equipment back to ServiceMaster and quit.

You saved yourself from getting pretty sick most likely too

This is not the usual story so far posted. I left the armed forces the same as I joined them, that is with no skills or bits of paper saying I could do stuff. In this situation I ended up with the only job I could get: security guard.

I spent 9 months getting messed around by the company at just over minimum wage and looked down upon by the people I was contracted to work for.

Eventually I ended up on one building, my contract way roving, the company paid much less to workers working at only one building, the building manager liked me and wanted to keep me, my company to keep him happy kept me there. The company decided that since I was now permanent on this building I should accept the lower wage for the same work, I refused. I told them to take me off the building, they didn't.

They then decided to do some sums and worked out I would only be out of pocket 200 a month, failing to take into account the overtime I was entitled to on my current contract by working the longer hours on the building. I refused to sign the new contract. They refused to answer my questions about whether they would do the same job for less money.

The managers then came down on me about my uniform and a few other things. The area I was working in was cold all year round, well below working regs. I was wearing my coat. They said this wasn't allowed but refused to provide an alternative. I was ready for something like this and had the regs ready. They then decided I wasn't allowed to read books at the desk and other wanky things like that. I pushed back and refused, what was I meant to be doing with my time? Just stare forward like a robot?

Anyway they went away and came up with the perfect solution. I wouldn't get any pay rise like all the other employees until my wage was the same as the other permanent building workers. I quit on the spot and refused to give the month's notice I was required to; I'd interviewed for another job and got it, it paid nearly double, and there were other perks. The managers, taken aback, started to suddenly want me to stay. What would it take for me to stay? The same pay and perks as the new job I said.

Before they pulled their shit I wouldn't have interviewed but they bought it on themselves. Best day of that job!

Several years ago I worked a contract for (an already at the time) famously shitty publicly traded company. First assignment was writing a utility to be used when business units were shut down: deallocating all resources, erasing server data, scorched earth — that’s what they wanted.

They refused to pay for any kind of test environment and insisted I build and test on their production network.

There was no way I was going to do that (just imagine what it would look like if something went wrong), so I paid for cloud hosting myself. I wrote the utility, tested it thoroughly, and delivered it to the client. We had a very positive code review, and then I gave notice that I’d be terminating the contract early.

My non-reimbursed expenses weren’t very much at all, maybe $100 USD at most; it was the principle of the thing combined with a worry for what unprofessional thing they’d demand of me next.

I was sick one day. They negotiated it down to half a day sick leave, which I had no say in.

There were a lot of other questionable actions in the past, especially with regards to how they treated other staff. And there were many more questionable actions after that. But not trusting that I was sick, or worse, refusing to acknowledge I was sick, that was the last straw.

In context, most of the compensation would have been a bonus on completion of a consulting project, so I needed a lot of trust because they didn't specify exactly how much.

I have one serious one and one silly one.

Serious: I worked with a hot-tempered director from academia for a total of 3 months, at a remote lab for a large tech company. At this company, writing docs is more important than doing any work. This guy kept asking me to rewrite the doc and present it to the team over and over. Coworkers confided that they were confused as to the issue with the doc and didn't understand why he was acting this way. My direct manager tried to be all empathetic and work with me to improve the doc and said he didn't know what the director's problem was. Yet, each time I presented, I would get grilled and my manager would just sit there with a smirk on his face, not defending me. At our last meeting, the director tore up the report and said "I don't want to see another doc like this." I pretty much had a yelling session with my manager asking why he wouldn't back me up and he just sat there deadpan. The director walked in and I said "if you ever speak to me that way again, I quit." It happened again, and I quit on the spot. My two week resignation period was spent at home, with permission. I came in one final time to walk my clueless manager through all of the code I had written and he just said "Wow you really did a lot of great work here." I wanted to explode. My exit interview was cathartic. Two months later, the manager was fired.

Silly: I had been working at a startup and was in the process of leaving that startup (interviewing etc.) There was constant drama at this startup and the COO was a complete drama queen. The latest drama was that the COO was on a crusade to figure out who kept plugging the toilet and sent an email to everyone threatening termination. I went to wash my hands (not use the bathroom) where the sink was outside both bathrooms in public view. One of his lackeys told him that I had used the restroom last (I didn't). During the meeting where I learned this he started asking me about when I typically use the restroom and gave me a warning. I just looked at him and said "Are you fcking serious right now? You're meeting with me over a clogged toilet I had nothing to do with? I am so fcking sick of the drama at this company." I met with my direct manager, told him the situation and just said "I can't. I've learned a lot from you, but I'm about to receive an offer from another company, and I just can't anymore." I returned to the COO's office to resign and the COO asked me if I wanted to give him a hug. I just looked at him and said "Um, no, I am giving you my resignation. I know this is no notice, do what you need to do." I also missed stock options by a week. I learned that two weeks after I quit, the toilet plugged again, overflowed after hours and flooded the entire work area.

My career has been otherwise normal.

> Silly

I was working an operations job, 4 pm - midnight Th, F, noon-midnight weekends; because it was the only technical job I could get. I would often bring leftovers from home for a mid-shift meal. Once I brought pizza in a box, and it got taken by someone else; but you know pizza in a box, seems reasonable to eat, I guess. When my home cooked leftovers in tupperware got taken, f** that, time to polish up my resume. Thankfully, it was good timing and I got hired at Yahoo Travel, and did well there, and made connections that got me to my next job that got me to retirement. So, I guess thanks to the person who stole my meals. :)

I have one probably once per month. Then I realize that I have no other options

After college, I'd applied across the boards for a job, any job, just needed money to pay off my student loans. Got a job as a programmer for $10 an hour in VB6 to fix and update software. Everything was going well, and even got a $2 promotion after training was complete. Soon it all became clear that the micromanaging from the boss, constant looking over my shoulder, arrogance in meetings and treating me like I was stupid because my boss was the one who came up with the software idea and I was too stupid to contribute anything new to it... after a year and a half of making updates and changes to the program and growing the platform.

It wasn't the worst job and it taught me a lot about programming. Although my tyrant boss sucked, he had some heart to occasionally invite me out to lunch and even gave me side jobs to do for his friends, which I charged accordingly. But I think I'd just grown tired of his arrogance and annoyances. It was great when he wasn't at the office, but he was there more often than not.

I decided I'd just start looking for another job. With the behavior of the boss, I was just tired of the bullshit, and also wanted more money. I knew that he wasn't going to give me any more money than the $12 an hour so I'd just get another job. And that I did -- he offered me double my salary. I took it along with the other job.

The condition: I'd work the other job and come and work there at night for about 2-4 hours at $24 an hour. The "that's it, I'm leaving" moment was when I started and about 2-3 days later, he called me into his office. The senior programmer was there as well.

He asked me, "What did you do here the past 2 or 3 nights?"

My response: "The job you are paying me to do."

Him: "Well, I had the senior developer go through your browser history, and it looks like you come here just to play around while I pay you."

hands me a printout of all the websites visited

What did I see? It was all the songs from a YouTube playlist I was listening to.. apparently recorded as if I was visiting them, despite having it on autoplay.

I told him that I had, in fact, done work, showed him, and told him that would be the end of our contract, to pay me what I was owed, and that I was done.

I explained what all the YouTube videos were -- a playlist of songs I listen to while I'm working to help me focus on work. He soon apologized but by then, "that's it, I'm leaving."

Totally get how an employer can go into your account and look through your history but questioning me on a bunch of YouTube videos that were actually just music... yeah, I was good on that one. It did take me about 3 more years to get back to the salary I was making working for him, but it wasn't worth the bullshit i would've gone through had I stayed.

He eventually sold the software I had worked on to another company and they destroyed it, as he was their sole competition.