Is it foolish of me to quit this job during a pandemic?

March 6, 2021 12:56 PM

I've been able to finally focus on work, something I've struggled with in the past 1-2 years and was the subject of my previous Ask. I've found a job where for the first time since mid-2019, it's something I enjoy doing...even if I plan on ultimately quitting due to yet another relocation this summer. But there are some downsides to this new job that I'm not sure I can power through. Financially I'll mostly be OK if I quit. Should I? Is this dumb?

I just wrapped up week 6 at new job, which is actually amazing considering my recent history. I made it a month at my first job back in the fall since being laid off due to pandemic, and then finally started this job 3 months later. My apartment lease ends July 31 and I am definitely leaving current location at that point, thus this employment coming to an end regardless.

But I like this new job. And I feel like I was handed a gift for being able to find new employment during this pandemic. Once I overcame the inability to focus at work, I definitely saw myself being able to work here until I left my apartment/city. I love the work I do, even if I don't so much enjoy the structure of this company. So it's tolerable for these next few months.

My problem relates to my current boss' boss, who is the owner of the company. He runs the company but never steps foot in the building. He runs it from afar...is very data/numbers driven, is a camera watcher, and is constantly moving goalposts. He gives direction but at the same time isn't sure what he wants. Basically, if this guy was in the building and was my direct boss, I would have been long gone.

I've only spoken directly to him once, he pretty much uses email to contact me. So all the feedback that I get comes from my boss, which is his GM. I'm in another management position, although lower than the GM, and when I receive feedback from Company Owner...I implement it, and then later get told he wants it done a different way. So as I said the goalposts are constantly moving. GM/my boss is well aware that Company Owner is difficult to work with, but nonetheless has to do what he asks.

I've had a couple "I want to quit" moments. But they've all been brief. Lately, however, I get emails on my days off that it seems like I'm expected to respond to. Last week Company Owner sent me an email on my day off, and I responded the next day, and it was no problem. But today I was sent an email that really frustrated me in some ways, which is what has really prompted imminent thoughts of quitting. It didn't really require a response, but I would also like to not worry about work when I'm not there. I get paid hourly, and have never been the person that checks work email when I'm not there (I don't work from home), although I do casually monitor it. But these things seem to be recurring on a weekly basis.

I don't really envision things getting worse, more so staying at the same baseline as they are now. But I also know my stress levels, and the things I am dealing with outside of work, and am wondering if this is worth it. I've gone over my financial numbers, and I'll mostly be OK if I quit now and don't work for the rest of my lease. I can't sublet/break lease, and am not looking to do so anyhow.

I'd be in a pretty great position if I did work for the next 4.5 months, but where I'd be at without working in that timeframe would be minimally acceptable to me. I wouldn't plan on looking for work here again...based on how hard it is to find a job now, how much time I have left in current location, and how hard it's been to get to this point of succeeding at work. I'd have to be more careful with money over the next few months, but it's something I think I can manage.

I feel like I'm asking for permission to quit, but am I being rationale here? It sounds so crazy to me to willingly walk away from a job during this pandemic. Is it worth the peace of mind if I can mostly take the hit financially? Or am I being dumb/overreacting? Or I guess this is really a question of how much I personally think I can power through?

Thank you, please be kind.

posted by signondiego to Work & Money (19 answers total)

See what happens if you don't respond to the email until Monday, and stop checking your work email when you're not being paid. That should give you more hard data to base a decision on.
posted by Alterscape at 1:06 PM on March 6, 2021 [42 favorites]

Everyone emails on the weekends anymore. They will likely be doing that at every job you'll ever have from now on. Handling how to react to weekend email is on you. If you're spoken to about not responding on weekends, that's a reason to have a conversation, not a reason to quit yet.

Management that has no/poor strategic planning skills? Again, something you'll probably find at many jobs.

You can do what you want to, but unless the job is physically unsafe or truly emotionally abusive, I'd stick it out. You're out of there in July; you're a short-timer. Do the best you can, take their money and the experience and let them move the goalposts all they want to.
posted by kimberussell at 1:23 PM on March 6, 2021 [33 favorites]

I think you might have a hard time finding any job that doesn't include this type of frustration and annoyance. If it's causing more stress than you can handle, you may need to do more than just quit this job. You may need to get help figuring out a way to deal with the stress so you can hold down a job in the future.
posted by Redstart at 1:29 PM on March 6, 2021 [22 favorites]

One part of these frustrations is within your control to improve: set firm boundaries to stop work communications intruding into your personal life -- all work comms (email, calls, etc) should go to work-specific email accounts or phone numbers that are accessed from work-specific devices (phones, laptops). Then be disciplined and turn your work devices off outside of the hours you are paid to work.

You have quite a lot of power to decide where your boundaries are.
posted by are-coral-made at 1:35 PM on March 6, 2021 [14 favorites]

I think if your thought is that you would quit, just set the boundaries you want and see if that results in a discussion around performance/firing - you've been there a short enough time that you can leave it off your resume, and it will give you practice at those things in an environment where failure doesn't result in an outcome you aren't prepared for. So yeah, turn the email off on days off.

The boss thing has been something I've experienced at many of my jobs and my mantra is "I'm here to do the work my boss(es) want me to do." If their process is redoing it three times, then that's their lousy process.
posted by warriorqueen at 1:52 PM on March 6, 2021 [11 favorites]

You are paid hourly. You are not paid to read work emails outside of work hours. Stop doing that and 90% of your problem goes away. If they are unhappy about that, they can fire you -- but they won't.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:56 PM on March 6, 2021 [28 favorites]

Chiming in to agree with everyone above, and to also mention that once you quit for your relocation, you will most definitely appreciate having a little longer to look for work before you're in a financial crunch.
posted by itsflyable at 2:40 PM on March 6, 2021 [9 favorites]

Yes, just set a hard line that *you* do not respond to emails off hours and don’t worry about when people are sending them. I don’t see anything that suggests that will even cause you any trouble.

I mean, until the pandemic, I was able to keep that stuff to work hours; then for a while I ended up with a little kid doing virtual school during work hours, which meant that work got shoved into all the other hours. For a while I was trying to be careful to only draft emails off hours and send them the next day, but I started dropping the ball on hitting send and basically lost any capacity to care about what people think about the time stamp. Just assume that your boss or boss’s boss are working when they can, not that they expect you to be working concurrently.
posted by Kriesa at 2:50 PM on March 6, 2021 [7 favorites]

Stick it out. You need to trust in yourself that you're resilient to handle this kind of ordinary, workaday stress.

If you keep running away when you hit a little friction, then you're going to spend your life running away. And a life spent running away is not your best life.

That doesn't mean you have to be a masochist, but this job doesn't really sound bad and you don't even sound like you dislike it. Honestly, I think spending the next few months there is probably better and healthier and more engaging than withdrawing from the working world as you whittle down your savings through the rest of your lease.

Anyhow, they're sending emails on the weekends because they're working, but that doesn't mean you need to be working. Unless it's a true emergency, ignore those emails until you're on the clock.

And bosses often seem like paranoid control freaks to the people under them. Feeling that way about your boss isn't really cause for alarm, it's normal and natural.
posted by rue72 at 2:53 PM on March 6, 2021 [15 favorites]

Regarding "moving the goal posts" -- one mantra an old colleague had was "the client never knows what they want". One positive way to frame part of the situation is to view this aspect of the job an opportunity to gain more experience at working with clients who don't know what they want (which is ...most clients? ...all clients?).

As an employee you have not made any professional or contractual guarantee that you can produce any particular outcome for the company, or solve any particular problem. As an employee you have not been engaged as a contractor who has accepted a lot of risk and entered into a fixed price contract to deliver outcome X for the client for the price Y -- such contractors might be effectively charging 5-10x the hourly rate that you're charging in compensation for accepting the risk that what they've agreed to do turns out to be harder than what they expected, and have savvy consultants and lawyers who get the client to commit in writing precisely what they want. As an employee you're paid by the hour to help the company with the company's problems. You clock on and do what you can to fight today's fires during the hours you're paid to care, and then clock off. If the company has a problem where the owner doesn't know what they want and keeps changing their mind, that's the company's problem.

Suppose the owner said they want you to produce a document or put together staff schedule with requirements A,B,C. You do it, then later on the owner reviews the work and say they don't want A,B,C, they actually want X,B,Q,Q,A , and you need to rework it. That's fine. As an employee you're not paid to produce an outcome, you're paid by the hour. So you don't work overtime, you just rework it during your paid hours at your agreed rate, and bill the client (the owner) for it through your usually hourly paycheck.

If the owner expresses unhappiness with the amount of rework or the time it takes to produce an outcome that they feel is satisfactory, then you could offer suggestions such as "perhaps before any new piece of work is commenced we could have a meeting, where all key people involved in the decision agree on what the requirements are for the piece of work, and write down what these requirements are, so we are all clear on what the goal is and why" or "often it is difficult to know exactly what a good result looks like without doing a few iterations of the work that incorporate review feedback. Could we change how we're operating to put less effort into doing a high quality first iteration / first draft so we can get feedback earlier before we invest too much time -- i.e. what if we rethink the work as doing a quick, cheap experiment first to help pin down the requirements". But if the owner doesn't express unhappiness with the amount of rework -- then it's not your problem to solve!
posted by are-coral-made at 2:56 PM on March 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's not clear from what you've written that the weekend work emails demand or even request an immediate response. Like others have said, everyone emails over the weekend these days, but plenty of people who do don't actually expect immediate responses from employees who work set days.

You say you could swing it financially for the time before your move- but then how much would that leave you after you move? Unless you have a job waiting for you at the new place, I'd keep this job. Plus, you're generally a more attractive job applicant if you've already got a job.
posted by coffeecat at 2:57 PM on March 6, 2021 [6 favorites]

I'd say do your best to stick it out if things remain at approximately this level, for a few reasons: to show yourself you can, to add some buffer to your financial status, and to lengthen the job on the resume, preferably until close to moving time so you can use "needed to relocate" as your reason for leaving.

And I recommend doing this while remembering that you've worked out the numbers, and if the situation really comes down to an "I have to quit/I can't do this anymore" then at least you're in a financial position where you CAN - because so, so, SO many people aren't. You can go to work WITHOUT the stress of worrying about the job falling apart, because you already know you'll be financially fine if it does, and you already plan to leave in a few months - you're not trapped there, you have a way out, so if you can refocus the nonsense at work as just their petty little drama that THEY are stuck with, but you're not, and even better, you can just shrug off as irrelevant... then you're gold.

You may not always find yourself in such a fortunate position in the future, where you can mentally count work drama as irrelevant - and there is something SO liberating about having been able to do it once, it can really reset some of your thinking about work.
posted by stormyteal at 3:09 PM on March 6, 2021 [4 favorites]

i will reiterate what many have said above: just because email is sent during the weekend, it doesn’t mean that there is an expectation that it will be received or read during the same weekend.
posted by PaulVario at 4:08 PM on March 6, 2021 [7 favorites]

Stick it out, save even more money and be in a great place come July when you move.
posted by AugustWest at 4:18 PM on March 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

In general, you know this job is time-limited, so stay as long as you reasonably can. You'll get practice at just working, and money (basically, what stormyteal said). CC: the GM on correspondence, and check in to review requests from the owner. Practice having boundaries - it's typical of a business owner to send email any time, but you shouldn't need to respond on off hours.

Having a financial cushion makes life so much easier.
posted by theora55 at 4:20 PM on March 6, 2021

I would stop monitoring your emails entirely over the weekend, and consider making sure that your immediate boss (not the big boss) has your phone number if there's an honest-to-god emergency for some reason. You're already not responding to emails on weekends (good! I try not to, also!) so it's not like anyone you work with will notice if you stop reading them entirely.

As to the goal-changing stuff: yeah, that can be frustrating. But if you're paid hourly, as long as you keep working to fulfill the new goals, you're getting paid to do the work. Even if it's annoying or repetitive to throw stuff away as the requirements change, as long as it's not actually giving you unpaid overtime then I'd try to mentally place it in a "not your problem" bucket. It's your boss and his boss' problem if projects are slowed down by goal-shifting, not yours.

I've quit jobs with no plan when the actually day-to-day work became actively soul-sucking (not even the people, just the actual minute-to-minute doing stuff). As long as that stuff is fine- you basically like your individual tasks you're doing, even if management is a bit off-the-wall- I'd stick with it, especially since you have an end date already decided.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:25 PM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

Since you're an hourly employee, is it even okay with your employer for you to be checking your email during not-established working hours? Employers are legally required to pay their hourly employees for time spent reading or responding to work-related e-mail that exceeds their established (typically 40 hour) workweek. Because of this, my most recent employer would not allow hourly employees to check their email outside of established working hours.
posted by SageTrail at 5:33 PM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’d consider this situation to be a kind of blessing. You don’t *need* the job, but you have it, and it seems like a good opportunity to practice boundaries and professional detachment. Don’t try to think about the company mission or the goals of the project that you’re contributing to, only look at what’s being directly requested of you on each specific day. The what and what of requirements changing isn’t your responsibility, so don’t even try to carry it. It doesn’t sound like the work you are doing at this company is vital to you building a career, so try to focus on whatever satisfaction and enjoyment you can find in each days tasks.

You’re not psychic, and it’s not part of your job description to behave as though you are, or respond to the secret desires of management that are not expressed to you. If the big boss is frustrated that you deliver what they asked for rather than what they thought they were asking for, remember the frustration is really at their own poor communication, not what you’ve done. And nobody else in your position would’ve read their mind and done better.
posted by itesser at 7:32 PM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

Wait a minute, you're an hourly employee? You should not be expected to be answering work emails on the weekend, unpaid. If you're not getting paid to be on call all the time/all weekend, then you shouldn't be doing that.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:55 PM on March 6, 2021