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I've recently started working for a company, lets say X.

Now X promised me to let me work on certain technology stack, lets call them A and B, which also happens to be my preffered area of interest. X also asked me to learn some other technologies, lets call them C, D and E, to which I agreed.

After working with X for 63 days (running), I find myself spending 90% of my time doing stuff that are not at all related to A, B, C, D or E. The remaining 10% time, I do work on C, D and E... but A and B is mostly absent. After some candid discussion with few of my new colleagues, I realized the situation may not change anytime soon.

Now, under such circumstances, along comes a new organization Y, which also happens to be bigger and more popular than X. They offer me a nice job (over an interview which I attended with a lot of hesitation), which should dwell only in the domain of A and B. They also throw in the possibility of working on some other technologies: F, G, H etc... which I'm highly interested to learn and explore. I know them from their reputation and it seems highly unlikely that they'll not stick to their words. They also agreed to ignore/overlook my brief stint at X if I happen to join them.

Apart from a small inconvenience of having to move out of my home town (and some possible deflection in work-life balance), I do not see any other logical reason to not accept the job at Y. However, I'm a liitle stuck with the ethical implications here.

I'd like to know if it is OK to ditch a company after two months, if the work donot seem to comply with the job description under which I was hired.

Need some opinion on this.

Thanks.

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  • You mention talking to some colleagues, did you have a talk with your manager to see what your future holds? Before you decide to leave this company you should at least have that discussion. – cdkMoose Jul 7 '14 at 12:02
  • I did speak with my supervisor. The future plan involves work that are only vaguely related to my domain, mostly focused on interfacing/integrating with other fields which are not my area of expertise. It is not 'completely' unrelated, but quite removed from the promised job description. – metsburg Jul 7 '14 at 12:26
  • I'm afraid if I show my cards to my current employer, I'll be wooed back with a bevy of promises about better and more relevant work. I guess I'll either have to leave without exactly knowing what this company has in store for me, or stay here long enough till the other opportunity has disappeared and I'm stuck in No Man's Land forever. – metsburg Jul 7 '14 at 12:29
  • Fair enough. You've done what you can. I didn't see any reference to your manager in the question and I felt it was more important to ask those questions of your manager than your colleagues. – cdkMoose Jul 7 '14 at 12:42
  • Do you have a job specification? And does that specification explicitly state what work and technologies you are expected to work with? Otherwise, you are doing exactly what you signed up for... getting paid to do what the boss tells you. – HorusKol Jul 7 '14 at 23:54
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If you decide to leave, then you are leaving for the "right" reason.

  1. You took your current job based on the employer's representation that you'd be working on specific technologies and that your skills were needed there. Obviously, the expectation did not pan out and it doesn't show any signs of panning out in the future.

  2. The other company is offering you the technologies that you are looking for and in fact - assuming that they are on the up and up with you - they need you working in those technologies.

You can do anything you want as a professional, as long as your justification is sound and you are prepared to offer a sound, rational defense for what you did. And I believe that leaving because the new employer is offering exposure to the technologies you want to work with and because your current employer's representations did not materialize and are not going to any time soon - that's quite and easily defensible.

If you decide to leave, make sure that you leave on the best possible terms with your current employer- to the extent that's possible, that is :)

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  • 2
    Agreed - "the job turned out not to match the initial representations" is one of those reasons that make a short stay at a company very understandable. – Adam V Jul 7 '14 at 18:53

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