I work as an engineer at a startup technology company in the United States, and for several reasons, such as:
- A culture of working more than 8 hours a day.
- A loud "open office" environment and a culture of interruptions.
- A pay cut from my previous job, along with the dramatic increase in hours worked, effectively creating an even larger per-hour pay cut.
- Bad health insurance and no dental insurance, but free candy.
I have decided to find a new job and resign as soon as I can. I expect this to be in a few months, to give me time for a job search and interviews.
We have a product that uses multiple platforms (Android, web, etc.). I am solely responsible for one of the platforms, and I will leave them without anyone who is able to work on the project in the near future:
- I know for certain that the company had difficulty hiring for my role previously, and I do not expect them to have an easier time this time around. It's very hard to hire people currently.
- The project requires a lot of specialized knowledge, it took me at least a month to begin to understand everything (although it was messy, lacked any documentation and had few comments)
I've made improvements that I hope will make the job much easier for my successor, and thus make myself view positively:
- My documentation coverage is impeccable
- Nearly everything is heavily commented
- I have cleaned up the previous codebase, which was a bit of a spaghetti mess, through extensive use of immutable value types, pure functions, etc.
- There were no unit tests when I arrived, the coverage is much better now.
How can I plan an exit that will damage my career as little as possible? My main concerns are:
- Being labelled a job hopper in the future, as I started at this company in early February, and it's currently October.
- Burning all of my bridges with the team at the startup, since I'll be leaving them hanging at a critical time - it's almost time to raise another round, and some upcoming sales metrics are going to be very important.