5 Signs It’s Time to Fire Your Job
Clues your current job is taking you off your true path
For those of us who came of age amid the economic stagnation of the 21st Century, gainful employment often felt like a rare commodity. Well-meaning parents, teachers, and bot-generated listicles all drilled into us that security is golden.
We were bombarded the messaging that if we got lucky enough to land a “good” job - a salaried gig with benefits, bonuses, and the occasional company retreat, complete with motivational speakers and trust circles - we should cling to it like the vitality of life itself. Squandering such a treasured opportunity, we were assured, was the fast track to a professional purgatory of coffee frapping, amateur cab driving, and slinging foot fetish photos on OnlyFans.
Horse pucky!
The truth is, every day spent suffering a job that’s slowly smothering your spirit under a wool blanket of corporate malaise is a day wasted.
In physics, the law of inertia states that an object in motion will stay in motion, while an object at rest will remain at rest. You’re never going bust out of a professional rut sitting passively in the same cubicle day after day. Companies don’t hesitate to fire employees who are no longer meeting their needs. Workers should be just as willing to fire a job that no longer meets theirs.
While there are as many reasons to abandon an inert career path as there are frustrated workers, here are five of the most common signs that it’s time to fire that dead in job before the next interminable “all-hands” meeting.
1.) People hired after you keep getting promoted over you
Getting lapped on the corporate track by that rare overachiever is one thing. We’ve all born witness to that savant of middle management minutia who re-imagines quality remediation processing, streamlines intake modulation, and repairs the busted microwave in the fourth-floor kitchen all in the first month on the job. There’s no shame in being leapfrogged by that person.
But when you notice a pattern of people you trained collecting “senior” and “vice” titles while you need a second set of fingers to count the number of years you’ve been an “associate,” it’s safe to say there’s probably no future for you in that workplace. When you find yourself taking orders from your former intern, it’s time to make a mad dash for the nearest door, window, or loading dock and keep on running.
Perhaps you’re being taken for granted. Maybe you’ve been deemed too valuable in your current role to promote out of it. Or your lack of advancement is performance-related. You’re churning out quarter after quarter of mediocre output because the position/company simply doesn’t inspire you.
Whatever the case, the writing is on the cubicle wall, right next to that “F my life” Post-It note you scribbled 3 years ago: the only way you’re ever going to move up is to move out.
2. ) Sunday is no longer Funday
Monday morning malaise is normal. Even a brief bought of Sunday night sorrow is reasonable. No matter how much you like your job, if it’s as much fun as the weekend, you’ve probably got some problems in your personal life. Medium has approximately 1,743,982 articles to help you unpack those.
But if you find yourself spending a beautiful Sunday afternoon glued to your couch, paralyzed with the existential dread of the oncoming week, something is deeply wrong at work. Ideally, the weekend should be a respite from the stresses that come with even the most fulfilling jobs. If you find office problems intruding into your weekends, then they’re not truly time off.
With no time off, you’ll eventually burn out, and we all know what that looks like. It looks like the person who shows up to the office one day with their Dockers on their head, acrylic paint on their face, and a bag full of rotten eggs to pelt all of the capitalist pigs who’ve bled them dry in the name of the bottom line.
Don’t be that person. “Egging” is tough to explain away under “reason for termination” on future job applications, and acrylics are abrasive to the skin. Better to simply walk in Monday morning, Dockers belted normally around your waist, calmly hand in your neatly typed letter of notice, and spend the next two weeks playing The Sims 4 and stealing leads from the CRM so you can hit the ground running at your next job.
3.) You find yourself “Jiming” an imaginary camera throughout the day
Jim Halpert was the condescending slacker on the US version of The Office who deemed himself too good for his gig as a paper salesman. Rather than devoting his efforts to landing a job commiserate with his presumed abilities, Jim spent his days playing pranks on his deskmate and flirting with the engaged receptionist. He never passed up an opportunity to convey his feelings of superiority by sneaking sardonic glances at the camera whenever one of his coworkers dared to actually take the job or company seriously.
Don’t be a Jim. If you were truly too good for your job, you wouldn’t still be there. Either focus your considerable talent and intelligence on making the work environment better or leave.
Take a chance. Get out of your comfort zone. Go to a company where you may not always be the smartest person in the room, but you’ll learn and grow. Maybe you’ll even feel challenged and fulfilled enough that you won’t need to compulsively inflate your own fragile ego by mocking those who are actually working while at work.
4.) You’ve started an office romance
Despite what heartless HR handbooks would have you believe, there’s nothing inherently bad about dating a coworker. Let’s face it, in a 21st Century world where 60 hour work weeks are as common as rancid break room coffee, we spend far more time with our coworkers than we do with anybody else. Collaborating on complex projects that involve creativity, passion, and intensive interaction is a far better way to get a measure of a person than a drunkenly written Tinder profile and a 15-minute Zoom date.
Office romances are inevitable. But once the seeds of attraction blossom into a full-blown relationship, one of you has to go.
You might think you’re keeping your after-hours rendezvous a carefully hidden secret. You’re not. Your coworkers have been onto you since that company game night when you two seemed to be a little too apt at deciphering each others’ unintelligible Pictionary drawings. And did you really think the IT guy wasn’t going to tell his tech bro buddies that you’re using each others’ names as your Two-Factor Authentication passwords?
Unless you want every facet of your romance to unfold under the scrutiny of the entire office, your next couples weekend should probably involve updating each other's resumes.
4B.) Your office romance ends
You didn’t listen, did you? You thought your relationship would be the exception because you’re both super discreet, and you work on different floors, and your co-workers aren’t that nosy. You continued down the treacherous path of office love, and it was all cotton candy and roses until the sugar high crashed down like Thor’s mighty hammer and the rose thorns sliced the trachea of your once blissful corporate love affair.
Suddenly one floor doesn’t seem like much distance at all, does it? You’re constantly seeing them. In the elevator. In the break room. Coming out of the third floor supply closet where you two used to abscond to “do inventory” on slow Friday afternoons.
Wait, what were they doing in the supply closet? Inventory isn’t until the end of the month. And why is the IT guy in there? There aren’t any computers in the supply closet! Great. Now you’ve got to beat up the IT guy. You should probably have him do that software refresh you’ve been putting off first. You’ll be able to dash off your resignation letter much faster with the latest version of Microsoft 365 cleanly installed.
5. You’re suffering through your 5th Anniversary party
The whole office is gathered together. They’ve got a cake with your name on it. Everyone is swapping stories about that time you booted the winning triple in the kickball game at the company picnic.
You should feel great, or at least moderately satisfied, but instead, you feel… empty.
Where has the time gone? Have you really spent 60 months here? 240 weeks? 1680 days? 40,320 hours? 2,419,200 minutes frittered away in this god-forsaken office park with precious little to show for it but a rusting kickball trophy, a hollow “senior” tacked hastily onto your title and a big fat chair ass? Are you really paying down $120,000 in student loan debt for this?
The feeling is natural. Healthy even. We’re conditioned to evolve in four-year cycles. After four years we graduate from high school. Another four and we’re done with college. The standard rookie contract in most professional sports is four years. Most TV shows start to suck after the fourth season.
If you’ve spent more than four years on the job without at least considering your next evolution, then it means you’ve probably gotten comfortable. Comfort is the enemy of growth. That heavy feeling jockeying for space in the pit of your stomach with the Costco cake your grinning coworkers keep urging you to scarf down is stagnation. Sometimes an insufferable office party in your honor is just the gut punch you need to realize you’re not satiated, you’re sick.
You should have bounced last year, but there’s no time like the present. Thank your colleagues for the cake and all the good times, because there sure were a few. Visiting the IT guy in the hospital proved to be a real team-building moment.
Then pack your desk, if it contains anything worth packing, and head for the door never to look back.