I had been thinking of leaving my job at VMware for over an year and half.
1. It started with the MTS3 --> Sr. MTS promo that came with a 3% hike. That straight up felt like an insult, it was probably the lowest increment that I got in my 10 years of s/w job(Microsoft and VMware). The RSU refreshers remained at 25K regardless of MTS3 or Sr. MTS position. I was told that the lower hike is because of the hike in target bonus(12% --> 17%). Didn't want to continue that argument anymore, just said fine and started looking for jobs outside.
2. The feeling got stronger when I screwed up providing estimates for creating a new microservice and was not given a decent chance to adjust the estimates(It took double the time to finish what was promised, so a big time screw up on my side - learnt my lessons on estimations :) ). Felt like going to office and saying 'I quit' almost everyday for couple of months! Working close to 14 hours a day, while taking care of 2 kids was not fun, and feeling the pressure to try and bring in the feature even sooner only made things worse.
3. Got my green card in Jun 2018, got a decent financial cushion from the sale of our rental house towards end of 2018 <-- very important events that allowed me to even think of taking a break.
Tried interviewing at couple of places(FB, LinkedIn), screwed up one out of five interviews at every onsite. I could clearly see that the 20% effort I put into preparing is only going to get me this far and to be able to crack the interviews, I need to put a lot more effort(Jai Leetcode!) and that too consistenly for a month or two. With 2 kids and a job that has on-call plus weird hours because of London and Beijing offices, being able to put that level of effort for interviewing felt a bit like torture. I didn't see why I had to go through that much trouble when I was confident that with a month of dedicated practice, I would be technically ready to crack the onsites.
My thinking was something like this: Take a month off, relax, do something crazy/fun. Take a month to prepare and then couple more months to find a job. That should get me a 300K/year(a colleague at that time got multiple offers and this was the lowest offer he had from one of FANG) job after 4 months of no pay(Thank you for the cushion San Jose house!) and the loss of 4 months of pay would even out due to the higher salary in new job. And in the worst case of not being able to find a fulltime job, I was confident that I can score a contracting job that would pay me around $170K/yr(my TC at VMware was close to $220K including base+bonus+RSU). That felt like a decent backup plan. Also, with our dual income, it felt like it was time to stop worrying about total comp and look at the minimum we needed to keep our lifestyle for the time being. Once the kids(6&2) grow up, we'd have plenty of time to spend at work and try for bigger paychecks if we wanted to.
Coming back from a vacation to India, I decided to break the news to my manager. But I was also sympathetic towards my new manager's condition, as he was trying to form a bigger local team(solving one of the problems due to which I was leaving) and there weren't enough senior people left to train the newly hired people. So, I told him that I don't have an urgency to leave, but I want to leave. Need to give credits to my manager who was able to pursue me to stay for 2 more months and was doing his best to give me interesting projects and keep me in the team. Although I liked that the manager wants me to stay and is doing things to make me happy, I wanted to leave. When the layoff happened, I sent him a message saying Intel allows for volunteering for layoff, could you please lay me off. Unfortunately I was turned down, otherwise I would have had 5 months of pay in hand. :) I almost gave in and told him that the 2nd new project that he gave me does sound interesting and that I'm ok with a long term commitment with this team. I told him that I would talk to him about my expectations of a pay adjustment and he agreed to have another meeting about it.
I was serious about getting a good hike and decided to create a slide deck of what have I done in the past, what was my impact till now and how critical I would be for the team going forward. While looking at all the features that I've done and the things that I could do in future by staying there, the feeling of leaving my job only got stronger. I felt that the 2 major features I worked on would never leave me, the guy who almost took up one of the features from me got fired and there was no one senior enough to be able to handle the 2nd feature - both of them involve lot of customer issues troubleshooting. I didn't see a way forward, to be able to hand these features to other people while trying to work on newer features looked impossible. Add the awesome geo distribution of our team to the mix(6 official site and 2 remote people), I didn't feel like this is the place I want to spend half of my active hours in my life.
Went back to the manager the following Monday and said I'm done. I didn't want to go through another round of convincing as I'm really done this time, so I gave him a firm date of 2 weeks from that Monday(last week of Feb). I didn't feel like picking up anymore work and didn't want to stay in this job any longer, as I kind of started feeling guilty that I'm just sitting around and not being useful to the team and pulling a salary for just being there. For some reason, the manager was adamant about me staying till end of March, I'm not sure why. Maybe he genuinely wanted me to get my bonus on that day and get out? I didn't feel that I should be paid any bonus as I was not satisfied with my work in second half of 2018, so gave him a strict date. After some heated arguing, we decided to keep things friendly and part on good terms. I felt that the final conversations about quitting could have been handled a bit more gracefully, but everyone has a different way of dealing with things I guess :).
So, Mar 8th 2019 will be my last day and the first time I'm going to be free without any work or plan on what to do next! Last time I remember having a 2 month break was after my Undergrad(13 years ago :P)
Lots of crazy thoughts:
1. Take an year off and roam around the world(Guess who came up with this idea? :P)
2. Maybe it's time to finally finish that Real Estate Agent course that I started 3 years ago(Rajesh, Kalyan?)
3. I am still serious about that south Indian food truck and Bindu's idly/chai stall!
4. Try contracting roles and build up some architectural knowledge across multiple products
1. It started with the MTS3 --> Sr. MTS promo that came with a 3% hike. That straight up felt like an insult, it was probably the lowest increment that I got in my 10 years of s/w job(Microsoft and VMware). The RSU refreshers remained at 25K regardless of MTS3 or Sr. MTS position. I was told that the lower hike is because of the hike in target bonus(12% --> 17%). Didn't want to continue that argument anymore, just said fine and started looking for jobs outside.
2. The feeling got stronger when I screwed up providing estimates for creating a new microservice and was not given a decent chance to adjust the estimates(It took double the time to finish what was promised, so a big time screw up on my side - learnt my lessons on estimations :) ). Felt like going to office and saying 'I quit' almost everyday for couple of months! Working close to 14 hours a day, while taking care of 2 kids was not fun, and feeling the pressure to try and bring in the feature even sooner only made things worse.
3. Got my green card in Jun 2018, got a decent financial cushion from the sale of our rental house towards end of 2018 <-- very important events that allowed me to even think of taking a break.
Tried interviewing at couple of places(FB, LinkedIn), screwed up one out of five interviews at every onsite. I could clearly see that the 20% effort I put into preparing is only going to get me this far and to be able to crack the interviews, I need to put a lot more effort(Jai Leetcode!) and that too consistenly for a month or two. With 2 kids and a job that has on-call plus weird hours because of London and Beijing offices, being able to put that level of effort for interviewing felt a bit like torture. I didn't see why I had to go through that much trouble when I was confident that with a month of dedicated practice, I would be technically ready to crack the onsites.
My thinking was something like this: Take a month off, relax, do something crazy/fun. Take a month to prepare and then couple more months to find a job. That should get me a 300K/year(a colleague at that time got multiple offers and this was the lowest offer he had from one of FANG) job after 4 months of no pay(Thank you for the cushion San Jose house!) and the loss of 4 months of pay would even out due to the higher salary in new job. And in the worst case of not being able to find a fulltime job, I was confident that I can score a contracting job that would pay me around $170K/yr(my TC at VMware was close to $220K including base+bonus+RSU). That felt like a decent backup plan. Also, with our dual income, it felt like it was time to stop worrying about total comp and look at the minimum we needed to keep our lifestyle for the time being. Once the kids(6&2) grow up, we'd have plenty of time to spend at work and try for bigger paychecks if we wanted to.
Coming back from a vacation to India, I decided to break the news to my manager. But I was also sympathetic towards my new manager's condition, as he was trying to form a bigger local team(solving one of the problems due to which I was leaving) and there weren't enough senior people left to train the newly hired people. So, I told him that I don't have an urgency to leave, but I want to leave. Need to give credits to my manager who was able to pursue me to stay for 2 more months and was doing his best to give me interesting projects and keep me in the team. Although I liked that the manager wants me to stay and is doing things to make me happy, I wanted to leave. When the layoff happened, I sent him a message saying Intel allows for volunteering for layoff, could you please lay me off. Unfortunately I was turned down, otherwise I would have had 5 months of pay in hand. :) I almost gave in and told him that the 2nd new project that he gave me does sound interesting and that I'm ok with a long term commitment with this team. I told him that I would talk to him about my expectations of a pay adjustment and he agreed to have another meeting about it.
I was serious about getting a good hike and decided to create a slide deck of what have I done in the past, what was my impact till now and how critical I would be for the team going forward. While looking at all the features that I've done and the things that I could do in future by staying there, the feeling of leaving my job only got stronger. I felt that the 2 major features I worked on would never leave me, the guy who almost took up one of the features from me got fired and there was no one senior enough to be able to handle the 2nd feature - both of them involve lot of customer issues troubleshooting. I didn't see a way forward, to be able to hand these features to other people while trying to work on newer features looked impossible. Add the awesome geo distribution of our team to the mix(6 official site and 2 remote people), I didn't feel like this is the place I want to spend half of my active hours in my life.
Went back to the manager the following Monday and said I'm done. I didn't want to go through another round of convincing as I'm really done this time, so I gave him a firm date of 2 weeks from that Monday(last week of Feb). I didn't feel like picking up anymore work and didn't want to stay in this job any longer, as I kind of started feeling guilty that I'm just sitting around and not being useful to the team and pulling a salary for just being there. For some reason, the manager was adamant about me staying till end of March, I'm not sure why. Maybe he genuinely wanted me to get my bonus on that day and get out? I didn't feel that I should be paid any bonus as I was not satisfied with my work in second half of 2018, so gave him a strict date. After some heated arguing, we decided to keep things friendly and part on good terms. I felt that the final conversations about quitting could have been handled a bit more gracefully, but everyone has a different way of dealing with things I guess :).
So, Mar 8th 2019 will be my last day and the first time I'm going to be free without any work or plan on what to do next! Last time I remember having a 2 month break was after my Undergrad(13 years ago :P)
Lots of crazy thoughts:
1. Take an year off and roam around the world(Guess who came up with this idea? :P)
2. Maybe it's time to finally finish that Real Estate Agent course that I started 3 years ago(Rajesh, Kalyan?)
3. I am still serious about that south Indian food truck and Bindu's idly/chai stall!
4. Try contracting roles and build up some architectural knowledge across multiple products
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