I recently left a job in about 3 months. My intention with this blog is to highlight some of the important things to consider when you take on that next role or how to know when you are done with a role.

So just backing up a little: Not that long ago, I took up a new job. It was with a leading company in an upcoming technology area. It all felt super exciting. And I felt the team I would work on will become the bridge between older and newer technology. It did live up to the excitement in some forms and I had the opportunity to learn a lot, but once the learning wore off and day to day grind started – I realized that my irritation levels were rising day by day.

Generally when I encounter this feeling, I know it is one of 2 things: this thing is not working out OR I am too exhausted. The way to proceed is usually to take a few continuous days off (for me, it’s at least 5 consecutive days). After that, if you come back to work and you feel refreshed and ready to go again – then it was probably just fatigue. If however, you feel like “What am I doing here?”, then it’s time to leave.

I am no stranger to changing jobs but even in my wildest dreams had I not anticipated leaving a role in 3 months. However I came to the conclusion after a break that what I want in life and the role I was doing were quite mismatched. First things first, I made a poor decision and there is no one else to blame but myself. Here are some of the things I considered when I made this decision:

Doing and not thinking

Every company and perhaps every team spends a different percentage of time in doing v/s thinking. One extreme is planning for the year and getting nothing done and on the other extreme is continuously doing without planning which effectively gets nothing done (running in circles).

I felt that there was too much doing and not enough thinking in my role and I personally prefer to have some plan of where I am going before setting off. This might come at the expense of not being productive and efficient in short-term because when you are thinking, nothing gets done and it might appear to others that you are not doing anything. But IMO it is important to have some level of clarity on plans and roadmaps before you execute because that generates long term productivity and building the right things for customers.

Advice to self: Understand how the company plans, what they plan for and how they execute. Understand how your team works and how they pivot to changing priorities before you join.

Losing financial trust

We all run into these issues where the way our compensation structure was explained to us is not actually the ground reality. Especially when it comes to bonuses, a lot of things get said and soft-promised under the discretionary propaganda. I believe companies should be transparent on this aspect the most. Under-commit and over-deliver might be the perfect advice here.

In some of my previous roles, there have been situations where there was a difference between what you expected and what you get. However these are generally small differences like being promised $100 and getting $90 or $110. In this current role however I found that I expected $100 and got $30. This just completely broke my financial trust. Obviously I was not promised anything so part of the blame is on me, for somehow ending up with a different belief in bonus structures. But at the end of the day, once you lose that trust it’s all downhill. If this happened once, you can never trust that it will not happen again and again.

The point is that each of us make financial decisions when switching roles and these are important decisions. In this case, the amount of money was not relevant but it was the mismatch of expectations that made me re-evaluate if I trust the company. It’s similar to taking a Uber where you know how much fare you pay upfront v/s taking a taxi and being anxious about whether the fare will be $10, $20, or $30. It’s all about expectation setting.

Advice to self: Spend sufficient time on the sensitive topic of compensation with a new company to understand the worst, normal and best case scenarios.

Transparency v/s security

I do believe that there is a tradeoff where more transparency can lead to higher security risks. Each company has a different profile of where it wants to be on that scale. Some companies try to practice a high level of transparency, especially to its employees, while others believe the security risks outweigh the high level of transparency.

However trading off transparency excessively for security can lead to serious consequences I believe. It generally kills the productivity of the company and can lead to many silos, a lot of politics etc. This is because information cannot flow freely. Often, security becomes an excuse for lack of transparency without any supporting data.

In my last role, there were things I wish I knew but I could never find out because of many factors. This made me feel excluded and also just generally more ineffective as I did not have either complete information or had to jump through hoops to get to the right information.

Advice to self: Look for signals of how the communication flow is, what kind of information is shared and restricted. Go with your gut because a lot of this gets picked up subconsciously.

Focus on outcomes instead of hours

I see this varies a lot especially by regions, cultures and industry. There are some places where the hours you show up and appear active is a stronger predictor of your performance than your actual output. Perhaps in certain industries it might be actually be relevant and the correct thing to do.

However, if your role involves thinking, then it is a wrong signal. The more time you think every day, the poorer your decision quality. Hence to take more effective decisions, you need to limit the amount of time you work and take those decisions (for me, about 6 hours a day).

I am a strong believer in trying to minimize the time I work because that forces me to take more effective solutions and trade off time vs output better. As a leader it also becomes a driver in getting better at delegating and empowering instead of being the key decision maker in everything your team does. If you can come to work for a month and watch netflix and your teams can run by themselves, that means you have time to take on more responsibility. If the time you spend on work grows in correlation with your team or product size, eventually you will run into the 24 hours of the day limit.

Advice to self: Understand the working hours and asynchronous / synchronous communication split. Ask people how often they work or attend meetings at night.