Lessons learned: quitting after one month on the job
I debated whether to write about this or not, but figured some might learn from my professional failure in this regard.
A month and a half ago, I went from working at a relatively small tech company after eight years to a huge Fortune 100. It was a longer commute, but better pay, a good team of co-workers who cared about their work, and the "big company experience." The only downside was that it's a less hands-on type of role (more auditing than infrastructure engineering).
However, a couple of weeks into the new position I started to realize that my passion for doing the low-level work (reading wire traffic, pushing the firewall buttons, etc.) was starting to tap me on the shoulder heavily. Going from a small company to an immense one also comes with a huge corporate culture change that one must adapt to. Some might not be bothered by this. I was.
So it became inevitable that I needed to switch jobs before my new employer invested too much more into me. I gave my two-week notice recently. They, of course, were disappointed. You can't blame them since it takes a long while (maybe a year?) for an employer to get their ROI on a new-hire, plus now they need to restart the process over again in finding someone (getting the requisition approved, sifting through resumes, interviewing, waiting for another hire to come onboard, etc.). A bad decision on my part costs both parties in ways that aren't always obvious.
In short, I feel terrible ... and rightfully so. While we can say that "at-will" employment is what it is and companies terminate good people all the time for whatever reason, I'm more concerned about how I let my new (now former) team down. They're a good group of folks who don't really deserve this kind of professional disrespect. The only way to positively spin this is that they perhaps lost an analyst who could have potentially turned out to be mediocre. Good riddance?
The upside (for me anyways) is that I'm moving to a much smaller company whose business model completely revolves around information security for which I'll be a network security engineer doing firewalls, bad-guy detection / prevention, network monitoring, and incident response. Pretty much a dream job with a group of people in the SOC who I've worked with at another company. Ironically, I was actually offered this role right before I started my (now-previous) job, but since I had already committed to my now-former employer, I initially turned it down.
Still, it doesn't alleviate the guilt I'm feeling. So my lesson here is that when you consider moving into a new position, understand your real needs and don't jump ship just because of working environment tangibles. It's hard though, as sometimes you don't know what you're missing until you really start missing it.
