Go Your Own Way: Dispatches from DC’s Quitting Front

In every bad job there comes a point when plotting to get out becomes a strange and engrossing hobby of sorts. Once the idea gets in your head, it’s hard to shake. When would you throw in the towel? How would it all go down?

A few coworkers and I had a monthly series of calls to motivate each other to apply to other jobs. Mostly we just used that time to vent and discuss our post-quitting plans in the kind of dreamy detail usually reserved for inmates planning their first real meal beyond the walls of the Big House. We spoke of throwing our hated work laptops into the sea.

In the past year, at least twenty people had quit our division; many were early in their career but a decent number had already put in five or ten years. Their goodbye emails, sent to the whole company list-serv, flew fast and furious, while others just up and disappeared one day.

At first, the exits went unacknowledged by management. But well into the pandemic year, as the crush of work demands increased, and positions went unfilled, and even more of our colleagues jumped ship, the company felt compelled to address the exodus. Namely, by launching into a series of desperate rationalizations. We were told that such turnover was normal. People were just going back to school. The markets were being weird! It was the Cossacks!

Eventually, the company begrudgingly rolled out a series of staff engagement surveys in an attempt to get to the bottom of things, but nothing really changed. Another year passed. And people kept on quitting.

Some version of this little scene is happening everywhere in American workplaces. In November 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 4.5 million Americans, nearly 3% of the workforce, had quit their jobs that month, setting a new record for “quits” in the survey’s history. These waves of exits across nearly every industry starting in early fall of last year — the Great Resignation — have sparked much fevered analysis; from wonky economist takes to David Attenborough-esque meditations on the migratory patterns of the nomadic Millennial worker. And yet, no one seems to be able to neatly categorize what is happening.

We wanted to know how these exits were showing up in our city. So we asked 730DC readers why they’re leaving (or staying) and what they think of this collective moment when millions are breaking up with work.

A lot of you are leaving. The majority of our respondents (74%) either resigned in the last year or admitted to being resignation-curious. Perhaps that’s to be expected; when you put out a survey on quitting, you tend to get people who really want to quit. Something to keep in mind: our sample also skews heavily towards office workers of some sort. So, the survey results aren’t representative of the experiences of those working in the hospitality and service industries, who have nationally shown much higher exit rates but only account for about 1% of our respondents.

Work is a minefield. The big question coming out of the survey — why are people quitting? — is a difficult one to answer. We can’t pin down a single cause because America’s case of the quits is driven by “a grab bag of diffuse burdens”:

“Wages aren’t keeping up with surging prices. Low-wage jobs often lack opportunities for career growth. A crumbling childcare industry is driving up daycare costs, making work unaffordable. Those who have remained in jobs face increasing responsibility and grueling work conditions punctuated by fears of the next variant of COVID-19. And then there’s just plain old vanilla pandemic fatigue.”

Maybe one place to start is by acknowledging that while all of these classic push factors — bad bosses, low pay, burnout — are present to varying degrees in our survey data, it’s impossible to disentangle them from the broader impacts of our ongoing public health crisis. Though employee dissatisfaction has been building for a while, the pandemic has made working conditions for many in our survey completely untenable.

It’s telling that so many of our respondents quit because they felt they had no other choice; nearly 40% of these folks reported either fleeing bad bosses and/or workplace harassment and abuse. And though many of the anecdotes about personal tipping points read like a horrifying mashup of the very worst Ask a Manager columns, a few themes did emerge:

(Almost) everyone is tired. The closest thing to a collective factor driving nearly half of respondents to quit was a pervasive sense of exhaustion. Many of you recount how the pandemic has effectively eroded any semblance of work-life balance that may have previously existed in your jobs. References to stress and burnout were everywhere in the responses we collected and most were directly linked to increasing demands from employers.

“I begged my supervisors to help me take some of the workload off. But as much as they tried the higher ups wouldn’t budge and kept on saying “it’s a pandemic we all have to make sacrifices”. I was so insanely overwhelmed and overworked along with many of my peers. It became clear that no one in this industry actually cares about your well-being, just what you can produce for them.” (Government)

“My boss became such a micromanager that he scheduled out my entire week for me, hour by hour, and demanded that I follow it to the letter.” (For-profit office)

There is a cost to these expectations: despair, physical and mental breakdown, the withering of our very spirits. Some in our survey noted that seeing a marked decline in their health finally drove them to quit even without a backup plan in place.

Chronic workplace stress (AKA burnout) is a documented “occupational phenomenon” with serious health impacts, but most companies aren’t terribly interested in addressing it head-on beyond the occasional nod to self-care (on your own time, of course). Under such conditions, quitting can be a life-saving move. I’m reminded of what writer Choire Sicha wrote around the time he quit his job:

“If you are unhappy, or if you frequently say you are “exhausted,” if maybe you cry at work a little more often than you personally think is reasonable, if you wake up in the morning and consider dying instead of going to work, you CLEARLY owe it to yourselves to do something else. Will making a change maybe make you poor or scared? SURE. Could the change be bad? ABSOLUTELY. But the alternative — staying put, degrading like an old yogurt — is to become a worse person. You can’t solve your own burnout, you can only change the system or your situation.”

Back to the office? No, thanks. For many of the office workers in our survey, perhaps growing accustomed to pandemic remote-work arrangements, it was their employer’s dictates to return to the office on seemingly arbitrary timelines that finally pushed them to leave. Such demands from on high can grate, especially when issued to preserve some mythic “office culture” (ie. all those spontaneous hallway meetups) without due consideration for public health recommendations or employee preferences.

Many employers, following the lead of our country’s increasingly fatalistic approach to pandemic response, have also effectively ceded responsibility for keeping their workers safe. For some in our survey, particularly those working in frontline positions and rarely afforded the option to work remotely (or basic PPE to avoid getting ill on the job), the risks just weren’t worth it.

“They underpaid field staff and lower management, subjected them to terrible working conditions with no real rights to stop work if it got too dangerous, poor training and lack of safety equipment when dealing with toxic substances…” (Environmental Compliance)

“Boss kept initiating “discussions” about WFH vs in the office but really gave no choice to us. And they were the only one with an actual office with a door, and they’d just close it and take their mask off while we sat with masks on all day.” (Nonprofit office)

The long goodbye. Even when you’ve finally had it, when the urge to throw your real or metaphorical apron to the ground and leave is real, it can be difficult to know when to make your move. For those that took the leap, most reported lengthy rumination phases of a few months to over a year. This makes a lot of sense to me because we don’t live in a society that makes spontaneous quitting situations possible; not least because quitting a job without another source of income lined up can be economically ruinous and jobs are still the way most people access healthcare.

My own contemplation phases for previous bad jobs have sometimes spanned years because the reckless quitting impulses are usually checked by unpleasant flashbacks to the last time I was unemployed. Some scenario where I’m forced to relive my scarring first summer in DC; broke, working a series of dispiriting temp gigs, and getting straight up trolled by my alumni office’s cheery mailers asking after my post-grad job search. Inputting data off beer-soaked vouchers for a Georgetown party bus company was never the dream, guys!

All this to say, stable employment can be a hell of a drug. Walking away is especially difficult when you’ve invested years into a career track or workplace. Some respondents spoke of waiting around for improvements only to find their employers making even more inscrutable decisions as time went on. Sometimes…it doesn’t get better. By the time a workplace trotted out some new policy or ill-fated restructuring effort (“change management,” where all the changes are bad!), the writing was on the wall.

“Everyone got ridiculous title changes and separate “internal titles” that you would assume were used to determine pay scale but did not.” (Government)

“I didn’t let myself quit without an offer in hand but I was mentally checked out for so long.” (Media)

Perhaps these long and angst-ridden contemplation phases help to explain the thread of restraint running through so many of the quitting stories we received. Apart from sending a few strongly worded emails (ranging in tone from polite to “mild bitchiness”), most of you exited quietly, leaving bridges largely intact and unexploded. Which is a shame because I love a good quitting story.

The lack of drama arises in part because most people cannot afford to burn it all down — not when future employment hinges on preserving relationships and some level of baseline professionalism to secure references, particularly in niche industries.

I can’t help but think this is atleast a function of the pandemic and many of our respondents quitting remotely. What options do we really have? Writing an unhinged Glassdoor review? As ungratifying as it all is, sometimes the only way out is through an anticlimactic zoom meeting with your supervisor or writing a Faulkner-length resignation letter to HR (as atleast one person in our survey did). There were, however, a few fun outliers in the responses that capture the glee and irreverence of finally breaking free:

“I told the people I managed who were being laid off (who I was instructed not to tell they were being laid off until they had finished their production cycle responsibilities). I also took some cutlery when I went to get my stuff as repayment for being the only person who ever did the dishes in the physical office.” (Government contractor)

“I called my boss and quit with less than two weeks’ notice. Then in a meeting with a lot of lower level/underpaid staff I told everyone I was quitting, why I quit, and gave them a long paper trail of all of the HR violations I experienced in case HR tried to brush over why I left. I’m glad I did because they immediately told everyone I had been offered a promotion (I hadn’t been) and double my pay (also not true).” (Nonprofit office)

“Put in three days notice then drove to the beach” (Art)

“I got to tell MY boss “Hey, call me” over Slack!!!” (Media)

For others in our survey, leaving was a much more fraught experience. I was struck by how ambivalent and guilt-ridden people were at leaving their workplaces.

“I cried. I’d been there nearly five years and quitting felt like giving up, even though it was absolutely the right decision — and I even knew that as I was crying to my boss as I told her I was quitting!” (Media)

Many reported agonizing for months about the impact their resignation would have on coworkers and supervisors, and tried their best to communicate their decision with care. Not that this collegiate behavior was always reciprocated. Several respondents spoke of bosses who took the news very badly, launching into messy emotional displays regardless of how much lead time (in one case: five months of advance notice!) and delicate planning went into their exit.

“I got no exit interview, and they tried to make me use my own money to have my laptop shipped back. I still haven’t been sent the items from my desk after a year.” (Nonprofit office)

I said it was no longer a good fit and put in my two weeks and agreed on my end date. The next morning I was locked out my email with a message saying my resignation was accepted immediately 🙃” (Politics)

Something that always irked me about the Great Resignation discourse was the vaguely accusatory tone in media narratives about all those unfilled jobs (10.6 million, at last count). Pundits rend their garments over the “labor shortage” as if to suggest that this massive slice of the workforce is just shuffling quietly into retirement or daydreaming by Walden Pond.

Not that there’s anything wrong with either of those scenarios (sounds ideal, actually), but very few of us can afford to skip out entirely on this whole “exchanging labor for currency” thing. Only about a third of survey respondents felt they could up and leave because they had a pandemic nest egg or financial support from family or a partner to get them through a stint of unemployment. Without the safety net of money in the bank or familial backing, most are understandably averse to making big, potentially risky, life changes like quitting their job.

Ultimately, what has allowed the quitting impulse to flower so beautifully for our respondents was the sense that better options were out there for everyone. A few observations from our survey:

First, the social element: nearly half of the quitting group noted that it was seeing their coworker or peers in their broader social circles blazing a trail out of their job that made it seem like a possibility for them.

“I see tons of coworkers quitting and getting (presumably) higher paying jobs elsewhere. It makes me feel like if I don’t quit my job in this moment, I’m going to miss out on the only favorable labor market conditions I have ever experienced as an adult.” (Tech/IT)

“The day I told my manager I was turning in my notice he told me he was also putting in his notice the same day. The next day the other person on my small team put in their notice. Our office was only 13 people and 3 of us quit in one week.” (Nonprofit office)

“The Great Employment Glow Up.” Most of our respondents (68%) who quit did so explicitly because they received a better job offer. All this trading up is reminiscent of the bygone era of Old Economy Steve; where you could quit a bad or even just middling job in the morning, grab yourself another gig by the late afternoon, and then quit that one too just for the hell of it.

“Unemployment isn’t great, but b/c of this revolving door (and employees’ new-found respect for themselves, especially in hospitality), the friction barrier to quitting is a lot lower than it’s ever been. If I had to quit (which I considered in the first 4 months of my job), I would do so with confidence that I could be quickly re-hired.” (Consulting)

The sudden, frenzied interest from employers can be thrilling, particularly for Millennials who have never known a job landscape that didn’t resemble Death Valley. Friends in the past year report being hounded by HR reps. Recruiters kept sending me thirsty messages on LinkedIn about “exciting opportunities.” And not all of it was spam!

This may not seem remarkable but it’s worth noting how unusual quitting has become in the past few decades. The responses from our survey seem to hint at a noticeable shift; people who have been trying to quit for years are finally able to find not just new jobs, but better jobs, with pay increases, greater flexibility, and most notably, an advantage in negotiations with employers. After decades of an employer’s market demanding lofty qualifications for even entry level jobs — a PhD, a pilot’s license, fluency in ancient Aramaic — there’s finally an end to the madness.

“I really did feel like I had the upper hand in negotiations, and I can’t say that I felt like that 2.5 years ago. People, now’s the time to make your move.” (For-profit office)

Strangely, even with the prospect of workers having this rare “once in a generation” upper hand in the labor market, many employers are still doing little to meaningfully engage with the real causes of worker dissatisfaction.

Less than a fifth of employers in our survey were open to negotiating with staff to reconsider their decision to leave. Many of our survey respondents spoke wearily of employers deep in denial about both the scale of exits and the organizational dysfunction often driving it.

“Higher ups tried to explain my resignation to each other as “the kids these days job hop around all the time” when in reality I was mortified to have to leave a job after 6 months. The management was SO BAD and they seem to want to blame it on our youth (I’m 29!) instead of examining organizational problems. 6 months after leaving I learned that my old bad boss was let go… so I guess they learned.” (Hospitality/Service)

What’s most inscrutable is that even accounting for the squishier emotions like pandemic ennui driving quit rates, workers have been incredibly vocal about what would keep them in their jobs: at a minimum, higher pay, better benefits, and more flexibility.

And yet, in lieu of material changes that would actually benefit workers — pay raises or promotions or staff resources to alleviate crushing workloads — most employers in our survey have refused to acknowledge employee demands outright or pivoted directly to offering mere tokens of appreciation.

This checks out, in my experience. After the dismal results of yet another staff engagement survey rolled in, people in my division received a single decorative candle mailed to their homes. It was a nice gesture, I guess, but… a candle? In this economy?

It’s hard to explain such tone deafness given how much ink has been spilled about the impacts of workers catching that old quitting feeling. Forbes warns HR departments to brace for an impending “talent apocalypse.” The Economist gravely advises companies to rethink their retention strategies. And the Wall Street Journal is busy holding a vigil for all the bosses left behind. Their worries are not unfounded: surveys, like this one, indicate that well over half of those currently employed are thinking of quitting their jobs. Congrats employers, you played yourself.

The Great Contemplation…

I’ll be honest; exit statistics like the ones we’ve been seeing these past few months thrill me to no end. I’m glad for these people fleeing their clueless employers and chasing their brighter tomorrow, even as I can’t help but wonder, as someone seemingly forever on the cusp of quitting, what lies ahead.

For most of our survey respondents, the future includes a different job in the same industry). For others, this moment has prompted more radical departures: going back to school, switching career tracks, or striking out on their own to start something brand new. Regardless of which path people chose, the responses reflected mostly joy, excitement, and palpable relief in leaving behind their old jobs. If there was a trace of regret, it was only that they hadn’t acted sooner.

“I wish I’d known that it was okay to quit and take the leap. I had been debating quitting for at least a year, and felt the pressure to stay to round out my resume (and to get government benefits after 3 years service). I also felt immense pressure to stay on the path I had chosen for myself, which I’d committed to through grad school, internships, and previous jobs. But ultimately, it’s totally okay to quit for a healthier environment — whatever that looks like for you.” (International Development)

“I gave three weeks notice and worried I was leaving my coworkers in a bad place. What can I say, I’m a people pleaser. But once I was gone, I stopped thinking about all my coworkers and old job almost immediately.” (For-profit office)

“It’s ok to quit! You really can just leave! Everyone is replaceable at work, and it’s better to quit on your terms rather than let things get so unmanageable that you get fired (I’ve been there, too). Also, if you can, prioritize and budget for an emergency fund so you can safely say “fuck this” and leave whatever bad situation you’ve found yourself in.” (Government)

Existential rumination gives way to pandemic epiphanies. A quarter of our survey’s quitters explicitly cited “pandemic ennui” as a contributing factor driving their decision to quit, but for a great many more, all this soul-searching has led to reassessing their relationship to work entirely. Americans work more hours on average than any other industrialized nation. Despite alarming levels of burnout, we are encouraged at every turn to put our jobs first. And yet, it’s never enough. To quote labor journalist Sarah Jaffe: “Work won’t love you back.”

This realization came through particularly in the responses we received from employees at non-profits (about a quarter of DC’s workforce), where “meaning” is often used to justify long hours and low pay:

“I left a nonprofit that I’d been at for a long time, and at times it felt so core to my central identity and I felt like I had such an obligation to the organization. When I stopped going to the office for work, when I stopped traveling, when the organizational culture started to erode, I realized that my job was…just a job and I was an at-will employee.” (Nonprofit office)

“I quit a good, high-paying, relatively interesting job doing something important in an industry that is important. All because my heart ‘just wasn’t in it’. Everything about that is so so stupid, but I just couldn’t help myself. The definition of work and what I want to get out of it is shifting rapidly, and I’m just trying to keep up and follow my little work heart. So here we go.” (Government)

These epiphanies are hard won: our jobs inform so much of our world: where we live, who we are, what crumbs of attention and time we have left to give to everything else in our lives. We are so haunted by work we can scarcely envision a future without it. As Anne Helen Petersen asks in the Atlantic:

“Who would you be if work was no longer the axis of your life? How would your relationship with your close friends and family change, and what role would you serve within your community at large? Whom would you support, how would you interact with the world, and what would you fight for?”

It’s hard to know what will come from this wave of exits. As the capitalist machinery keeps chugging along, people rightfully question if this labor moment will peter out, allowing complacent companies everywhere to go back to business as usual. Maybe it will? But I do see encouraging signs that the status quo has shifted for good.

The low-grade panic so evident in many of these Great Resignation articles often seems less about turnover, and more about a restive workforce collectively raising their standards and opting to agitate for their demands. Approval of labor unions is at its highest since 1965, and American workers have been staging walk-outs, sick-outs, and strikes in record numbers this past year.

And though we didn’t ask specifically about labor organizing in our survey, several of our respondents nonetheless referenced unionization efforts (attempted or currently underway) at their workplaces. Even in the face of employer retaliation (ie. union-busting), even when quitting would be the far less tortured route, people are still fighting to make their jobs better and build worker power.

In the past year, I’ve noticed colleagues of mine, many of whom had long been circumspect about airing their work grievances, become more vocal about pay inequity, the lack of work/life balance, and the hollowness of corporate diversity and inclusion efforts (solving racism, one webinar at a time!). The usual grousing seems to be giving way to more overt defiance.

Those staying put are not unaffected by this moment. For many, the last year has been a long period of contemplation spent gathering information, job-searching, or rabble-rousing. Even the respondents in our survey who said they were content with their current jobs (a demographic mystery population), noted that if conditions changed or the work was no longer meaningful, they wouldn’t hesitate to make a change.

“This isn’t about people quitting. It’s about us finally realizing our lives are more than our jobs. The pandemic gave us a window into how we can care for ourselves and prioritize our health and communities over working ourselves to death.”

At the end of 2021, I finally joined the ranks of other esteemed quitters. Despite my jailhouse boasts, I did not go out in a fiery blaze, lit cigarette in hand, flinging around copies of my single-spaced quitting manifesto.

Perhaps that’s just as well. By the time I left, the company had already cycled through all of the Great Resignation stages of grief and now seemed numb to provocation. My final week passed in a blur. I dutifully did my exit interview, supplying recommendations that I knew in my bones would be ignored; I mailed back the laptop I had been involuntarily yoked to these many years, and sat through one last company retreat with the emotional distance of someone about to board an escape pod, leaving behind a dying planet. I was out. I was free.

There is so much sage wisdom to be gleaned from our survey respondents (which we’ve compiled below), but I’ll share a little of my own. Even if you find meaning in your job (and a great many of you do), there is no inherent nobility to living like you’re trapped in a Bruce Springsteen song, sacrificing the best years of your life to the hammer factory (or uh, restaurant, office, whatever). We’re in a moment where workers have more bargaining power than ever to push back against capricious employers and all the indignities of the modern workplace, both big and small (you stare into your doomed future, open office plan!).

Though we can’t know the shape of things to come, we can take heart in the groundswell of consciousness taking place right now: people are recognizing their worth and rightfully reaching for more. So for anyone out there, conflicted, weary, pondering a move, well, I think you should leave.

On that note, we’ve rounded up some advice from the veteran quitters who wrote in to our survey:

• Have a short-term and long-term plan in case the job search doesn’t go as planned.
• Figure out your health insurance situation to avoid tax penalties and, um, potentially crushing medical debt in case something happens. But there are cheaper options than COBRA out there.
• Related note: use up all of your vacation time/sick leave before you exit (Editor’s note: In DC, employers are required to pay out for unused leave when you exit; however, they can stipulate otherwise in your contract. Check the paperwork to decide whether you’d rather have the time off or the cash.)
• Save everything you might possibly need from your work email: you could get locked out pretty quickly.
• If at all possible, take time off between jobs — even if it’s just a week.
• Prioritize and budget for an emergency fund if possible so you’re able to leave a bad job sooner rather than later even without another job offer in hand.
• 2 weeks notice to your employer is the standard; don’t feel pressured to give more and duck out sooner if you feel so moved.
• Don’t feel guilty about leaving. Your workplace will deal.
• And remember, kids, don’t wait around for a change in your job that may never come: “If it sucks, hit the bricks.”