Hope Needs a Date
There are plenty of good reasons to stay in a job you don’t love.
Money is one.
Equity is another.
A pension. A bonus. An acquisition. Maybe you’re waiting for a promotion that puts you in a completely different location/life.
I have no problem with job hugging.
In fact, sometimes holding on for dear life is the smartest thing you can do.
But if you’re staying because of something that’s supposed to happen in the future, I think you need one thing:
A date.
Without a date, you’re not really executing a strategy. You’re hoping.
And hope is incredibly easy to renew.
That was the trap my friend Kim fell into. She took a job because she was told that in a couple of years, the woman above her would leave and Kim would get the dream job.
Two years came and went.
Then another year.
Then another.
The promise never technically disappeared. It just kept sliding forward.
That’s the dangerous thing about an open-ended promise. It costs the person making it nothing to renew it.
“Just give it another year.”
Great. Now we have another year of your life.
Contrast that with my friend Gordon.
Gordon was also hanging onto a job. From the outside, you could even argue he was doing more job hugging than Kim.
But Gordon knew exactly what he was waiting for.
He had equity and a vesting date.
That changed everything.
A shitty Tuesday was no longer just a shitty Tuesday. It was one Tuesday closer to getting paid.
A reorg wasn’t automatically a reason to leave. The question became: Can I survive this long enough to reach the date?
That’s a strategy.
You can decide the price is too high and leave. You can decide the payoff isn’t worth it anymore. But at least you’re making a decision against something real.
“Someday” is not real.
“After the next reorg” is not real.
“They told me I’m next in line” is definitely not real.
I’ve made the opposite mistake too.
I had vested. I’d gotten through the hard part. Then my ego got involved, I quit over who I was being asked to report to, and I later found out I’d left a couple hundred thousand dollars on the table.
So apparently I can screw this up from either direction.
Stay too long waiting for something that may never happen.
Or leave too early because you’re pissed off.
The answer isn’t always to stay. It isn’t always to leave.
It’s to know what you’re optimizing for.
If your reason for staying is a future payoff, put a date on it. If your company won’t give you one, give yourself one.
Otherwise one more year has a funny way of becoming nine.
And hopium has a terrible vesting schedule.
