I worked at a really toxic job at a hedge fund where I let them burn me out in a year and then they fired me. Several mistakes were made:
1) I failed to realize the importance of face time/asses in seats time. I was spending tons of ime working late nights and weekends solving hard problems outside of trading hours where nobody could see the hard work I was putting in. Also, being the only hourly, all of my coworkers would disappear early Friday afternoon and everyone else senior in the department would ask me to do weekend work that would effectively have me working 2 days of overtime without going home. Essentially on Fridays I worked for 3 straight days without going home every weekend for 9 months.
2) I accidentally exposed an embarassing mistake made by several seniors in the department. A simple question that I asked in a meeting when I saw how two pieces of network gear were hooked up identified that if either went down we would end up with a network loop and a minor catastrophy for a very expensive trading system. Two of the network engineers in particular were really angry at me for this and would no longer speak to me afterwards. Apparently correcting the mistake took several weekends of off-hours work.
3) I let an absolute snake in the department "mentor" me when I was new. I failed to realize she was using me as an opportunity to reassign her work. When I got sick for three days with a sinus infection, she reassigned hundreds of her outstanding tickets she was delaying on to me and then started calling me out in department emails asking where I was and why I wasn't handling the tickets. Nobody bothered to look at the history before forming their opinions about me. Luckily, she's no longer in the industry and works as a baker.
4) I let the traders physically abuse me. One asshole spilt a cola on his Bloomberg keyboard and I was at his desk with a replacement within 5 minutes. Apparently I wasn't fast enough for his liking and he spent that few minutes kicking me in the ribs as hard as he could while I was under his desk hooking up the new keyboard.
5) I was addicted to World of Warcraft. Despite the long hours I spent at work, I unfortunately filled my free time with video games instead of finding a better job.
Did you think that perhaps World of Warcraft kept you sane under those insane working conditions, ina. therapeutic way? Perhaps it was a form of escapism; gaming helped my numb brain find motivation to look for a job later in life
1) I failed to realize the importance of face time/asses in seats time. I was spending tons of ime working late nights and weekends solving hard problems outside of trading hours where nobody could see the hard work I was putting in. Also, being the only hourly, all of my coworkers would disappear early Friday afternoon and everyone else senior in the department would ask me to do weekend work that would effectively have me working 2 days of overtime without going home. Essentially on Fridays I worked for 3 straight days without going home every weekend for 9 months.
2) I accidentally exposed an embarassing mistake made by several seniors in the department. A simple question that I asked in a meeting when I saw how two pieces of network gear were hooked up identified that if either went down we would end up with a network loop and a minor catastrophy for a very expensive trading system. Two of the network engineers in particular were really angry at me for this and would no longer speak to me afterwards. Apparently correcting the mistake took several weekends of off-hours work.
3) I let an absolute snake in the department "mentor" me when I was new. I failed to realize she was using me as an opportunity to reassign her work. When I got sick for three days with a sinus infection, she reassigned hundreds of her outstanding tickets she was delaying on to me and then started calling me out in department emails asking where I was and why I wasn't handling the tickets. Nobody bothered to look at the history before forming their opinions about me. Luckily, she's no longer in the industry and works as a baker.
4) I let the traders physically abuse me. One asshole spilt a cola on his Bloomberg keyboard and I was at his desk with a replacement within 5 minutes. Apparently I wasn't fast enough for his liking and he spent that few minutes kicking me in the ribs as hard as he could while I was under his desk hooking up the new keyboard.
5) I was addicted to World of Warcraft. Despite the long hours I spent at work, I unfortunately filled my free time with video games instead of finding a better job.