Exit strategy
I just completed the exit interview from my old job. Naturally, it was online rather than with a human. I don’t know who they got to organize the survey but one of the sections in particular was an especially keen reminder to me of why I left. I’ll paraphrase - but the question went something like this:
Check up to three of the following options for why you chose to leave:
[ ] my manager wasn’t accountable
[ ] my manager wasn’t effective
[ ] my manager lacked some other corporate drone quality
[ ] the company lacked future opportunities for me
[ ] the company wasn’t headed in the right direction
…and so on
This was really frustrating. What was conspicuously missing was any response that let me express an opinion that aspects of the job and company that were the reasons that I joined over nine years ago were no longer true today. There was no option that encapsulated the disillusionment I had over a change in climate from what I thought was true in 1998:
[ ] I felt the company respected me because in spite of a mixed positive/negative interview, the company flew me back across country for another round of interviews (which I aced)
[ ] I felt respected because almost every other company I interviewed with required a drug test at the interview. While I didn’t then and don’t now use drugs, the expressed confidence that performance - not lifestyle - is what matters, meant a lot to me.
[ ] I felt like this was a company that would never, in a million years, decide to stop stocking the printer rooms on every floor in every building and consolidate that on some random floor because they thought making the employees go on a scavenger hunt for a pen would save more money than paying some guy to stock all the printer rooms with pens.
[ ] It was clearly a fun place to work. You could tell by the open spaces engineered into the buildings, the video games lining the hallways, or by interacting with the people.
[ ] It was a place where status didn’t matter a whole lot - people were and seemed incredibly pragmatic.
A lot of things happened but one of the key changes is that not everyone was turning into instant millionaires. Consequently I believe the work dynamic changed considerably to one with a bunch of geeks who weren’t sure what to do with themselves after the median 4.5 year retention window elapsed and they found they couldn’t just leave and spend the rest of their lives on 11 months of preparing for the next burning man but they actually needed to keep working to pay the bills. They changed into hypercompetitive, but incredibly fragile, nerd/jerk chimeras. And 9/11 happened and all the video games were swept from the halls (maybe the WMD’s were in the cabinet for Joust???). And we got parking passes. And jackass rent-a-cops started showing up all the time to harass us if we didn’t walk around with our badges strapped to our belts like the weenies we were increasingly becoming. And the company started to decline, too. Not that I should be misunderstood. Some of my best friends still work there 
But the missing option from that survey question was “I no longer feel like this is an incredibly fun place to work.”
Or maybe “I can no longer suspend disbelief about my reality by telling myself ‘big company that feels like a small company’ - this is and feels like a big company.” If you need proof, it’s all there in the exit interview.