1. Quitting My Job at Thirty

Thirty is a turning point. If your career has gone well, by this stage you should, in theory, already be settled at a company—an important contributor, or even a manager or technical lead. Yet I quit without having another job lined up at the time when I had the richest career capital.

Objectively speaking, this decision was rather reckless.

I bought a house this year. With my savings running low and the pressure of a mortgage, the risk was high—just like the cases you often see on social media, where people make impulsive decisions because they don’t have enough savings.

Working at a company and drawing a salary is stable, but it also means exchanging value. No matter how many ideas you have in development, or how much ambition you hold for architecture and design patterns, in the end you’re still making a contribution for the company. At heart, you’re still just a cog in the machine—only the size of the cog differs.

To be fair, I did gain unprecedented opportunities for growth at the company. Whether it was learning how to design an appropriate architecture for high traffic, building servers from scratch, communicating with developers from different countries, working with cross-functional teams, or leading a team to complete several features, these were all invaluable experiences. And only at that level of traffic and scale do you get to see things you would never have even considered before.

But what I’ve been seeing lately is all kinds of inefficiency. That’s probably a common ailment in large companies, more or less.

Low efficiency, blind expansion, miscommunication, complicated decision-making, unclear responsibility, and passing the buck—these are all conditions that are hard for large enterprises to cure; they can only be eased.

In the year before last, I was assigned to a new project. At the time, my manager gave me a great chance to shine. As an early-stage developer, I had a lot of control over the development process, and it even influenced how the newer team members approached their work.

Drawing on my previous project experience, I tried to simplify the tedious parts of development. And in order to deal with Japan’s cumbersome document review process, I tried to communicate across teams and introduce automation in as many ways as possible, so the team wouldn’t be held back by all that bureaucracy.

I failed. Management wanted us to follow that kind of bureaucratic document format, and deployment confirmation had to be done with website screenshots. The high cost of communication had a significant impact on development.

Only after talking with my colleagues did I realize that management actually wanted a machine that would just quietly write code, not improvement—even though those bureaucratic procedures were already hurting productivity badly.

In the end, development on this project was terminated, and all my work went up in smoke.

After being hit by two consecutive project cancellations (update: another one was cut recently), I took a major blow. On one hand, I understood the company’s policies; on the other, I felt that in the end, all my contributions were still subject to the company’s say-so. That kind of state is not healthy.

It also made me understand one important thing: work outcomes are, to some extent, unpredictable. What matters more is the environment—who you work with and which project you’re on.

Of course, at the same company, I also had a completely different experience. A manager was willing to understand what I wanted to do and gave me free rein to lead the development team. After we achieved results on the project, it was reflected in my performance review, and over the years my salary nearly doubled. That’s another story—we can talk about it later.

The three most harmful addictions—heroin, carbohydrates, and monthly salary — Taleb

Over time, I became numb. Salary changed from a source of motivation into a poison. As long as I did my job well, I could receive a decent paycheck every month. But if I tried to stand out and change things, I was more likely to make things worse and hurt my performance. I couldn’t help but feel that the environment really can change a person a lot.

Faced with tedious tasks, meetings, routine work, and a product direction that drifted away from my own core values, the internal environment at the company made my desire to quit stronger and stronger.

Is this the life I want?

I can say very clearly: no.

For me now, comfort and doing work I don’t like at this stage of my life should not be options I need to consider. Overall, this is still a great environment, and if you put in the effort, you can gain many opportunities to grow here. It’s just no longer the right place for me.

I don’t dislike the fun of taking on new challenges within a company. If the opportunity is rare and the project aligns with me, I wouldn’t rule out going back to corporate work. But stepping out on my own gives me more control, and brings me closer to what I want to do.

It’s time to take the first step.