Knowing when to leave

I wrote this in my blog drafts well over a decade ago (exact date unclear). I thought I'd publish it as-is as an aside. I'm sure it was going to be an excellent full post, but clearly this is just the intro. I still agree though: knowing when to go is important!

Some years ago, someone I worked with closely on a project that was failing had a mini-meltdown. He unfriended the rest of the team across social media, including the official accounts, which he took over unilaterally; he refused to even sit at the same table as the rest of the team on company trips, and at events.

To this day, I still don't exactly know what triggered the episode. But it was a moment that made me realize the project we were working on together could never succeed. Four months later, I had extracted myself.

Years later, I believe this was the wrong decision.

Knowing when to leave is an important skill. You've got to balance your loyalty, and your long-term career, against the objective facts in any situation. Leaving a project early is not a good idea: it sends a message that you're ready to flake out when times get tough. (In a startup situation, times will get tough.) However, if a project:

• genuinely has no long-term prospects, either for you personally or as a whole
• and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it
• and the situation is not directly of your own making

You need to think about going. Anything else is running on a treadmill for no reason.