This question originally appeared on Quora: Why do people quit their jobs at dream companies like Facebook $META or Google $GOOGL? Answer by Michael Wolfe, Entrepreneur, on Quora
There is a long list of reasons why people leave jobs at highly-rated employers like Google or Facebook, but before I list some of them, let me first highlight what I think is the assumption underlying the question.
My guess is that you are operating under a set of assumptions that I’ll call the Big Lie. The Big Lie goes something like this:
The Big Lie relies on a few supporting lies:
The people behind the Big Lie are not malicious. They often have your best interests in mind and actually believe they are helping you. They are your parents who want to see their kids in a “safe” job at a prestigious company. They are your teachers who want you to get good grades to create opportunities for yourself. They are the big companies who create great work environments so they can have their pick of people.
This is all a long way of saying “everyone is different,” and most people who have been in the working world for a while have long moved past the Big Lie, but younger folks, especially new college graduates, are very susceptible to it. It often is a result of pressure from family and friends, but it is just as often a simple lack of knowledge – many of them want to join a Google or Facebook because they are literally one of the only tech companies they know anything about. But there may have been 100 other lesser-known companies that would have been a better fit.
Now, set the Big Lie aside for a moment, and I’ll answer the question as asked, which is why people leave jobs at companies that supposed to be the “best employers.” I know lots of people who work at companies like Google and reach a day where they start daydreaming about quitting. There are as many reasons are there are people, but some pretty typical ones are:
For the people who know exactly why they joined BigCo in the first place, this transition is pretty graceful. If they originally chose BigCo after an honest assessment of who they are and what their career goals are, they resign as soon as it no longer meets those needs. They go onto something bigger and better (for them) and are better off for the experience and connections they made along the way.
But if they originally joined BigCo only because they believed the Big Lie, this transition can often throw them into a personal crisis:
Companies like Google and Facebook are amazing, but they can be disasters for people who choose them for the wrong reasons or stay too long because of inertia.
People without a firm sense of who they are, what they want, and where their interests and passions lie are vulnerable to this. They end up taking their cues from family, friends, and teachers because they don’t have an inner compass to guide them.
Every person walking this earth is different, and changes from month to month and from year to year. Once you realize there is no “best” of anything, it becomes much easier to seek out what is “best for you” and make career decisions based on your own criteria, not based on any conventional wisdom about what success looks like.
Your decisions may or may not include a Facebook or a Google, but if they do, they should for reasons that are uniquely yours.
As Steve Jobs said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
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