So, how many of you are absolutely miserable working in tech but feel trapped?

Talk about literally the perfect question for me right now...

I work in Enterprise Support for one of the big cloud providers on the west coast. I took this job almost a year ago (beginning of next month). When I started this job, it wasn’t a call center. We had a great mentor system, sure we had quotas to meet but they weren’t that high. We had tons of metrics— if you weren’t doing solid on one or two but others were great, then no biggie.

Over the last couple months it’s become a call center, and only looking worse as things go on. Quotas got a lot higher, a metrics got cut to only 3 things, expectations went up. We hired a ton of people, so the case load is spread out more... but we still have the same requirements.

And to top it off, a few months ago my manager noted to that I was actually being underpaid relative to my peers, by like 20k. Every two weeks I ask him if there’s been any traction on it. Every week the story advances a bit more. But still nothing solid.

I used to love working here. I used to enjoy coming in every day. I knew I wasn’t going to stay in THIS position forever, but I thought about staying in the company for a long time. The last month or so has made me really unsure.

What sucks is I have certain career aspirations that I intended for this job to catapult me into. I went from being a lowly windows desktop support tech fresh out of college to being a Linux support specialist for one of the big guys. I don’t -want- to leave. But between the 20% raise that has been dangled in front of me for months, the increasingly hostile work environment on my current team... idk.

maybe I’m burning out, maybe I’m just becoming jaded. I loved Tech, learning Linux, going from self-taught to being a recognized Linux specialist on my team felt amazing. I felt on top of the world.

Now I’m terrified that if I would leave here I’d have to leave “the big guys” to not risk the same thing happening again, but doing so would likely mean a pay cut, or (I feel) at least a very likely cut in future salary potential.

I don’t know if I want to leave Tech, I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t in tech. But everything I’m hearing about how hostile and toxic it gets is definitely putting me off from it, and everything I’ve seen myself isn’t encouraging.

I don’t know if I want to leave Tech. But I know I’m not happy right now.

/r/cscareerquestions Thread