My first job out of college my boss was a smart and successful guy but terrible with people and a terrible boss. He was the biggest micromanaging and condescending jerk I've ever met. He was a tenured professor at a major college and started a research company - the research company is where I got a job. He would show up every day after working at the college, so like 3pm, and want to meet with every single employee to go over what they've been up to the last 24 hours, because, like I said, he was a micromanaging asshole. There were probably 40 employees to meet with so sometimes you'd have to wait around until 9pm for him to get to you just so you could have a condescending dickhead get mad at you for not doing things perfectly. Then you could go home. A lot of employees coped with this by showing up to work at 1 or 2pm, I think the boss even preferred people did this, though he never came out and said it.

Over the first 6 months I got two raises which pretty much kept me silent. I went from $30k to $37.5k to $45k. I was feeling pretty good about my $45k and didn't want to lose my job but I was getting more and more miserable and more and more anxious every time I had to talk to this guy. One day I woke up and realized I didn't need the money, I had saved a lot, I figured I could find a new job, and this job was making me miserable. Once I decided I would quit I felt a lot of relief and a urgent need to quit immediately.

I didn't go out in a blaze of glory I guess but I quit, I offered a flexible schedule so they could hand my research off to someone. They asked me to stay 4 weeks and I did. I say "they" because my boss apparently was mad at me and in the end he never talked to me again after I announced my quitting. But my blaze of glory was about 3 or 4 other people decided to follow me and quit too. And after going to a dozen or so interviews I was offered a job that paid $75k, and within 3 months I got a raise to a cool $100k on the nose. At the time it felt like a huge win and quitting was really the best career and sanity move I ever made. My new bosses were amazingly good people and I'm still friends with them to this day, despite leaving that job after a few years to start my own business.

I ran into some old coworkers from the first job about a year ago and I just felt bad for them. They were doing the same shit for the same asshole with the same anxiety I used to have, and here I am, self-employed, making like 5 times as much as them. It's sort of tragic the career decisions people make due to fear and poor personal finances.