Dear Designer
Dear Designer: All Jobs Must Come to an End
How to know when it’s time to move on to another opportunity
Dear Mike,
How do you know when it’s time to leave a job?
Dear Designer,
You’ll have a number of jobs during your career. Some will be good. Some will be bad. Most will oscillate wildly between those two poles. But the one thing all those jobs will have in common is that, at some point, you will leave. Sometimes it’ll be your call; sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it’ll be a happy occasion; sometimes it won’t. But rest assured, every job has an endpoint.
The fact that a job ends shouldn’t be a surprise, although the manner in which it ends might be. So, let’s talk about some of the reasons people leave jobs and see what we can do to mitigate the negative impact. Because jobs equal income and all that.
But first, let me start with a story. I’ve been running my own shop (along with my partner, Erika Hall, who has a new book out about design research) for 18 years. In those 18 years, we’ve hired somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 people. The first time one of my employees left, I was devastated. I thought it was my fault. I started thinking our little studio sucked, because why else would someone want…
