"Should I quit?"

Question

We've got a lot of quitters. It's a fact of life that sometimes you do need to resign, and there are real, generally applicable problems around resignation.

The problem with asking about the decision to quit itself is that it's very localized. Not everyone can (easily) quit just because they're being paid less than market rate. And some people can quit because their office stocks Coca Cola instead of Pepsi.

There are a great deal of factors that go into resignation, and generally you can bet all of those issues aren't laid out in the question we get. "Should I quit" is usually asked about the straw that broke the camel's back. That straw might be a legitimate issue, but that issue itself rarely calls for an absolute "Never ever quit because of this" or "Quit right now and run!"

It's just a bad way to phrase the issue. What if there's a super simple way to solve the problem without quitting? Well, too late, I phrased the question so solving the problem is no longer an answer. I've also prevented the question from being useful to others in a similar situation who can't just quit willy-nilly (and some who can).

Another problem is, if the answer is "yes, you quit", it's often left in an extremely short answer that, at best, really only helps the asker. And someone always posts a "yes, quit" in these sorts of discussions; it's free rep! Find a question where bad working conditions are apparent, say "Hey, you should quit!" and ride the wave of "YEAH RIGHT ON". That really doesn't help anyone, it's barely even an answer, just a suggestion (a potentially dangerous one which really shouldn't be treated lightly).

A recent one is https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/4003/nepotism-fight-or-flight, but we've had plenty of these:
Should I quit because I'm not up to the job?
Should I quit my job because I lack experience?
Is it unethical to quit just before a project that I'm the only one suitable for begins?
Quitting an exploitative job
New Job and a big Mistake with Company Culture
https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/3843/quit-masters-and-work (2K rep users only) https://workplace.stackexchange.com/q/1572/42 (2k rep only)

Can we work with these questions? Do they need to be rephrased somehow? Or is this topic inherently too problematic to work with?

Answer 1

Any question that can be answered with a Yes or No is a bad question for ALL SE's. They invite polling, and opinion sharing. I am opposed to the kind of reworking that questions like these need to become constructive. What should I do questions are usually their end goals. The answer is different for "I need to be away from that person" versus "I want to keep myself out of jail."

• If the OP wants to know if they should quit or take any specific action then the answer is close it not constructive. Encourage the OP to reword it so it is constructive.
• If the OP has a constructive question with a bad title just re-title the question.

Most of these question read like a rant to me anyway but maybe I am just to cynical.

Answer 2

I think, your question reveals a bigger problem which applies to many SE sites (except maybe purely scientific ones). There is a large amount of questions that either can't be answered (polling) or too local (and useless to most visitors):

• If the question does not contain too much details, it invites various opinions (polling), and many of them are equally valid;
• If the OP adds enough details to get a single answer, the entire question becomes too local, and thus offtopic.

Quitting is an answer (probably, a wrong one) to a certain question. Therefore, asking, "should I quit?" is likewise asking, "is 42 an answer to my problem?"
In most cases, "should I quit?" can be dramatically improved by simply replacing it with "what is my best strategy?".
Even more, it can be re-formulated like this:

Considering details above, out of the following list, what is better?
* Quit now;
* Silently look for a better job;
* Ignore the bad person [or whatever the problem is];
* Come up with this problem to my boss;

So I would say yes, "Should I quit?" is a bad formulation.

Answer 3

There are times when I think "should I quit" could be reworded to "how do I improve X aspect of my working conditions" which may be more directly applicable.

Do we have a blog? I rather feel like this could be a blog item about this specific issue - because fixing a common problem at work (which may lead to quitting) might just be more widely applicable and something to encourage. But being steamed about something at work, and venting at TheWorkplace is not the right approach...

I almost wish some of these could have a 24 hour hold - time to chill out and then say "wait, how do I really fix this?" and/or "is Coke not Pepsi at work a dumb reason to quit?"