I Quit, But Not Before Saying a Few Things

Dear Management, HR, and Whoever Is Currently Pretending to Be in Charge,

Effective immediately, or as soon as I finish typing this beautiful trainwreck of a farewell, I hereby resign from my position as Senior Associate of Whatever the Hell It Is I Do Here. That’s right. I quit. And unlike the software we rely on, I will not crash silently. I will make noise.

First, I want to thank you for the opportunity to slowly rot in a windowless office while pretending spreadsheets matter. This job has been a journey, if by “journey” you mean a Sisyphean marathon where the finish line keeps moving and someone keeps pelting you with Slack messages.

When I started here five years ago, I was bright-eyed, eager, and still believed in things like “team spirit” and “the mission.” I remember my onboarding orientation: the stale bagels, the PowerPoint made in 1998, and the buzzword bingo that included “synergy,” “innovation,” and “disruption.” Little did I know, the only thing we’d disrupt was my sleep schedule and my will to live.

Let’s talk about the culture. Oh, the sacred “company culture.” You threw that word around like glitter at a middle school dance, and just like glitter, it got everywhere but meant nothing. Culture meant free pizza on Thursdays (cold by 12:03), passive-aggressive emails about the state of the shared microwave, and forced Zoom “fun” meetings where we pretended to enjoy trivia night while silently Googling answers and planning our escapes.

You wanted “grit”? I gave you grit. I survived four rounds of layoffs, three reorgs, two managers who ghosted me mid-project, and one company-wide initiative called “Operation Pivot” that no one could explain but everyone pretended to understand. I wrote 17 different versions of the same PowerPoint pitch for a product we never launched. I once stayed up until 3:00 AM rewriting a report because someone felt Arial was “less trustworthy” than Calibri.

But the final straw was last Monday. You know what you did. You called a mandatory 8:00 AM “alignment meeting” to discuss “realigning our Q3 vision goals.” That sentence alone made my soul dry-heave. Then, in front of the team, you praised Steve for “thinking outside the box” when he literally suggested the exact idea I’d emailed you two weeks ago. The one you ignored. I might as well have written it in invisible ink on a napkin and buried it in a sandbox.

Also, Steve is an idiot.

No disrespect to Steve personally, except that’s not true—plenty of disrespect. Steve once asked if the cloud was “literally in the sky” and tried to plug an HDMI cable into a stapler. But sure, let’s give him a leadership role. Let’s give the guy who called me “admin” in a meeting (I’m not admin, I’m the project lead) a standing ovation because he discovered bullet points.

Am I bitter? Oh, honey. I’m a French roast.

To the few good souls here who kept me sane: bless you. You know who you are. You brought joy to my days, shared memes that made me laugh inappropriately during budget calls, and warned me when bagels were actually fresh. We trauma-bonded over broken systems, managerial neglect, and the sheer absurdity of treating every minor deadline like an Apollo moon landing. I love you. I will miss you. Some of you are the reason I didn’t go full Office Space and take a bat to the printer.

As for the work itself? I tried. God, I tried. I gave my brain, my weekends, and a piece of my soul to make things better. But improvement here is like trying to teach a toaster philosophy. You can slap motivational posters on the wall, rebrand the same broken workflow as “agile,” and put a beanbag chair in the corner, but the core rot remains.

Here’s a fun fact: I’ve written more lines of apology email than actual project code. I’ve used the phrase “per my last email” so often I should trademark it. I’ve nodded sagely at discussions about “client-facing deliverables” while secretly trying to remember what planet we’re on.

But no more.

Today, I reclaim my time. Today, I take back my Saturdays. Today, I no longer have to pretend that “Q2 stakeholder engagement metrics” light a fire in my soul.

I’m leaving to pursue other things. Maybe I’ll open a bookstore that serves wine. Maybe I’ll become a barista in Iceland. Maybe I’ll just sit in a chair and stare into the abyss, knowing the abyss will never reply-all me with "just circling back."

What I won’t be doing is forwarding emails about “cross-departmental alignment” or sitting through another meeting that could have been a nap.

As for the exit interview—no, thank you. I’ve said all I need to say, and frankly, you can’t afford my honesty. You’d need a therapist, a lawyer, and possibly a priest to parse the trauma I’ve amassed here. Consider this letter my exit interview. My feedback is: Fix your sht.* Also, pay your interns.

My badge is on my desk. My soul is in a jar somewhere between last quarter’s burnout and that time you asked if I could “wear more neutral tones to be more client-friendly.”

I am not client-friendly. I am human.

Goodbye.

Unapologetically and joyously yours,

[Name Redacted Out of Petty Spite But You Know Who I Am]

P.S. Tell Steve I said “Hi,” and also “Why.”