So. I'm resigning.
Not dramatically. Nobody wronged me, there was no blow-up, no bad manager story. It was genuinely a good journey and I learned a lot. But I sat down and did the math on my own life, and the numbers stopped working.
I'm writing this down for two reasons. One, because I want a record of what I was actually thinking when I made the call, so future me can check whether I was right. Two, because I spent a lot of nights reading other people's versions of this post trying to figure out if I was being reasonable or just soft. So here's mine, in case you're doing the same reading at 2 AM.
Three reasons. In the order they got heavy.
Reason 1: I stopped growing
This is the one that's hardest to explain to people, because from the outside it looks like the opposite. I was busy. Constantly. Busy looks like growth if you don't look closely.
But being busy and getting better are different things. What I was doing was shipping — a lot — and what I wasn't doing was learning how to ship better. There wasn't much guidance available. No one was reviewing my architecture decisions and telling me they were wrong. No one was pointing at a thing I'd built and saying "this works, but here's the version of it a senior would have written."
So I plateaued. I got faster at the things I already knew, and I got almost nothing new. Every real skill jump I made in the last stretch — the system design stuff, the infra stuff — I taught myself, at night, on my own time, from my own money.
At some point I had to be honest: if all of my growth is happening outside of work, then work isn't where my career is happening.
The tell
Here's the specific thing that made it click. I asked myself: what could I learn here in the next year that I can't learn on my own at home?
I couldn't come up with an answer. That's the whole reason, right there.
Reason 2: The hours ate everything
Let me just lay out the actual day, because the abstract version ("poor work-life balance") does not communicate it:
- ~8 hours in the office
- 1–2 hours of travel, every single day
- Then home, then my learning — the stuff that was actually moving my career
- Asleep around 3:00 AM
- Awake at 9:00 AM
That's six hours of sleep on a good night, and there weren't many good nights. Do that for months and it stops being a schedule and starts being a slow leak.
And notice what's missing from that list: everything else. Friends. Rest. Anything that isn't a screen. The only way I could keep learning was to take the hours out of my sleep, because there was nowhere else left to take them from.
What I was actually carrying
The workload is worth spelling out, because "I was busy" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Running at the same time:
| What | How many |
|---|---|
| Company projects | 2 |
| Open source contributions | 2 |
| Helping out on someone else's project | 1 |
| My own side projects | 2 |
| College + extra study | Ongoing |
That's six or seven active codebases, each with its own context, its own stack, its own set of things currently on fire. Plus coursework. Plus the self-teaching that was the only thing keeping me improving.
Context switching between two projects is fine. Between seven, you're not really working on any of them — you're just paying the cost of remembering where you left off, over and over, all day.
I was intense about it. I want to be clear that a lot of that load was self-inflicted and I'd do most of it again. But it isn't sustainable stacked on top of a 10-hour day plus commute, and something had to give. For a while, the thing that gave was sleep. That's not a long-term plan.
Reason 3: The money didn't cover my life
This is the reason people are weirdest about saying out loud, so I'll just say it plainly: my compensation did not cover my expenses.
Not "I wanted more." Not "I felt undervalued." The arithmetic did not close. Here's what my money was going to:
- Travel — daily commute, every working day
- Food — eating out constantly, because I was never home at a reasonable hour
- Education — college fees, courses, books
- AI subscriptions and tools — which are not optional for me; they're how I work and how I learn
- Everything else — the normal cost of being a person
That last category is the one that kept getting squeezed. When a salary doesn't cover the basics, you don't cut the fun stuff first, because there wasn't any. You start cutting the things that keep you functional.
And there's a compounding problem here that I didn't see at first: being underpaid is expensive. Long commute means eating out. No time means no cooking. Exhaustion means bad decisions with money. The low salary doesn't just leave you with less, it actively generates costs.
How the three fit together
For a long time I treated these as three separate complaints, and each one on its own felt survivable. Growth is slow — fine, I'll teach myself. Hours are long — fine, I'll use the night. Money is tight — fine, I'll be careful.
But they're not independent. They're the same problem wearing three hats:
- Low pay meant I couldn't buy back any time (no cab, no living closer, no eating properly)
- No time meant learning had to come out of sleep
- No sleep meant I had less capacity to do the work well
- Not doing the work well meant less growth
- Less growth meant no leverage to fix the pay
That's a loop, and it doesn't break from the inside. I tried optimizing every individual piece of it for months. You can't fix a loop by working harder inside it — working harder is the thing feeding it.
So what actually made me decide
Honestly? It was realizing that my best work was happening at 1 AM on projects nobody was paying me for.
That's the signal. If the version of you that does the most interesting work only shows up after the workday, then the workday is the thing standing between you and your career, not the thing building it.
If you're in the same spot
I'm not going to give advice, because I've been resigned for about five minutes and I have no idea if this works out. But here are the two questions that got me unstuck, and they might get you unstuck too:
"What can I learn here in the next year that I couldn't learn alone?" If the answer is nothing, you already know.
"Am I tired, or am I in a loop?" Tired gets better with a vacation. A loop doesn't — it just resets and starts again on Monday. Be honest about which one you're in, because the fix is completely different.
For me it was the loop. So I'm getting out of it.
More soon — I'll write about what comes next once there's something worth writing about.