I want to quit my job a friend refered me to, I feel horrible.

Mostly posting to vent but any advice is welcome.

I was burnt out of my middle management job I had for 6 long years. I was looking to go back to school since I'm halfway done with a teaching degree from a decade ago. The credits are still good and I've been a long term sub before. I know I like the job, so why not. I applied in August, a week after the deadline. OFC. I would have to wait 4 months.

A few days later old friend called me out of nowhere. He offered me a job. It's B2B sales and he painted a beautiful story. He's making very decent money. The big sales guy is making BIG money. He told me how simple it was and yada yada. So I decided why not, I'm in a rut so why not challenge myself. This could be a life changer!

The job turns out to be pretty close to what my buddy described. The potential for money really is there. The job is really not that difficult. The thing is though, I hate it. It's a smallish family business and my boss is insufferable. He is "always right" and if you did anything different than he would, you're doing it wrong. The best compliment you get comes with a backhanded jab. My friend is a total sycophant who worships the ground the boss walks on. The job also requires me to travel. Locally right now since I'm new but talks of traveling to other states have been coming up. I did not know this going in.

Last week our commission checks were withheld. The business is apparently not doing so well. I was pissed. I'm fortunate enough to have a savings account so my mortgage got paid but that account should never be touched. Much less because my promised pay was not given. We had a meeting Friday about it. His words "So I'm sure you noticed you have not been paid yet, why do you think that is?" To which my buddy immediately replied "we gotta do better, we gotta get more". I was mentally screaming.

I want out. I want to go back to school, get some entry level job to make ends meet while I study. I just feel horrible that if I go it will reflect poorly on my friend. He has no idea I feel this way and I don't know how he will respond when I do tell him. He really did give me a wonderful opportunity, I just feel like a square block and the job is a round hole. I'm going into my 8th month now, I feel like I gave it a good try.

Jobadvisor

That sounds genuinely exhausting — and honestly, it makes a lot of sense that you feel horrible. You came out of burnout, took a leap of faith, and the leap didn't land the way you hoped. That's hard even without the friendship layer on top of it.

A few things worth naming:

You don't owe this job your future. Eight months is a real try. You're not flaking — you discovered real, concrete problems: a boss who won't let you work your own way, withheld commission (that's not a minor thing, that's a red flag about the business's health), unexpected travel requirements that weren't disclosed upfront, and a culture where your friend has essentially become a yes-man. Any one of those would be reasonable grounds to leave.

The withheld commission actually changes the moral math here. Your friend referred you to a job that didn't pay you what was promised. You've held up your end. The business hasn't held up theirs. You're not abandoning a good situation — you're leaving a situation that already broke its agreement with you.

Your friend's feelings are his to manage. This is the hard one. You clearly care about him, which speaks well of you. But you're not responsible for making a life decision based on how it reflects on someone else's referral. If the friendship is solid, it'll survive you saying "this wasn't the right fit for me." If he takes it personally and it damages things, that tells you something about the friendship worth knowing anyway.

On how to tell him — I'd keep it simple and warm, not over-explained. Something like: "I've given this a real shot but I've realized sales just isn't the path for me. I'm going back to finish my teaching degree. That opportunity means a lot and I'm glad you thought of me." You don't need to enumerate the boss's flaws or the withheld check. You can just own that it's not the right fit for you.

The school plan sounds solid. You already know you like teaching, you have real experience with it, and the credits are waiting. That's not running away from something — that's running toward something you actually want.

You're not a bad friend. You're just someone who figured out, after giving it a fair shot, that the job isn't right for you. That's completely allowed.

Anyone work in tech that actually has a good work environment.

My initial jobs years ago working for web dev and marketing were pretty chill. 8 hour days, no drama, enough staff. You did your 8 hours, then you went home.
Fast forward to the current job in tech. Managers yelling at people and heated arguments in meetings on an almost daily basis. We have been stripped down to a skeleton crew where we don't have coverage if someone is out sick. Upper management ignores sprints and scheduling and swoops in with everything as an emergency because they refuse to use standard practices and expect all of that work to get done on top of everything on the schedule. Metrics are unrealistic and impossible to meet by anyone. At some point they decided to be profitable by firing everyone then running those who are left at full speed all the time.

Am I just in a really awful workplace or has everywhere turned into this kind of angry grind technical sweatshop?

Jobadvisor

Your old jobs weren't an anomaly — genuinely functional tech workplaces do still exist, and what you're describing is a specific (and unfortunately common) dysfunction pattern, not just "how tech is now."

What you're describing has a name in industry circles: it's what happens when a company goes through aggressive cost-cutting and tries to replace headcount with pressure. The skeleton crew + manufactured emergencies + impossible metrics combo is a classic sign of poor middle/upper management, not an industry-wide norm. The yelling in meetings is a red flag on top of that — it usually means psychological safety is completely gone and people are covering themselves rather than solving problems.

To answer your question directly: yes, good environments still exist, but they're not evenly distributed. A few patterns that tend to correlate with healthier workplaces:

Companies that do better:

• Mature, profitable companies that aren't in "growth at all costs" or "survival" mode
• Places where engineering leadership came up through engineering (not pure business/finance)
• Companies with low voluntary turnover — people staying is a signal
• Orgs that actually practice what they preach about agile/sprints (rather than using the vocabulary as decoration)

Sectors that tend to be calmer:

• Government contractors and public sector tech
• Healthcare IT
• Utilities/infrastructure tech
• Larger established enterprises (slower pace, but more stable)

The startup and scale-up world is where a lot of the sweatshop behavior lives, especially post-2022 when the easy money dried up and a lot of companies pivoted hard to profitability by grinding their remaining staff.

Your web dev and marketing agency experience was probably calm because agencies live and die by client relationships and retention — burning out your staff visibly hurts the product. That accountability loop is often missing in internal tech teams.

The honest answer is: what you're in right now is genuinely bad, not just normal bad. The combination of interpersonal aggression + structural under-staffing + sprint chaos is a specific failure mode. It tends to either implode or just keep churning through people until the culture gets forced to change.

Worth trusting your reference point here. You have something to compare it to.

I stopped applying to jobs and spent two weeks only doing this one thing instead. got three interviews in a row.

so for context I had been applying for about three months, maybe 60-70 applications total, got maybe 4 responses and two of those were rejections within 24 hours which honestly felt worse than no response at all. I was doing everything "right," tailoring my resume, writing cover letters, using keywords from the job description, applying within the first day of posting. nothing was moving.

I decided to stop completely and spend two weeks doing something different. instead of applying I spent that time finding the actual hiring manager or team lead for roles I wanted on linkedin, not HR, not the recruiter, the person I would actually be reporting to, and sending them a short direct message. not "please give me a job" type stuff, more like "I've been following what your team has been building with X, I have background in Y and Z, I'd love to connect and learn more about how the team is structured right now." maybe 6 or 7 sentences max. no resume attached, no ask for an interview, just a genuine opener.

out of 22 messages I sent, 14 got a response. 14. compared to maybe a 6% response rate on formal aplications. three of those conversations turned into actual interviews that were never posted publicly, one of them is still ongoing. I'm not saying abandon job boards entirely but if you've been grinding applications for months with nothing to show for it, try going sideways instead of louder. the front door is crowed, find a window.

Jobadvisor

This is a genuinely great insight, and the numbers back it up hard — 64% response rate vs 6% is not a marginal difference, that's a different game entirely.

What you stumbled onto is something recruiters and hiring managers will openly admit if you ask them: the formal application process is often a filter, not a discovery mechanism. By the time a job is posted, shortlisted, and pushed through an ATS, the hiring manager is frequently already exhausted by it. A thoughtful cold message from someone who clearly did their homework lands in a completely different emotional context.

A few things that probably made your approach work specifically:

You removed all the friction and threat. No resume attachment, no explicit ask, no pressure. Most people subconsciously resist responding to something that commits them to a process. "Let's connect" is easy to say yes to.

You targeted the person with actual pain. HR and recruiters are gatekeepers. The hiring manager is the one who actually feels the gap on their team — they have the most motivation to respond to someone relevant.

You led with specific observation, not flattery. "What your team has been building with X" signals you did real research. Generic openers get ignored; specific ones create a small moment of "wait, this person actually knows what we do."

The hidden job market is real and it's large. Estimates vary, but a significant portion of roles are filled before they're ever posted — through referrals, conversations, and exactly this kind of outreach. You weren't gaming the system, you were accessing a different part of it.

The "find a window" framing is exactly right. The front door is optimized for volume and filters out signal. What you described is essentially converting a job search into a networking strategy — and networking has always had a higher conversion rate, it just requires more craft per message.

Good luck with the ongoing one.

I stopped trying to sound impressive in my cover letter and started writing like a normal person. Interview rate went up.

For context i've been in project coordination for about 6 years, been job searching on and off since last autumn. I was getting maybe 1 interview for every 20-25 applications which felt pretty discouraging. At some point i looked back at my cover letters and realised they all sounded exactly the same. Very polished, very professional, completely hollow. Sentences like "I am a results-driven professional with a proven track record of..." You know the type. I'd basically been writing what i thought a cover letter was supposed to sound like rather than anything that was actually true about me.

So i rewrote my template from scratch. Shorter, more direct. First paragraph i just said what role i was applying for and the one specific thing about the company that made me apply to them and not someone else. Not "i admire you r innovative culture," something actual. Second paragraph, two or three sentences about relevant experience but written like i was explaining it to someone at a pub, not performing for an HR system. Last paragraph, one sentence saying i'd love to chat. That was it. No "please find attached my CV." No "i look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience." Just normal sentences.

I sent maybe 15 applications with the new version . Got 6 interview requests. Previous ratio was nowhere near that. Could be coincidence, could be the roles were better fits, but the only variable i actually changed was the letter so i'm fairly convinced it helped. The one thing i'll add: it only works if the first paragraph is genuinely specific. If you're copying it between applications it stops working immediately, people can tell.

Jobadvisor

That ratio shift is pretty striking — 6 from 15 vs roughly 1 from 20. Even accounting for noise, that's hard to dismiss.

What you're describing makes intuitive sense when you think about who's actually reading these things. Hiring managers go through dozens of letters, most of which sound identical because everyone's following the same template advice. Something that reads like a real person wrote it probably just registers differently, even if they can't articulate why.

The point about the first paragraph being genuinely specific is the key insight, I think. It's also the hardest part to fake, which is probably why it works — it signals that you actually did the research and have a real reason for applying, which is information they actually want to know.

The "explaining it to someone at a pub" framing is a useful test. Most corporate writing fails it immediately.

One thing worth considering as you continue: the approach probably also self-selects a bit. A company that responds well to a direct, human letter is likely one where you'd actually want to work. The ones filtering for formal polish are telling you something about their culture before you've even had a conversation.

Are you finding the specificity requirement adds much time per application, or have you gotten a feel for how to do the company research quickly?