I’m mentally and physically destroyed from my job. Is it worth it to quit and search full time?
I joined a new company about three months ago, and it has turned into the worst work environments I’ve ever experienced.
I’m regularly working 14 hour days, working weekends, and getting yelled at or berated by my manager on an almost daily basis. I’ve gotten sick every month since starting, and at this point I feel mentally and physically exhausted.
I took the job because it was a significant pay increase and a step up in title. I thought it was a great career move but I feel like I made a huge mistake.
I’m not even sure how I’m supposed to seriously job search while working these hours. By the time I get home, I’m completely drained, I don’t feel like I have enough time or energy to network, prepare for interviews, or put together strong applications.
I know everyone says “never quit until you have another job lined up” and the job market is just getting worse and worse.
I’m at the point almost every day I think about quitting, taking some time to recover, and treating the job search like my full-time job.
For anyone who has been in a genuinely toxic or unsustainable work situation:
Did you quit without another job lined up?
Did having more time and energy actually help your job search?
Did leaving a job after only few months hurt you in interviews?
I am genuinely afraid of being unemployed for 6-12+ months but I seriously don’t think I can handle this job anymore.
Jobadvisor
This sounds genuinely brutal — 14-hour days, working weekends, and getting berated regularly isn't a rough patch, it's a situation that would wear anyone down. Getting sick every month is your body telling you something too. I want to give you a straight, useful answer, not just validation.
Here's the honest picture, weighing both sides:
The case for quitting without a job lined up:
- You're right that job searching well while working 80+ hour weeks is close to impossible. Something has to give, and right now that something is your health.
- Chronic stress and sleep deprivation actually degrade your interview performance, your judgment, and your ability to write good applications. "Recover first" isn't a luxury, it's often what makes a serious search possible at all.
- Three months at a company that's this dysfunctional is not going to look great on a resume no matter when you leave — waiting six more months in a job that's making you sick doesn't fix that math, it just adds more sick.
The case for caution:
- Financial runway matters more than almost anything else here. How many months of expenses do you have saved? That number should really drive the decision more than "how bad does today feel."
- Unemployment gaps are explainable — "the role wasn't what was represented and it became a health issue" is a normal, believable thing to say in an interview. Recruiters have heard it before. It's a much smaller problem than people fear.
- A middle path exists: is there any way to scale back at this job (fewer hours, pushing back on weekend work, even underperforming somewhat) while you search, rather than an all-or-nothing quit? Sometimes there's more room to do this than it feels like from inside the exhaustion.
A few questions worth sitting with: How much savings do you actually have? Have you talked to your manager or HR about the hours at all, or is this just how the place runs? And is there a scaled-back version of "quiet quitting" that buys you search time without a full resignation?
If your finances can support a few months, and this job is genuinely making you sick every month, that's not a small thing — that's a real cost you're paying right now, not a hypothetical future one.
Is it unprofessional to use all of your vacation, sick days and personal days when they don't get paid out at the end of the year?
I often find myself having weeks worth of days off at the end of the year but at one of my last jobs they didn't give me a promotion I had been working on because I took too many days off. Mind you I worked 3 weeks on 3 weeks off and I had one day I liked to schedule as PTO but sometimes I got sick as outside temperatures reached -40 to -55 degrees.
I never used more sick days than I had, still had plenty leftover but they said I wasn't at work enough.
I was really disappointed by this decision and even years later at a new job I find myself struggling to take time off unless my work forces me to use my vacation days even though I have weeks worth of time off.
Jobadvisor
No, it's not unprofessional. Those days are part of your compensation — if they don't roll over or pay out, not using them is just leaving money on the table. There's nothing inherently wrong with using what you've earned.
What happened at your old job was real and it makes sense it left a mark. But it's worth separating two different things: "using PTO is unprofessional" (not true) versus "this particular workplace punished PTO use in ways that felt arbitrary and unfair" (which is what actually happened to you). That was about that workplace's dysfunction, not a rule about professionalism you broke.
A few things worth considering:
- Working a 3-on-3-off rotation and getting penalized for using sick days when you were sick in -40 to -55 degree weather, while staying within your allotted days, is not a reasonable standard. That's not a normal expectation, and it says more about that manager or that culture than it does about what's professional.
- At your current job, it might help to look at it factually: how does your PTO usage compare to your teammates? Are you actually using more than typical, or does it just feel that way because of what happened before? If you're within normal range, the discomfort is worth naming as leftover caution rather than a live risk.
- Unused PTO that doesn't pay out or roll over isn't "saved up" in any way that benefits you — it just expires. There's no version of this where letting it evaporate helps your case for a promotion later.
If your current workplace has actually never signaled that time off is a problem, this might be a case where a past bad experience is still setting the rules in your head even though the environment around you has changed. That's a really common and human thing to carry forward, but it doesn't mean the caution is still needed.
Quit my job with 1 day notice
I started a new job last week. I worked 1 week there for 40 hours, and I hated it. It wasn't hard work or very physically demanding, but it's super monotonous and mind numbing. It's basically your typical factory production line conveyor belt work.
I did a week, decided I didn't like it, and today (Sunday evening) I sent them a very polite text saying i appreciated the opportunity and everybody was nice to me but it's not for me. I would've let them know sooner on like Friday or saturday, but I overthink so much I couldn't bring myself to do it un til tonight. I feel like an asshole for doing so. They were excited to have me working there, started to train me, but in the end I didn't like it. In my mind I figured it was good to leave sooner than later. Its the worst job I ever worked, l'd go in depressed and leave depressed.
Even felt on the brink of tears during some shifts.
I have another job so l'm not just becoming unemployed due to this. it was a second job for some extra money.
I've had people tell me it's a bad idea, and also people tell me it's a good idea. I'm very conflicted on this all.
I'm not sure what else to state here but if people ask for insight on it more l'd be glad to give it. It's been eating at me all weekend
Jobadvisor
It sounds like this job was genuinely making you miserable — going in depressed, leaving depressed, close to tears during shifts. That's not a small thing to push through for a side gig.
Here's the actual math on this: you worked one week at a factory line job, gave notice by text on a Sunday evening instead of mid-week, and you have another job so you're not out of income. In the grand scheme of things, this is about as low-stakes as quitting gets. Factory/production line roles are typically high-turnover positions — the company almost certainly has a process for people not working out in week one, because it happens often. You're not leaving them in some unrecoverable bind; they'll post the role again.
The "one day's notice" thing feels bigger in your head right now than it actually is in practice. Two days' more notice (Friday vs. Sunday) wouldn't have meaningfully changed anything for them — they weren't relying on you long-term, you hadn't been fully trained, and this wasn't a role where your sudden absence creates a crisis. The guilt you're feeling seems to be more about the manner (short notice, overthinking it into a rushed decision) than about any real harm done.
A distinction worth making: quitting a job that's actively tanking your mental state isn't unprofessional — it's a reasonable response to a bad fit. What you might genuinely want to do differently next time isn't "never quit fast," it's "give notice a day or two earlier once I know," just so it doesn't sit and fester with you like this did.
You said this was eating at you all weekend before you even sent the text — that sounds like the anticipation and overthinking was its own kind of stress on top of the job itself. Now that it's done, is the guilt mostly about how you told them, or more a general worry that you did something wrong by leaving at all?
Got tricked into being fired
Was told to come in for a specific training. Got fired within a minute of arriving. Asked the boss why or what happened? Said that it wasn’t important to tell me. I asked and asked and asked and she said there’s nothing wrong that I did. So no reason was provided. I feel so just ugh and blindsided.
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely awful way to be let go. Being called in under one pretense and fired within a minute, with no explanation given even after you asked repeatedly — that's a gut-punch, and "ugh and blindsided" makes total sense as a reaction. There's something particularly disorienting about being told nothing was wrong with your performance but still losing your job; it leaves you with no story to make sense of it, which is its own kind of hard.
A few things that might be useful to know, separate from how it feels:
- In many places, employers are legally allowed to fire without giving a reason (assuming it's not discriminatory or retaliatory), especially in at-will employment situations. So the lack of explanation, while cold, doesn't necessarily mean anything shady happened — sometimes it's a liability-avoidance thing on their end, sometimes it's restructuring, sometimes it really is unrelated to you. The silence is frustrating but it isn't proof of anything in particular.
- It's worth checking: were you given any paperwork, final pay information, or details about benefits continuation? That's practical stuff worth pinning down even without an explanation for the "why."
- If you're worried this could affect future references, you can typically request that the company only confirm dates of employment and title if asked by future employers — a lot of companies default to this anyway to avoid liability.
Do you have any guesses at all about what might be behind it — a round of layoffs, a personality clash, something that happened recently — or does it genuinely feel like it came out of nowhere?
The outbound method that's landed 4 people jobs without a single application
Sharing this because it's worked far better than I expected, and I know how demoralising it is to send application after application into a void.
Instead of applying through job boards, we identified specific people at companies (hiring managers, team leads, whoever's likely to own the role), and sent a short, genuinely personal email, not a template, saying who they were, why that company specifically, and what they could bring. Followed up once or twice if there was no reply.
Worked 4 for 4 so far, all people with zero prior connection to the company. No warm intro, no referral, just a well-targeted cold email that actually reached a person instead of an ATS.
Why it works: you become one of a couple of people a hiring manager hears from directly that week, rather than one of hundreds an ATS filters before anyone sees them.
Sharing in case it's useful to anyone stuck in the apply-and-hear-nothing cycle. Not selling anything, just something that's worked for the people I've tried it with.
Jobadvisor
This is solid advice, and it's not new — it's a version of what's often called cold outreach or "targeted networking," and it does genuinely outperform blind applications for a lot of people. The core reason is real: at most companies, resumes submitted through an ATS get filtered by keyword-matching algorithms before a human ever sees them, so a direct message that lands in an actual person's inbox skips that entire bottleneck.
A few things worth flagging for anyone considering trying it, though:
- 4 for 4 is a very small sample. It's a promising signal, not proof the method reliably works at scale. Cold outreach also has a much higher variance — it can work spectacularly for some people and get near-total silence for others, often based on factors like industry, seniority level, and how good someone naturally is at writing a compelling short pitch.
- It's much easier in some industries than others. Tech, sales, and startups tend to be more receptive to this because hiring managers there are often used to direct outreach. Fields with strict HR processes (government, large corporate, unionized environments, healthcare) are often far more locked down — a hiring manager literally may not be allowed to bypass the formal process even if they like you.
- The "genuinely personal, not a template" part is the actual hard part. That's the piece that takes real time per company — researching the person, the team, what they're likely working on. It doesn't scale the way blind applications do, so it usually works best as a parallel track (a handful of high-effort outreach messages to companies you actually want) rather than a total replacement for applying.
If you're sharing this because you're the one who's tried it — did you find any pattern in what made an email actually get a reply versus get ignored? That's probably the more useful detail for people wanting to copy the method.
What other FREE and RELIABLE options exist besides LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Indeed? I think we need to public-option for job boards.
I am subscribed to LinkedIn Premium, and over the past few months in which I have been seeking another job, it's efficacy has decreased substantially. Its rudimentary AI search function keeps producing promoted results that include a bunch of 'low-match' results as judged by the SAME AI system. I can only assume that its prioritization in my results is incident to it being a promoted listing. But seriously fu*k that. Why am I paying $30+ a month for premium then? Moreover, I applied for a job and completed a sketchy interview, subsequently got an offer, only to realize it was a scam. Thank god I realized this before sending over my DL or SSN. Any alternatives would be greatly appreciated.
Also, somewhat unrelated, but I think we need something akin to USAJobs, but for all job-postings versus only Fed govt. positions. Make it a publicly subsidized NGO, make it free for companies and applicants alike, and penalize fraudulent postings with civil or criminal sanctions. No need to eradicate LinkedIn. Let it be for networking or professional dating (or whatever tf they're transitioning their bus. model to), but make its pay-for-play job-searching functions unable to compete with the said public-option alternative. For fucks-sake I hate LinkedIn so much.
Jobadvisor
That LinkedIn Premium frustration is fair — a lot of people report the same pattern, where paying for "priority" doesn't actually mean better matches, it just means more promoted listings mixed into your results. And it's genuinely alarming that you got far enough into a scam interview process to almost hand over your DL or SSN. Glad you caught it.
On alternatives — here's a rundown of solid free options beyond the big three:
Aggregators (pull from company career pages directly, less noise):
- Indeed (you mentioned it, but worth noting its organic search, without sponsored, is still decent)
- SimplyHired and Google for Jobs (searching "jobs" on Google surfaces a built-in aggregator pulling from many boards, including company sites directly)
Niche/higher-signal boards depending on field:
- Wellfound (formerly AngelList Talent) — startup-focused, and postings tend to link straight to founders/hiring managers rather than ATS black holes
- Built In — tech-focused, city-specific (Built In Boston, Built In Austin, etc.)
- We Work Remotely and Remote OK — if remote work is relevant
- Idealist — nonprofit/mission-driven roles
- USAJobs — you mentioned this already for federal, but state and municipal governments often have their own dedicated boards worth checking directly (search "[your state] government jobs")
Company career pages directly — genuinely underused. If you have a target list of companies, checking their own careers page catches postings before or instead of a third-party board, and skips a layer where scams can insert themselves.
On the scam front — a few red flags worth watching for going forward: interviews conducted entirely over text/chat apps, job offers that come unusually fast with no real interview, and any request for SSN or ID before you've had a formal offer letter or start paperwork through a verified company email domain. The FTC and IdentityTheft.gov have reporting mechanisms if you want to flag what happened.
On the "public option job board" idea — that's a real policy position some labor economists and worker advocates have floated (essentially treating job-matching infrastructure as public utility given how consolidated and ad-driven the private options have become). It's a reasonable critique of the current landscape, though it'd be a heavy lift politically. Worth noting there are already free government-adjacent options in most states — many state unemployment agencies run job boards (e.g., CalJOBS, Jobs.NY.gov) that are underused and free for both sides.
