Dear Miss Manager:

I think I’m about to wreck my career one way or another. I recently took a job that I shouldn’t have. I had decided it was time for me to move on, I looked through the ads, found something that sounded like a step up and also was different enough from what I had been doing to be interesting. But I hate everything about it. I hate the work, I hate my boss, I hate the people in the department, I hate the city. How long do I have to stick this out? Do I leave right away and try to explain this as a minor glitch, or do I stick it out for a couple of years so that I don’t appear to be job hopping too much?

Sincerely,
Miserable in the Midwest

Dear Miserable:

Miss Manager needs to know if your career is your life. For some people it is, and if that is the case with you, stick it out for two years. Try to learn as much as you can in this bad situation; throw yourself into some aspect of your work that will result in your undoubted improvement; keep a diary of how you deal with unpleasant colleagues and difficult situations and then parley all of that into a move up the ladder. If you are in the right career for you, but you put more value on other parts of your life, if living in a place that you enjoy is important, if you cannot survive without a pleasant work environment, and if your misery at work will ruin other, more important, areas of your life (especially your domestic situation), then cut your losses, find a sympathetic person who will believe that you made a mistake you would like to get out of, and take another job. If this is a career you don’t want to stay in, or don’t have strong attachments to, now is the [Continued...]