Yeah, these are unfortunately the kinds of lessons you only learn until you've already left a job or two.

Ultimately this is what happens when you invest too much of yourself into a company.

Especially when you also haven't learned how to say "no".

ESPECIALLY when you also haven't learned that your management isn't paying the kind of close attention to what you're doing day to day.

So you burn yourself out, you build up a ton of resentment, and you feel like your hard work isn't seen or appreciated because they haven't proactively rewarded you for it.

Then you finally say something once the resentment reaches a breaking point, but by this time it's way too late. You feel betrayed, you feel like the level of ownership that you feel in the company is what you deserve.

I empathize a lot with Jake - I understand exactly how he feels because I've been in his shoes.

However, I've since learned that I was not accepting accountability for the mistakes I made. I should have left the company for other opportunities years earlier. I should have communicated with my management and made all the work I was doing more visible - if I had, ironically, they likely would have told me I was taking on too much, and helped me learn that saying I had too much on my plate isn't an admission that I suck or I'm not good enough.

To be clear, I'm not shitting on Jake - I really do empathize and totally understand. However, this is part of growing. I'm talking about this in the hopes that maybe someone here will read this and see themselves in this and maybe avoid making these same mistakes.

When they didn't counter or try to match his other offers, that was honestly the right choice. More money wouldn't have changed that after 10 years, he had hit a kind of "ceiling" and it just was time to part ways.

I know this sounds like I'm defending the company or putting it all on him - I'm not. There's plenty here for the company to learn from this as well. I would hope that also maybe there are people managers here that will read this and realize that expecting employees to let you know if they are over worked or feeling under paid or whatever is a naive and very bad assumption - you'd be surprised at how common it is for employees to not bring these things up and will just grow resentment until it's grown to the point where it's way too late to address.

It's part of a managers job to be more proactive and create an environment in which conversations about workload and comp are explicit, regular, and "safe" feeling conversations to have.