I think, over the years I have left companies for most of the reasons listed in this article. Not that I’m claiming to have always been a “star” employee.

I left my first job mainly for money. My third wins the honour of collecting most of the reasons in the list, but would gain special commendation for management BS (as the article calls it).

It was no surprise that they assumed that more people would leave for money. Most people incorrectly assumed that I left my last job for a pay raise too. The part that rang most true for me was “too challenged”:

“You cannot ask someone to complete 20 tasks and then give them inferior tools and personnel. … The employee will either leave, OR , become so unmotivated that they lose their star status and become a normal employee and thus under perform.”

I certainly felt my productivity drop as my frustration with the available tools increased. (Pet peeves included monitors that were not able to display one of the main screens of their main application and having to use a Citrix server to use Microsoft Office.) Ironically I did not feel particularly challeneged by the work — “death by boredom” — just my ability to get it done efficiently.

Looking from a job-hunters perspective, the difficulty I have is learning from this. How do you discover what a company is going to be like to work for? Ultimately I think it comes down to the old adage: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. You’re never going to find out this stuff at an interview, you just have to know someone already there.