Take this job and shove it?

A colleague of mine found a new job in Thailand recently. For whatever reason, he didn't feel he could go quietly into the night, and sent out a rather blunt (that's an understatement) kiss-off to our company this past weekend. It was a rather rambling e-mail, infused with a number of different grievances, some more legitimate than others in my opinion, and also featuring more than its share of name calling. While I think the letter could have been more carefully considered than it clearly was, it did get me thinking.

In a nutshell, my now ex-colleague feels screwed and lied to by our company, and convinced that he could do a lot better elsewhere. I feel for him, and certainly I know everyone hates the organization s/he works for at least part of the time. But while not passing judgment on him (I can vouch for his experience being a less than stellar one, at least), I found myself thinking repeatedly that it just wasn't that bad. So now I wonder: am I lucky, or just not seeing the big picture?

For my part, I'm pretty happy with the way things have gone thus far. Certainly I recognize that the very long workdays and the sometimes fly-by-night nature of even well established businesses in Asia are not for everybody. But I like being busy, and I've been in and out of the workforce long enough to know that if you wait for an employer who is always above board, you'd better have a lot of money saved up! I know that I am lucky in some ways: ours is a very small branch and everyone gets along quite well, which is often not the case at other branches I am familiar with. There are some things I genuinely don't like about the company, notably its vacation policy; but I've seen much, much worse. Bottom line, my experience on balance has been better than what I expected when I took the job, which is saying something because I was very optimistic about it to begin with.

The catch, I suppose, is that I came here from a place where the management had no respect at all for the employees. In my old line of work, people got screwed all the time under blatantly illegal circumstances, and I myself was one of the victims a couple of years ago. So my high opinion of my current job is at least partially a reflection that the bar was set quite low when it came to job satisfaction. I suspect the same was not true for my newest ex-colleague, and I also think he probably landed in a much worse situation here in Taiwan than I did. Sometimes it is nothing more than a case of good old fashioned rotten luck, such as getting placed with a manager or colleague who hates you for no reason you can control. It's happened to me a couple of times, and it was a very traumatic experience indeed.

What bugs me, though, is that even if my experience was isolated in a way, the fact that it was allowed to happen was a strong indication that there were serious problems with the management of the organization in question, even if not all employees suffered as a result. Could the same be the case here and I just haven't noticed it yet? In a word, yes. It could be, though it isn't necessarily. Maybe my friend was just unlucky or maybe it was his own attitude that did him in, but it could also be that he is the dying canary whom the rest of us should heed for our own safety.

For now, though, I don't see any big warning signs in my own patch. Teaching isn't my natural calling by any means, but it is very fulfilling for me. There's nothing better than the look in a kid's eyes the first time s/he understands something you've been trying to teach. As for the salary, it's not bad at all relative to the cost of living here and I am coming out a ways ahead of where I was financially back in DC. I get along famously with all my fellow-teachers. Perhaps best of all, the fact that none of us plans to stay long term anyhow keeps us all fairly relaxed about job security. If things did turn nasty tomorrow, it wouldn't be the first time I had failed to notice the warning signs, which is a bit scary. But my failing to notice them could just as easily be because they genuinely aren't there in my case.

I'd be interested in hearing from other teachers on this, especially those of you who also saw The Letter. Should we all be jumping ship in his wake, or do you think his experience was just an unfortunate aberration? For my part, I'm planning to stay put for now. I just don't think the situation is all that bad or that it's going to get that way.