It's a terrible time to quit your job. These 7 Big Tech workers share why they did it anyway.

• A challenging career market has left many workers clinging to their jobs.
• Some people have chosen to quit anyway.
• Seven former employees of Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft shared what led them to walk away.

Last year, Joslyn Orgill stood at a crossroads. She could keep her six-figure data engineer job at Google — or leave it behind to pursue something that felt more fulfilling.

Orgill and her husband had bought a home in Austin less than two years earlier, a decision that made staying at Google feel like the practical choice. Still, the reasons to leave began to build. She was concerned about job security in tech, felt somewhat invisible at a large company, and had a growing desire to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science — and potentially a career in academia.

Last August, Orgill quit her Google job and started a Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

"Google's an amazing company, but the job just wasn't a great fit for me," she said.

Over the past year, I've interviewed more than a dozen workers like Orgill, many of them from Big Tech companies, who chose to quit their jobs without having another role lined up. While some eventually landed at another large company, others stepped away from the corporate world entirely — joining a smaller business, launching their own venture, pursuing a career pivot, or focusing on personal priorities like parenting.

These individuals have become outliers in an economy where workers are quitting at one of the lowest rates in the past decade — a trend driven by a hiring slowdown across tech and other sectors that's left some clinging to their jobs with few appealing alternatives.

Those who have called it quits told me they did so for a mix of reasons: concerns about job security, shifts in workplace culture, entrepreneurial ambitions, or a desire for more meaningful work. In short, they wanted greater long-term agency over their careers.

Struggles to land promotions and RTO mandates have motivated quitters

Last year, David Chong began thinking about quitting his job at Microsoft. Since joining the company in 2022, he said he had struggled to earn a promotion from his senior software engineer role. To move up the corporate ladder, he said it felt like he needed to develop a "getting promoted" skill — one that required a lot of internal self-promotion.

Chong also said he had become the most senior engineer on his team, which meant there were fewer experienced colleagues to learn from, limiting his growth.

"I was growing frustrated with the slow promotion timeline," said Chong, who is 37 and lives in Toronto.

At the same time, Chong was increasingly interested in building an AI sales agent startup, a company developing an AI phone agent that screens inbound leads, filters out nonbuyers, and routes qualified prospects to sales representatives.

He said this move would be easier because he'd built up savings and had no dependents. In September, he resigned from Microsoft to pursue his venture full-time.

"My plan is to give myself about three years," he said. "If all else fails, I'll go back into the job market."

Frustrations with changing workplace expectations were also among the reasons Nicole Landis Ferragonio and Joe Luchs decided to call it quits. While working together at Amazon, they began talking seriously about building a startup of their own — and both resigned last year to focus on their venture, Datalinx AI.

Ferragonio said one of the reasons she decided to leave was Amazon's five-day return-to-office mandate.

"It raised some questions about how much agency you really have in Big Tech and what would be possible on our own," she said.

Luchs said the potential of AI technologies made it seem like there was an immense opportunity to build something new.

"The FOMO of not being able to get in on this AI opportunity was another driver to make me want to move fast here," he said.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

For some, family shifts reshaped career priorities

The decision to quit and pursue an AI-related startup — and take advantage of the rapid advances in the technology — was a common theme among the quitters I spoke with. However, for some, the decision to resign was more personal than professional.

In October 2024, Kruthika Jayatheertha took six months of maternity leave from her role as a senior user experience researcher at Microsoft. During that time, she decided to take a more extended career break — and resigned.

Jayatheertha said being around her daughter full-time has allowed her to witness many of her "firsts" — crawling, standing, wobbly walks — without hearing about them secondhand. She said that having a present mother during a child's early years is crucial to their development.

"It was clear to me that stepping away from work was the right choice," said Jayatheertha, who lives in India. She added that her husband's income made her break possible and that she plans to return to work around the time her daughter turns 18 months in April.

Personal circumstances also significantly influenced Alyson Isaacs' career decision. After working at a startup that "completely drained" her savings to $200, she joined Meta as a product manager in 2022. But her entrepreneurial itch never left, so she began preparing financially for a return to entrepreneurship — including moving to a less expensive area, going to a basic gym, and cooking more at home.

The question was when to make the leap and leave Meta. Isaacs said the death of her father in 2024 weighed heavily on her decision.

"That really triggered this thought in my brain of, 'Is being a product manager at a Big Tech company what I want to do for the rest of my life?'" she said. "And the answer was resoundingly no."

Last July, she resigned to build a startup, which she described as an "agentic AI solution for personal wellness."

The real resource quitting buys: time

Whether it was raising a child, avoiding a daily commute, or building an AI startup, the common constraint was time. And quitting their jobs was the only way to reclaim it.

When Jason White began thinking about building an AI startup, he knew it would mean leaving his job at Meta. Trying to juggle the business with his role as a full-time machine-learning engineer wouldn't have made sense for several reasons. For one, he already had two demanding roles as a Meta employee and a parent.

His other concern was legal, since he would have had to disclose any outside business to Meta, and there could've been non-compete issues.

Ultimately, he said, it was his passion for the venture — along with the financial cushion he built over the years — that pushed him to make the leap.

"At the end of the day, I want to take the swing," he said.