Because the job came easy and I liked it initially. With money inflow temporarily secured I focused on dealing with other areas of my life. I didn&#x27;t notice how much I&#x27;m burning out at first. By the time I did, I started having financial difficulties, because my salary started following my work performance, which was decreasing because of the progressing burnout, which... well, I managed to escape that feedback loop after spending over an year in it, but not unscratched. So basically at first I didn&#x27;t leave because I liked the stability, and later I couldn&#x27;t because of a sense of duty.<p>I was originally in a team of 4-5 programmers, but the company slowly got rid of everyone except me. At that point I tried to leverage the situation and institute some changes in the programming languages, web stack and workflow automation; most of them were rejected by the boss on the grounds like &quot;sure, we could switch to something better - like say, Ruby - but Ruby programmers are much more expensive than PHP.&quot;<p>It took me a lot of work and pain to eventually leave. My two biggest mistakes:<p>1) Not noticing when was the best time to go. There was a moment when the old project ended and they wanted to get me into a next one. Building it solo. From scrapped bis of metal. I should have left right there.<p>2) Being too afraid of changing jobs. I know that with my skills I can land a new programming job very quickly, but the process of job interviews scares me.<p>Oh, and 3) Singing that exit-level contract that ended up with me working my ass off in the evenings to finalize some contracted components.