Maybe You Don't Suck. The Job Does.

Ways Out (1/4)

It’s 11 p.m. and you’re updating your CV. Not because you have a plan. Not because a recruiter messaged you. You’re doing it because something is wrong and you don’t have a better word for it yet, so your hands went to the one thing that feels like action. You tweak the dates. You reword a bullet point you’ve reworded four times already. You don’t send it anywhere. You close the laptop and feel slightly worse than before you opened it.

I’ve been there. Most people I respect in this industry have been there. And almost everyone reaches for the same conclusion: I need to leave. Leave the role. Leave the discipline. Leave games entirely and go do something with my hands, or my money, or my sanity. In Poland, we have a saying which can be roughly translated to - “leave everything as it is and go live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere”.

Sometimes that’s right. Usually it’s premature. Before you blow up a career you spent years building, it’s worth figuring out what actually hurts.

Three things people confuse for each other

There are at least three different problems that feel identical from the inside, and they’re all wearing the same costume of “I hate it here.”

The first is burnout. The work drained you. You used to have capacity and now you don’t, and no amount of sleep on the weekend seems to refill the tank.

The second is boredom. You outgrew the job. You can do it in your sleep, nobody’s asking anything new of you, and the flat feeling you’re calling exhaustion is actually under-stimulation.

The third is the wrong building. The work is fine. You’d happily do it for another five years. What’s poisoning you is the room you do it in: the management, the politics, the people, the crunch, the strategy you can see failing in slow motion while everyone nods along.

This piece is about the third one. The other two get their own parts, because the cure for burnout is rest and the cure for boredom is a bigger challenge, and if you misdiagnose one as the other you can waste years. But the wrong building is the one I want to start with, because it’s the most common, the most misread, and the one with the cheapest fix nobody takes.

The slow version of quitting

My version didn’t arrive as a single bad day. It came as erosion.

I worked in publishing. My job, stripped of the title, was reading the market and deciding which games we could sign and sell. And for a stretch of it, I watched us hold a set of terms that the market had quietly walked away from. Revenue splits that looked greedy next to what everyone else was offering. Deal structures built for a year that no longer existed. Developers had options now, good ones, and we were acting like they didn’t.

I said so. Repeatedly. I’d point at a project and explain why a leaner pitch would be easier to market and more likely to convert, why a little flexibility on terms would land us the studio instead of losing it to the publisher down the road who’d already adjusted. I’m not claiming I’m never wrong. But there’s a specific feeling, and if you’ve had it you know it, of watching someone push a rock uphill while paying you to tell them the hill exists.

Here’s the part that does something to you over time. Flag enough problems and you stop being the person with foresight. You become the difficult one. The pessimist. The guy who kills great ideas. I’d build contingency plans for crises that hadn’t happened yet, quietly, and file them in a drawer, and when the thing I’d warned about finally hit the fan I’d open the drawer and be ready. That should make you valuable. Instead it makes you annoying, because being ready for the fire is an implied accusation that someone started it.

The standard response to my warnings was “try it my way, and we’ll figure it out on the way.” Which sounds like asking for some time to think about it, until you notice it’s not. I’d get the runway, the market would do exactly what I said it would, and roughly six months later the conversation would flip: you’re not effective, you’re not closing deals, why aren’t you signing games. The terms I’d been told to work within were the reason. But the terms were never on trial. I was. A couple of years went by, but I still remember the feeling.

That’s the thing about the wrong building. It doesn’t burn you out through overwork. It burns you out by hiring you for your judgment and then treating your judgment as the problem.

Why “same job, new company” is the most underrated move in the industry

I kept trying until the end. I had a recovery plan drafted, a whole sequence of changes I wanted to put in front of leadership. I never got to present it. Management decided it was time to part ways, and that was that.

What surprised me was my own reaction. I expected sadness. What I got was anger, the clean useful kind, because the work was sound and someone had thrown it in the bin unread.

So I did the obvious thing that almost nobody does. I didn’t change careers. I didn’t change discipline. I took the exact same job to a different company and brought the binned strategy with me.

Nine games signed in the first twelve months. Three of them in the first three.

I want to be careful about how I tell that, because the lesson isn’t “I’m great.” The lesson is that I was the same person doing the same job, and the only variable that changed was the building. Same skills, same instincts, same playbook that got me labeled difficult. Different environment, and suddenly the playbook just worked. It wasn’t me. It was never me. The room I’d been standing in had bad cards, and a new room dealt me better ones.

This is why I think the lateral company move is the single most overlooked option in games. We’ve built a culture where leaving your role feels like the brave, decisive thing, and leaving your company quietly for the same title feels like a sideways shuffle that doesn’t count. It’s backwards. The lateral move is cheap. You keep your seniority, your skills, your salary trajectory, the years you’ve banked. And if your actual problem is the people, the management, or the strategy, it fixes the actual problem instead of an imaginary one.

You don’t need a reinvention. You need a different table.

How to tell which problem you’ve got

The hard part is that all three problems produce the same Monday-morning dread, so you can’t diagnose by feel. You have to ask better questions.

On a genuinely good day, when the politics are quiet and nothing’s on fire, do you still enjoy the craft itself? If yes, you’re probably not burned out on the work. Something around the work is the issue.

Is it the job that’s draining you, or the meetings about the job? Those are very different ailments. One says the work is wrong for you. The other says the organization is wrong for the work.

And the cleanest test I know: if you imagine the same role, same tasks, same discipline, but a manager who actually wanted what you wanted and a leadership that listened, does the dread lift? If it does, you don’t have a career problem. You have an address problem. And you can change your address without changing who you are.

The honest catch

I won’t sell you the lateral move as a miracle, because sometimes you change companies and the same rot shows up in the new place wearing a different lanyard.

Two reasons that happens. Sometimes it really is the industry, not the building, and no amount of company-hopping fixes a structural problem that every studio shares. That’s a real possibility and it’s the subject of the last part of this series. And sometimes, uncomfortably, the pattern travels with you, because the common factor in every room you’ve hated is you, and that’s worth sitting with honestly before you blame the next employer.

But here’s what tipped me toward “it was the building, not me.” When I landed somewhere with a boss who got it, the relief wasn’t subtle. I went from being micromanaged to being handed the keys, and the moment I had a free hand I started building things that worked. Procedures, weird little experiments, the kind of stuff you only try when nobody’s standing over your shoulder waiting to call it a bad idea.

One of them: I was chasing a studio in South Korea, and instead of firing off the standard English cold email, I translated the whole thing into Korean and dropped an English version underneath, just in case. I got a reply in Korean. We kept the entire conversation going that way, slower because of the translation, but it happened at all only because of that one decision. The developer told me later he wasn’t comfortable doing business in English, so Korean was the only door that was ever going to open. I’d bet my hand that the same email in English gets no answer. That’s how I knew. The skill didn’t change. The room did.

So before you torch everything

If you’re updating your CV at 11 p.m. with no plan, do one thing first. Don’t ask “should I leave the industry.” Ask “would I be fine doing this exact job somewhere the people weren’t like this.” Be honest about the answer, because the two questions have wildly different price tags, and most people pay the expensive one to solve a problem the cheap one would’ve fixed.

I want to hear from the room on this. Have you ever changed companies, kept the exact same role, and felt the fog lift, or did the same problems follow you to the next place? Because I’ve watched both happen, and I genuinely can’t always predict which one it’ll be.