CODE IN TOKYO

Be Careful Right After Switching Jobs

The period right after switching jobs is actually pretty dangerous.

There’s the shiny side of it — “new company!” “new environment!” — but in reality, there’s also this vibe of

“this person’s position is still weak, right?”

floating around, and you can quietly end up getting handed awkward projects.

In my case it wasn’t a job change, but a long time ago, right after I switched departments internally, I got assigned a “difficult customer.”

This time, though, the story is from the other side.

I was on the client side, and the other party was a PM at a contracted vendor.

At first, things were going fine.

We hammered out the requirements, adjusted the deadlines and scope, agreed on the budget, and the mood was basically

“this feels like it’s going to go smoothly.”

But once we got into the implementation phase — since I’m an engineer myself, I checked progress through the actual source code, not just status reports.

And then.

Nothing was actually done.

“Wait, this isn’t moving forward at all, is it?”

When I pressed them, the PM finally came clean.

They had just switched jobs, and apparently their company hadn’t given them any decent engineers to work with.

In other words:

That kind of situation.

Naturally, it blew up.

I reported it up to my manager. Legal got pulled in.

And on top of that, beyond our company, there was the actual end customer. A company literally everyone in the world has heard of.

Apologies and recovery work kicked off, and in the end:

— all of it ended up on me.

And yeah, my mental health took a real hit.

That’s when it hit me.

The period right after switching jobs is genuinely dangerous.

Your position is weak. You don’t have internal relationships yet. Your reputation isn’t established.

So sometimes, “the project nobody wants to touch” gets handed to you.

Not every company is like that, of course.

But if the first thing you get handed is:

— it might be worth quietly going

“oh, maybe this is just how this company operates.”

And one more thing, from the client-side perspective:

“I just switched jobs, so I’ll force a YES even if it’s impossible”

Honestly, please stop doing this. It causes real trouble for everyone around you.

You might avoid getting yelled at short-term, but when it collapses later, everyone ends up miserable.

In the end, with projects, the worst possible outcome is “we couldn’t deliver.”