Have you ever reached a point at your job when you just know it's time to move on?
When do you move to the point that you're willing to let go of the demons you know for the ones you don't know?
What was your deciding factor final straw so to speak when you finally faced the decision to find a new job?
I had one job where I work up every morning wishing I was sick enough to go to the hospital so I wouldn't have to go to work.
At another job, I was working so many hours I was having trouble actually driving home at 2 or 3 am when I went home. Only job I ever quit without having another job, just physically couldn't take one more day and the final straw was when they asked me to do something unethical and illegal. Thanks to my exhaustion, I had a car accident in the parking lot the day I quit.
Other signs it's time to move on:
When you're not enjoying (most of) the work.
Only if you're very lucky will you have job that 100% enjoyable 100% of the time, but if you find that most of the job isn't enjoyable any more then you're not doing yourself or your employer any favours by sticking around.
When you would rather spend all day on StackExchange (or any other website) than actually do work.
The final straw was when I was at the hospital with my newborn baby, who was born early and needed to be on oxygen. I was using my own vacation days to be there, I did not get time off for this sort of thing. Then I was getting called and pressured to return back to work early before using up all my vacation days while my child was still in hospital. That was the last of many straws.
It depends in what you consider a successful career. Some people see having lots of money a success in itself. Others see developing useful products as major achievements in their life.
You should first know exactly what is the things that please you most (money, building products, having lots of good friends...)
Then, try to see if your current position could lead, with time and effort, to a better situation from your point of view and your values. If not, then move on.
I have a mathematical formula that I apply in my head on about a monthly basis. I call it the pay-to-crap ratio It works thusly: does the amount of pay I receive seem to offset the amount of crap I have deal with, crap being defined as the things outside of my core job responsibilities of software architecture and development (i.e. corporate mandates, re-organizations, bungee bosses, seagull management, budget reductions, benefits changes, etc.). If I feel that the crap quantity is overpowering my pay quantity, I'll talk to my boss about increasing my pay and/or reducing the crap. If neither of those are possible: sayonara, job.
The last full time job I left was because I became 'too valuable' to maintaining our very successful - and award winning, I might add - system that they would not assign me to the task of designing a new system. At that point I realized they werent interested in rewarding success, and didnt appreciate the notion of domain knowledge, so I jumped ship, leaving an ever more and more depressing corporate environment for a very fun dot-com.
At one job, I had a recurring dream that my model soldiers were going to show up and rescue me, despite their size and the fact that they were lifeless metal.
At another job, I got into trouble for following standard promotion procedure from development to test to production, as somebody else had, with management approval, hacked the production system directly without making sure to keep a backup.
Both were good signs that I needed to get out of there.
