Have you ever considered a big career change?

That can be somewhat intimidating if you’ve already been working your way up in a certain career field for awhile.

Sometimes all you need to step out of your comfort zone is a push in the right direction, and without knowing it, that’s exactly what the boss in this story did for one of his employees.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Boss says I should quit because I like spending time on ‘Hobbies’ so I did.

I was working for a startup engineering firm working as a Piping Design engineer.

But since it was a start up firm, we didn’t have a lot of man power and the ones we had weren’t as qualified either.

I was one of the very few qualified enough to handle a team of my own.

The boss trusted me with almost everything.

He did a lot of things that technically weren’t part of his job.

I was like the second in command after the boss only because I was managing a lot of things on the side as a voluntary basis.

Things like paycheck balancing, client meetings, quality assurance, documentation, and other stuff which he should had hired someone else to do.

I was good at it and he took full advantage of it by giving me things to do that never was under my job description.

The boss wanted to update the website.

One day he had this bright idea that we should revamp our website to attract more clients.

And he gave this project to his nephew who just graduated from college as a developer of sorts.

After a week or so the nephew came up with the first draft of the website and the boss was fairly disappointed as it didn’t look anywhere near to what he expected.

He then called me in and asked me if I knew anything about website design.

He spent a lot of time working on the website design.

At that time I was very much interested on UI/UX and was doing an online course to learn about it more.

So I told him that I’ll see what I can do.

I spent the next week full making a proper information architecture, wireframes and color guidelines that the nephew could pick up and build the website from scratch.

In the end the website looked futuristic and the boss was pretty happy.

He spent so much time working on the website that he neglected his actual job.

But during the week my other ‘responsibilities’ were put in a backlog and it just kept piling on.

I knew I would be able to cover it once am done with the website and didn’t pay too much attention to it.

The next week my boss caught up with backlog and called me in to his cabin.

He started yelling at me for all the ‘responsibilities’ that I didn’t attend to.

He explained the situation.

I calmly told him that I was working on the website and its not a big deal.

Told him that I would clear it out as soon as possible.

But he wasn’t happy.

He asked me why I spent so much time doing something that isn’t even my responsibility.

I told him that I was learning about UI/UX and was pretty much interested to learn more.

(I obviously never thought about perusing it as a career because frankly I was a mechanical engineer by qualification and didn’t think jumping to IT would be easy)

This reasoning wasn’t good enough for the boss.

The boss snapped and told me that I should quit and persue my ‘hobby’ as a living.

He said that only then I will understand how lucky I am to have a job that pays.

I kind of got offended because

1. He doesn’t even pay me the worth of things i do for the company

And 2. He knew I could cover and yet took this as a opportunity to ‘discipline’ me.

He decided to quit.

I stepped out of this cabin, went to my desk and put in my resignation and went home.

He called me a couple of times asked me to revoke my resignation and then made other people from the organization call me to convince me to come back.

I wasn’t having it at all.

It’s been 2 years now, I decided to pursue UI/UX as a career now and am working as a product designer in one of the biggest organizations in the country with a pay that’s almost 300% more than what I was getting as a mechanical engineer.

It’s great that he was able to discover what he really loved and turn that into a career.

It’s too bad his boss didn’t appreciate his hard work though.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

The boss messed up by challenging him to quit.

Exactly! What was the boss thinking?

Seriously, he should’ve sent the boss a thank you letter.

Another person shares a similar story.

Sometimes a hobby is the best career.

Go forth and make it so.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.