What are some good reasons to quit your job as Lead Developer at startup.

As in good sugar coated reasons or real ones?
"Horrible management" is frequently the top contender for why people actually quit.

@Henrik That is also the reason i'm going to quit :). But I also feel kind of bad because without me I think the startup will not survive if they don't find an replament in a short period.

@dhux if they don't succeed it's not because of you but because of their bad management, you will do no good in the long term for staying. Good startups are the ones that can figure out what's wrong and change it quickly. If they can't adapt to you leaving and if they can't figure out they have been doing something wrong then it would be no wonder they'll fail.

Threaten to quit if they don't hire new management and put the decision on them. If they believe they'll survive without you, you can leave with less guilt (even if you don't believe it).

@dhux If you want them to succeed you need to figure out a way to tell them the truth, especially if you think they might actually care.

In my case I resigned a month ago from a place which also has horrible management. They don't care since I have been quite the critical voice in the office about our issues, which obviously hasn't helped at all. So they chose to assume I am quitting solely for the reason that I got offered a position at a place I always wanted to work for. So I let them think that.

If you truly want to quit why not be honest about it just avoid profanity and insults. What's the worst that can happen, they will fire you?

What a great community!!! I told the PM that I will quit if it keeps going like this. And 1 hour later I got a message from the CEO saying that i'm very important to the company blablabla and he will make sure that it gets improve.

@dhux Awesome :)

I did exactly this last year. I was undervalued (had low equity relatively) and the CEO kept changing the mission statement of the company when investors weren't interested. Fair enough, but it got to the point where we became a subscription based service instead of single use, provided way less value to customers, etc. so I left.

Another big red flag was a failure to project numbers within reason. "There are over 18,000 students with demographic X, that's $1mil in profit in our first year man!!" Okay but we won't get all of those students, we won't even get 20% in the first year, slow down...