On the whole, my time at Sabre was enjoyable.  The primary reason was the people that I worked with.  In terms of raw intellect, we could hold intelligent conversations together.  In terms of personality, we were all reasonable people.  But even more than just being able to get along, I sensed that they were genuinely good people.  Particularly, they were honest, sometimes even when discussing controversial topics.  In addition, they never withheld from me any advice which would help me, both on the job, as well as in life.  I learned a lot from them, and I really admired and respected their guts, knowing that it would be easier for them to stay quiet on things that may get them into trouble.  With the group of co-workers, or much rather, friends working at the same company, closer to my age, we hung out together outside of work, and really got to know each other.  It was a personal relationship.  Just hanging out together as friends because we wanted to.

If all there was to a job was just the people, then I wouldn't have left.  Unfortunately, there were factors which ultimately led to the inevitable.  There is one word which can be used to classify all of these factors, and that word is policy.  The following are specific policies which I took issue with:

Working remotely, or lack thereof - it was the policy of the group I was with to have one specific day per week where we could work remotely.  Other than that, we were required to be in the office.  In addition, if there was a mandatory event, then we had to be in the office, even if that was on the day that we could work remotely.  Unfortunately, the commute for me takes one hour, one way, or two hours round trip.  In addition, I get my work done regardless of where I am.  Thus, the requirement to be in the office seemed unnecessary to me.  As for the mandatory events, that brings us to the second point.

Meetings - whether mandatory or optional, there have been few meetings where something useful came out as a result.  Usually, meetings have been characterized by generality and vagueness.  They have never added anything more than what the documentation and discussions with someone who actually knows the system would add.  Instead, meetings essentially just ate up people's time, but we were required to attend them.  At one point in time, on average, per day, I was spending more time in meetings than in doing my work, which was programming and testing, which did not require meetings to be done.  But, I was expected to get my work done.  Was I supposed to use my personal time to do my work in the evenings, because my day in the office was consumed by meetings?  Not if I could help it.

Passwords - here are some of the passwords that I needed to remember and change periodically: the global password, passwords to the system, wellness website password, 401k password, and UNIX server passwords.  In addition, the places that prompted for a password included the Jenkins server, ALM, SVN, the Format Finder tool, and the Compliance website.  There were a few associated issues: we shouldn't write the passwords down, because someone could get that piece of paper and have our passwords.  We shouldn't use the same password for multiple systems, because that would be less security.  So each password had to be unique, be remembered, and be changed every 3-12 months, depending on the system.  

Security - because of the corporate firewall, we could not download the software, packages, dependencies, or tools we needed at work, but had to do that at home.  In addition, to gain access to anything, this required a request to be filled out, which would then be fulfilled later.  And then, a few months later, the system would be refreshed, and the whole process would need to be repeated.  Of course, there were ways around this, but that was officially breaking corporate policy, and could land you in hot water.  So, basically the reward for productivity was a place on the figurative bad employee list.

Equipment - the equipment we were given to work with was not that great, and the test environment was the lowest priority in the system.  This meant that errors that were encountered would need to be traced to first determine whether it was due to an actual problem with the functionality, or whether the system was being utilized too much at the time to spare any resources, resulting in an error, or whether it was an inconsistency in the way the system was set up.  Hence, something which would otherwise be straightforward on a reliable system, because vague and full of different possibilities on our system.

Bureaucracy - we had to argue for our hours and search for where we could charge our time to at the end of each week.  One phenomenon that developed was that the projects being approved was not enough to cover all the employees who needed hours.  This was ridiculous, because, as employees, we were being paid regardless of whether we had a project to charge to or not.  For them to not approve a project, meant simply that there were developers going to work and twiddling their thumbs because they had nothing to do.  And finding hours would just be a pain.  Of course, this may have been an indicator that people needed to be let go.  And so I left.

Thus, with the combined force of all these factors, I came to the obvious conclusion that my time could be better spent elsewhere.  Given the dysfunctional nature of the company, I wouldn't trust them with my entire career.  Of course, there are probably lots of other place the same, if not worse, but we'll see what happens next.