Actually, I left my last job in somewhat awkward circumstances. The day after they upped my pay, they sat down with me and gave the good old cost cutting speech -- "you do good work blah blah hate to do this blah blah might find something elsewhere blah blah can't tell you when, but soon blah blah".

That's the kind of speech you get when someone a few layers above your boss looks at what it costs to hire good people, can't understand what a Technology Consultant does, and decides the world will go on without them.

I liked the place, I liked the people, and I was good at my job. After they decided to get rid of my program, they faced the dilemma of having work that needed to be done without the ability to pay for it. They also couldn't keep me in the same building as the group I worked with, and they weren't allowed to call me anymore, even though I still needed to work with them. They were supposed to call someone else who would call me, and then I would walk to the other building and talk to the person in my group.

To top it off, they knew they wanted to get rid of me and the other people like me at some point in the future, but they didn't know when. So they decided to run a competition between all of us, based on a very narrow set of criteria. Basically, we'd all be competing to see who would turn off the lights for the last time.

I live modestly and had accumulated a good cushion up until that point, so I told my boss that instead of moving to a different building when they had me scheduled to do so, I would simplify things and leave altogether. Then I took a trip halfway across the world, came back, read a few books here and there, and that's it.

Yes, I was lucky in that I had the financial and emotional wherewithal to walk out of that job and get on a plane... but there are enough opportunities for smart people with good skills who are willing to work, that I don't see any reason to put up with the Byzantine policies of that last job.

Indeed, put a couple of things you know like "Perl" and "HTML" and "Linux" on your resume, and you'll have to fight off headhunters.