July 31 was my last day at this company.
The decision did not come out of nowhere. There had been signs for a long time: management kept changing, and between January and July of 2025 alone, I went through five different direct leaders. Our department had probably become something of a hot potato inside the company. Our job was to shoot videos, and the boss had extremely high expectations for video quality.
To be fair, what we produced was already among the better work in our industry. But the boss was never satisfied. She would take celebrity shoots and Hollywood-level footage as examples and ask us to benchmark against them. The problem was that we had almost none of the things required to do that: not enough people, not enough equipment, no proper locations, and barely any budget.
The first leader stayed with us for more than a year. Strictly speaking, though, “leader” may not be the right word. That person mainly served as a bridge between us and the boss. When it came to actual technical problems, we still had to solve them ourselves. Video production is technical work, and in the entire company, apart from the two of us photographers, no one really understood it.
Then, in just seven months, five leaders came and went. Every newly appointed leader wanted to make a mark. Each one arrived with new rules and new plans, often before they even understood the workflow. The people below were exhausted trying to keep up, but the final results did not improve much. In some cases, the video metrics were even worse than before. The boss, however, never seemed to think the problem might be on her side. Instead, she believed the photographers simply had not delivered the effect she wanted.
This was my first company. The salary was fairly satisfying, too. Back then, because the boss cared so much about visual quality, she had interviewed more than a dozen photographers and found none of them suitable. Later, through a colleague’s introduction, I went in for an interview and joined the company.
In the beginning, the work turned out quite well. For the first two years, I was genuinely happy there.
It is fair to say that when the two of us photographers were there, the company’s video performance reached its peak. 2023 was also the year we received a year-end bonus. After that, under all kinds of strange decisions made by upper management, the company kept declining.
Starting in April this year, many familiar old colleagues were suddenly gone. The faces I saw around the office were increasingly unfamiliar. The sense of belonging I once had began to fade, and I had a feeling that sooner or later, it would be my turn.
The choice of leaders really matters. Unfortunately, in reality, there are too many managers who know how to package themselves but do not have the ability to do the work. And when they happen to meet a boss who cannot tell the difference, the boss may think they have found a rare talent. After going to great lengths to bring such a person into the company, they only realize too late—if they realize it at all—that the person is a tumor. By then, the company may already have been thrown into chaos.
In the end, I still left the company where I had spent more than 1,000 days.