I had a colleague who was working with me in a previous job (where I’ll call “location A”) who had come out of training a few years before me and was an excellent pathologist- AP/CP and very proficient in her subspecialty. She got a job offer in the northeast, about 800 miles away (location B). It seemed like a good opportunity to her- partnership opportunity and in a location she considered to be at least reasonable, so she took the job, made the move with her family (spouse and several kids) and bought a house there. About 2 months after starting, a major contract was lost and things fell apart. She was out of a job on short notice, and I don’t know all the details, but I know she had to hire an attorney and things had to get pretty ugly before she finally got paid for all the work she’d already done. She was unemployed for a little while then finally worked something out, based on prior connections, with the corporate lab where she’d previously worked (at location A). She relocated again to work at a different corporate lab facility at location C, which was over 1,000 miles from location B and about 500 miles from location A where she started. So this all happened within a span of about a year, and she was back to making peanuts in a third rate corporate lab job and stuck with a house back at location B. After sitting on the market for over a year, the house finally sold at a loss.
I previously described my own, very similar experience. And I personally know of 2 additional people (besides the two of us) who had this happen- one who moved several hundred miles west to get out of a bad job who then had the new job go down the tubes quickly, and another who was with a practice where I interviewed who described an almost identical experience that they’d been through. I believe these scenarios are occurring at a much higher frequency in pathology compared to other specialties, and you can’t just go back to your old job in most cases because they will have already hired someone else to replace you.
