The 'hidden resignation': employees are checked out
tidymails.com
tidymails.com
However, the opening example in this article seems different:
> A friend of mine recently turned down a job promotion that included a raise of $100,000 a year. He has some financial flexibility to turn down the offer, since he’s already a mid-level executive at a Fortune 1000 company and makes about $300,000 annually. He said he determined “it just wasn’t worth it” since the promotion called for more travel and more time away from family.
That’s reasonable. You don’t have to travel and be away from your family to make good contributions to a company. You don’t have to chase every single raise.
The bigger problem would be this example exec’s commitment to their side company. An executive who hangs on to their paycheck, benefits, and prestigious position while using their time to build their own company on the side is not good for a company. There is no way this person is maintaining a mid-level executive job at a big company, dedicating time to their family, and also building their own company on the side.
I'd probably still take it, but I'll admit I'm a bit more money motivated than the average person.
if someone has a relationship where there are not shared goals of more money and change/excitement?
Well, if you think you’d end up ahead on the money side at the end of that fallout, you’d be fooling yourself.
Your argument about an extra 50k could be applied to literally any raise.
When you already have $300k/yr, your life doesn't change by getting an additional $50k/yr. When you only have $50k/yr, your life completely changes when you get an additional $50k/yr.
People who are in the $300k/yr. position have the luxury of choosing other things besides making more money, which is what this person we're talking about was able to do.
To put it another way, how much longer will he live, if his stress levels are reduced substantially by opting to not take that new job?
50k post tax is enough for someone currently maxing out their retirement (including mega backdoor 401k) to nearly double their retirement investment. This could cut time to retire in half. Or it’s enough to comfortably put their kids through college in a few years. Or easily pay for private school for your kids. Or it’s enough to pay for vacations that were previously out of reach. Or enough to massively upgrade houses (assuming you want to succumb to lifestyle inflation). An extra 50k post-tax is absolutely a lot of money to someone currently bringing home about 210k post tax.
50k post tax is not enough for someone currently maxing out their "retirement" to "nearly double their retirement investment, that isn't correct.
The point is, after a certain absolute dollar number, additional dollars are incrementally less valuable, which makes questions like, "What does this do to my happiness?" a lot more relevant.
Even if it allows you to retire meaningfully earlier, so what? Dying at 65 because you were stressed is definitely not worth it.
Do you think you’re not on a forum filled with high income earners who also have personal experience with this?
It’s telling that you both assert that you would accept the job for the money and that the money would have almost no impact. Either you don’t actually believe what you say or you’re admitting that you’re not rational.
> 50k post tax is not enough for someone currently maxing out their "retirement" to "nearly double their retirement investment, that isn't correct.
Define maxing out, then. Max 401k plus mega backdoor is about 65k, I believe. Another 50k would indeed be nearly double. (65k is also what this person would actually take home from a 100k raise, assuming filing single, depending on state income tax of course.)
> The point is, after a certain absolute dollar number, additional dollars are incrementally less valuable
No one has said otherwise. Literally every dollar has declining utility so this doesn’t provide the support for your argument that you imagine. There’s no “dollar value cliff” at 300k.
> Even if it allows you to retire meaningfully earlier, so what? Dying at 65 because you were stressed is definitely not worth it.
You’ve gone from “it won’t affect retirement” to “money can’t buy happiness” to “gonna die from the stress”. This all seems really fake given that not only have you wildly diverged from your original claim that it won’t allow one to retire earlier, but also because you said you would accept the promotion.
I’m certainly not saying anyone should take the 100k raise and the responsibility that comes with it if they don’t need/want the money or they do not want the job change it brings. I’m just saying 100k raise is a lot of money for someone currently making 300k. For a lot of people at this level, another 100k would mean their spouse could stop working.
And I don't really want to argue with you about this. I'm referencing the "marginal utility of money" concept, and I think it applies here, and you don't. I'm okay with that! I think as long as we both agree that it's a thing, even if we disagree on where that line is, I'll be satisfied.
Take care and enjoy the weekend.
Nothing absurd about it. If you're making 300K, going up to 400K doesn't move the needle much. At that level you're already covering all your bills, paying for those vacations and investments and private school.
50K extra in pocket is nice, but nowhere enough at that level to change your life in an observable way. It's nowhere enough to move you into FU Money territory and since you were already covering all the basics, it doesn't move change much on that front either.
If I had kids (and I do), there's no way I would accept a 100K pre-tax raise if the tradeoff is having to spend a lot more time on the road away from home (as the example at the top of this thread stated).
Sure. If you’re covering everything you need then another 50k/year probably lets you retire way earlier.
Or $50k/year post tax pays for about a million in housing. It would pay for an au pair if you have a small child. It’s enough to have a partner earning a very good salary to stop working and stay home.
> If I had kids (and I do), there's no way I would accept a 100K pre-tax raise if the tradeoff is having to spend a lot more time on the road away from home (as the example at the top of this thread stated).
Well yeah, I didn’t say that it’s a good trade off for you (or anyone else in particular). I said it’s a lot of money.
The hypothetical person in your scenario is still going to retire, just a few years later. They’ll still send their kids to college, just with a few more loans (or maybe not because having more savings results in less financial aid). They’ll still go on vacations, just slightly less nice one. Or they’ll go on the nicer vacation, just less often. Etc etc etc.
What it does not do is change your life qualitatively. You’re not going to be routinely flying on private jets or hiring a butler. Your ability to affect politics is still mainly limited to the ballot box.
You’re still upper middle class. Just half a step ahead of the Joneses.
Someone who starts getting paid an extra $100k might also choose to have their spouse quit their job. An extra $100k is likely enough to offset a partner’s income (and a relatively high one at that). This is also a life changing event.
> What it does not do is change your life qualitatively. You’re not going to be routinely flying on private jets or hiring a butler. Your ability to affect politics is still mainly limited to the ballot box.
This is a very false dichotomy. There is a whole range of quality of life changes that happen before “private jet and election fraud” money. Anything over “not starving and can afford a place to live” is “incremental”.
Which is about 50%
That raise is on top of their salary so the additional dollars are taxed at the highest rate. For taht example executive, federal tax alone on the additional dollars is 35% most likely (35% for sure if single, probably 35% if married with a working spouse earning less). Then add state tax which here would likely be 10.5% and then add medicare tax at 2.35% and there may also be unemployment insurance tax and perhaps other assorted smaller deductions.
So yes, for additional dollars from a raise a good rule of thumb is that only 50% can reach you.
Particularly, because the employer is going to expect >$100k in value from the employee to make up for the raise and the employee barely receives half.
The middle class is being destroyed through taxes and inflation, while wealthy asset holders see their assets outpace inflation while taxed at much lower rates.
you have to be specific, whose time are you referring to? It matters. Are you assuming the executive is using company time to work on his side gig? If so, that's quite the claim. Or are you suggesting that it's not good that he's thinking about his side-gig in the shower instead of using those brain cycles towards his current employer? If that's the case then I think you're out of touch on the duty he has towards his employer.
That said, personal time for hobbies, even if "business-like" on some dimensions (eg. building an app, selling stuff on Etsy, etc) are probably fine as long as it is recharging your batteries and does not have any real or perceived conflict of interest with your primary company.
Yeah ... no, not even.
This started with talking about mid level managers. I’m not sure how it got upgraded to Fortune 500 CEO ( we can’t all be Bezos you know).
If you own the company and want to dedicate your entire life to it, that's one thing. When you only work for a company, even if you are getting stock, the company should not expect you to dedicate your life to it in the same way as the people who actually own the company and get to make the decision about how your stock options work (for example).
Even if everyday clerical kinds of jobs, companies have gotten the idea that workers are beholden to them and often have soul-crushing policies and expectations. I'm glad workers are finally saying "Enough!", giving them the finger, and finder better jobs rather than putting up with companies having unreasonable demands on their workforce.
For example I think I’d be quite frustrated being a senior exec at twitter seeing the CEO running another company, being on multiple boards, doing advising, etc (since in that case Dorsey probably wasn’t even putting in 30hr a week). Even as a junior employee, it sets a bad tone that the company is in coast mode, the CEO doesn’t really care because he’s working on the new shiny, etc.
So I redesigned my job to do as little as possible and focus most of my effort on side contracting.
I have zero friends at work. I joined a year ago and feel no connection. I never met anyone in person at my role. Haven’t been into an office.
I feel like an unwelcome outcast and largely unwanted and no one understands my background, talent or skillset. Basically: I am an intern despite my skills.
There is something extremely dehumanizing about remote work. Because corporations can do this to you and no one is the wiser. There is no mechanism to gain any social status it feels like. People who had insider access before I got here will always have advantages over me. I’m not going to have opportunities to stand out or advance my career.
Furthermore: The entrenched folks actively shut down anything that isn’t in their interests.
It feels like 100% of the exciting projects are automatically assigned to people with inside access.
I was removed from all the key meetings and email threads by people threatened by me trying to talk about ways to improve products and systems. Now I’m in an information black hole of exile.
So yeah, I’m doing contracts on the side and coasting. This was the same as my last job.
Remote work has completely deteriorated white collar work for me.
Your response sounds slightly like the one professor in my department who screamed out pirating your overpriced books is stealing while every other professor in the dept. told us to pirate our books or simply handed out flash drives with the pirated books on them.
From the employer side there are sometimes considerations why to keep someone around. Could be morale, regulations, keeping resources for something legacy or something in the future, etc.
If a company pays me $200 an hour to write children's stories and then at the end of the day burns all the stories in front of me it isn't me who is stealing from the company, nor is it necessary that I write high quality stories for them.
As long as I don't talk about Bruno I'll be fine.
Is that a reference to something known?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvWRMAU6V-c
Haven't seen the actual movie though, so don't know exactly what the deal is with Bruno.
An individual employee can rarely abuse a large corporation more than the corporation can abuse the employee.
If OP is in this situation, then the corporation is fine with what's happening, presumably for other reasons (could be even to keep him from a competitor's payroll).
As a (somewhat lowly) individual contributor the worst case scenario of an individual abusing a large enterprise was probably Jérome Kerviel ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel ) and I personally kind of believe in a conspiracy where he wasn't actually working alone, considering the amount of things he managed to do, so he was most likely a scapegoat. And even that worse case scenario lost Société Générale "only" €4.9 billion, for a company with a yearly revenue of €24 billion.
Meanwhile the worst case scenario for abuse the other way... is death. There are many, many documented cases of suicide due to overwork and similar abuses. Foxconn was literally installing nets around their office buildings to catch people jumping from the windows.
Can you elaborate on this?
Without discounting the frustration of GP, it doesn't exactly seem likely that he's the only one who cares in his entire org..
If the contracting is actually keeping your skills sharp, you'll probably do better 100% time.
I contracted for 5 years and what I found was that I was hired for my skills, but not paid to grow those skills substantially. Given that I focus on multi-year hardware/software projects, I was definitely falling behind true leading edge with each project.
In silicon valley, every day you are working on something that doesn't make sense is two days your career falls behind vs. someone who is on a true leading project.
There's a class of HN comments that combine "I'm being mistreated" with "not the first time it's happened to me."
If separate groups of people have the same reaction, it's worth considering common factors, notably the commenters themselves. (Other valid but less likely options include systemic bias or very bad luck.)
That said, I empathize with the described lack of connection in remote work. Wishing the commenter a turn of good luck soon.
Even if you're making $300k. After taxes, your disposable income is still 5 - 6 years away from purchasing a home in cash in many cities.
We're using debt to fuel the economy, which is dangerous.
It's quite sad, because we've known how dangerous this practice is for thousands of years. It's not for no reason that usury is prohibited in the three major religions.
Things that used to take 2-3 hours to plan started taking 6 weeks as management insisted on being deeply involved. Instead of infrequent project check-ins, 18 hours a week was blocked off to management updates. Shortly before I put in my 2 weeks I had project update meeting where my status was something like Accomplishments: held status update meetings on 11/1, 11/3, 11/8, 11/12, 11/15, and 11/18.
That job broke me and I just stopped caring. The new one is much better.
When you make $300k, disrupting your life for $100k isn’t really compelling. It’s honestly not enough money to compensate for your standard of living and family life. And frankly, the divorce will cost more.
It's entirely possible that new job would have been an hourly wage cut.
Sometimes slumming it more a mere $300k in the home office gives you a tactical advantage.
It’s different if you’re a grunt at a bank who gets some crazy gig at a big cloud company to lock in the “customer” or deny your skills to competitors — as long as you don’t think you’re actually worth that.
You could buy a somewhat nicer car. But now cars all look the same anyway, and are a liability if you live in the city.
You could take a somewhat more elaborate vacation during the 2% of the year you're not chained to your desk at work. But now covid... So if you're just going to sit at home anyway...
You could afford fancier bespoke hand made full business suit and tie, I assure you much more comfy than off the rack if professionally tailored especially after the first ten hours at work. But now uniforms are a sign of lower socioeconomic class not higher so once you can afford your jeans and tee shirt there's one small step up in fit and comfort with designer tee shirts and designer jeans, but the days of the $5000 business suit are over except for a handful of legacy companies. Put on your comfy covid pajamas and VPN in from your bedroom, do all your work in four hours and pretend to be busy the rest of the time, or play video games on the other screen while pretending to pay close attention to meaningless zoom meetings.
You could give more to your family back when people balanced family and career. But now you're not allowed family at those kind of levels, so it would just be more alimony/child support payments or you're childfree or you're lonely and being rich and lonely isn't any better than being poor and lonely.
You could buy fancier furniture to impress people you don't care about when you host parties. But now covid... so why bother earning $14000+ to pay for the $7000 couch if nobody will be impressed by seeing it?
You could buy somewhat fancier entertainment, the front row seats or the season tickets. But now covid, and generationally everything is just streamed over the internet anyway.
You could pay more for better places to hang out and possibly meet a date, singles night at the bar and all the baby boomer stuff that's pretty much gone now, at least compared to how it was when I was a kid. Online dating eliminated that, and covid pounded nails in that coffin.
I think in 1980 going from $300K to $400K would have had a much larger impact than in 2022 and not just due to inflation.
Plus houses are up 20-30%. And double in the last 5 years so you can’t really buy that either as no way salaries kept up.
Inflation is real bro, just doesn’t seem that way because people on the low end are getting poorer and poorer every day
Back in my boomer parents era, my grandpa had to get a promotion for my boomer dad to afford expensive hobbies like photography or listening to 60s rock.
For my kids, hobbies are just clicking a free app on their school issued "free" tablet. Its hard for kids today to understand hobbies and lifestyle used to be very expensive and your participation depended on how much money your parents made.
It used be a sociological class thing, like on resumes and college applications being into home photography meant you were upper middle class for jobs and schools whom wanted to filter on that class membership. Now those hobbies mean a kid once tapped an icon on his phone, and has about the same hiring/application significance.
I would guess there are still mainstream-ish hobbies today that are still expensive, but I'm trying to think of what they are, if you cross off stuff cancelled by covid. I guess fandom of expensive streamed services, fandom for HBO netflix ESPN disney+ cbs streaming service shows is one of the few remaining ways to show off wealth in public. Fandom is kinda tacky anyway.
Soccer is particularly bad. The big high school coaches basically have a side hustle running these club/travel teams as a funnel. Those soccer teams can be easily $10k, plus travel expenses of the team goes a a tournament. You’re basically forced to payoff a public employee to make it, which parents think is a big deal for college admissions.
My kid plays baseball and his nephews play soccer. I’m sure other sports are similar.
It's still a class thing, because poorer school districts don't have the resources to give always kids free tablets or laptops that are sufficient for actually getting things done, which became a big deal during the pandemic because of the shift towards remote learning. Access to the internet has certainly increased, but those connections to the internet can be poor and metered, like cell connections.
Music as a hobby is still expensive, as lessons and instruments are expensive. Team sports are still expensive, requiring that parents can afford uniforms, fees and the free time to get their kids to practice and games regularly. Most tech related hobbies are expensive, as well.
Back where I grew up in a farm-town turned exurb, people are worried about gas prices because they need to drive 30 miles to do anything.
There are people that think mistreating others (employee, customer, coworkers) is ok because they are paying for it. There are also people that think suffering is neccesary and anything else is delusional laziness. That's the problem. Given enough peace and prosperity the amount of suffering and labor should go down along with crime, disease and social instability. Provided there is a check on unlimited greed which in the US there isn't.
I think taxes can solve this quite a bit. I am not someone who thinks "there shouldn't be any billionaires" or support taking from the rich and giving to the needy (justifying theft). My proposition is: tax returns and welfare subsidies should be covered by the employer not the government. Everyone should have the same percent of gross wages collected for tax, when they file either they owe the government money or their employer should issue a refund.
This will work well if you also consider another proposition: everyone should have housing in the richest country on the planet. Every county should set a poverty line relative to cost of living, 30% of that is expected to go to housing. Landlords must pay a community housing tax that is 60% if the extra they charge above the 30% of poverty line.
If you make 50k, poverty line is 100k, and you pay 40k/ye in rent, your landlord has to pay 6K tax that will go to building and maintaining free housing in that same county.
Your proposition about a 60% tax just wouldn't work at all - with that kind of a tax, landlords wouldn't be able to pay for maintenance. I know it's popular in some circles to think landlords are just making infinite profit and greedily keeping it away from the impoverished, but there are substantial costs to owning property, and you can't just make up taxes that completely ignore financial reality.
Checked out foes not mean going put of way to show you don't care. It means not caring and doing the minimum to get by when no one is looking.
If this pandemic is ever over it's going to be interesting to watch the pendulum swing back and forth.
That makes absolute sense. Many people would no sell even more of their time if they cannot enjoy other aspects of their lives. But if it's really the kind of position that requires you to give your family time away for the company, they'll likely have to pay even more to fill that position.
That's why I don't find surprising at all that executive pay is so much higher than the average employee's. At some level it's hard to justify the extra cash in exchange for your life away. Lots of qualified people would not take that deal
Ppl are really tired and have enough assets to sometimes take few years breaks.
Removing highly skilled workforce from equation just “because they feel like it” was never taken into consideration by any employer..
Next one was a cheap tech startup that worked by recruiting people for peanuts, including hiring cab drivers doing night courses in IT, and placing them in telcos looking for business analysts for multiples of what they were actually getting paid. Hated the cheapness, left after a few months.
Then it was a FAANG company, which looked after it's people really well, but the frickin politics really grind you down, left there after a few years after my team got shuffled around on a whim from some exec.
Last role was a utility company, and it was a total mess internally. Vested interests, complete underfunding of the data processing systems, and major consulting firms scamming them for millions a year to produce meaningless reports. Impossible to make an impact, or even bring things up to code... For example, there was zero version control on software, zero! Things were tested on production. I stayed there far too long, should have left the first day, like a few hires actually did.
Here we are in 2022 and ...
I bet in the 2050s we'll be rediscovering strong typing and lisp again, and pretending its all new again.
I donno if JCL and RPG and COBOL will come back; probably will eventually. If they do come back I hope its after my time.
I want equity. I want to know exactly where the business is going without worrying about seemingly random arbitrary pivots and wasted effort. If we aren't marching to market dominance I want to go on paid time off until they get their shit together.
Instead, I'm phoning it in and working on my shit.
I respect companies that respect my time. My time off is my time off. When I'm well rested I perform better.
I'm tired of drinking from corporate troughs.
People can see through the propaganda and become cynical. This is not only inside companies but also through entire society. I think trump's success and things like Qanon are a result of this.
Biggest issue is corporate expects us to produce the same Power BI type of output with deep slide decks for corporate level meetings with no extra resources. Our BU just got an award for best financial performance within the corporation yet no one ever asked how - we've been busting butt for long time, making and selling product instead of making higher-ups feel important while our CEO goes on MSNBC shows spouting off about how the DI crap is making the company so much better. Lots of created make-work.
I'm no right-wing nut. My co-workers could be the UN - but we don't care about that; we just do our jobs - we're good at it and making things cheaper and easier.
So glad I retire in less than 2 years. I checked quite a while ago. Been building my side hustle so once I go I'll be good. I do feel for those who I'll leave behind - it'll only get worse and less work will get done. M hope is they persevere.
I don't see how a reduced job supply would lead to higher salaries.
People are checking because they can - no-one is looking.
But they won't.
An executive being checked is a problem as much as any other employee. However, executives are the ones who seem culpable of not updating policies of the company.