Even your boss wants to quit
axios.com
axios.com
No one was even slightly put off by my resume or career direction. I'm not sure what "no one would hire me" means, precisely, but I didn't have an easy time – it took many months and near 100 applications to find the right spot.
What I've realized is the corporate ladder is a fiction that serves to keep people working harder and harder without significant pay bumps. It is an artificial status game that has real ramifications; however, since it is a zero-sum game, it ends up bringing out the worst in everyone.
What are your goals now around your career?
Any chance you had terrible, even substandard leadership where you were Director (assuming that's where you had the profound burnout) and you would absolutely have loved it otherwise?
True!
Why is that, though?
Like - do the great leaders retire quick?
Or is it that we are just an unlucky bunch who get exposed to bad leadership?
The worst part of the two gigs I had was the director who was in the position above me? Not moving. In both companies. I spent almost six years between two companies trying to find a way out of middle management. I finally realized a lot of companies structure gets flat very quickly because a lot of the upper level executives are not moving, or not getting promoted, so then you have another set of issues you're dealing with.
Its just not worth it unless you can get in and get out of middle management in less than 2 years.
It's funny to say you don't like "constantly doing adult daycare" and conclude that it is better to be the one being adult daycares for instead.
Being senior staff often means $800k+ comp. I’d gladly take that over the $400k senior ranges. Directors are past $1m.
It’s a huge pay bump - not just 20% to go into management and more managerial roles. It pays.
The friends and colleagues in my cohort, the ones NOW with larger financial and familial responsibilities, curse their former selves for not knowing how good they had it.
I guess all that is to say, as cliche as it is, "be careful what you wish for".
Other peoples situations always seem better/easier. We don’t have enough data and are just too poor at objective evaluation.
This is so true.
After spending a decade in software development, I'm finally staying put where I am. So many times as a developer you hate something about your job. So you go out and interview, build some stuff for show on GitHub, and then finally land that job that's going to take away all your worries and grievances you have with your current employer.
Only to find out all you did was swap one set of problems for another, totally different set of problems which weren't an issue at your former employer.
You either accept this stuff as just something every company has, or you'll go crazy trying to find a perfect company/startup/agency to work at and you'll never get any further in your career.
The only question is, do I buy a boat, a beach house, or a lake house? I live near a lake and already have a jetski and a friend with a boat, maybe I should just buy a tract of land to drive my jeep and some ATVs. I mean, maybe people get a lot of happiness out of work, I certainly don't. I like to have fun.
There is nothing I can spend any amount of money on which will make my free time happy enough to make up for the misery of a job I do not care about. It cannot be done. If a better job means I have to take a pay cut, no matter; it's worth it for a happier life. Any job I could possibly take at this point in my career will pay enough to live well, anyway, so I don't see much point in trying to maximize income. Hedonic treadmill, diminishing marginal utility, etc.
I mean, we all hope that, but that could change without a moment's notice. For people outside the tech field, the last year's inflation, gas prices, and skyrocketing rents, their lifestyle went from 'enough to live' to 'short about $1k a month.'
If you live in a major western European city, yeah, you don't have to worry too much about money, there's a lot of social services available for you to fall back. Elsewhere, it's much more competitive.
Homeless -> Volunteer worker -> Govt job -> Non Faang -> Faang -> Enlightened that you missing out on life.
My answer was always that I did, I got to where I wanted to be, and I intend to stay there. I'm a programmer. I program. Ambition realized.
And with the money that programmers make, it seems even more ridiculous to suggest that I had no ambition while applying for a job as "senior developer" or "lead developer".
Just because someone is a great engineer doesn't mean they'd be a good manager. I'd be scared to work under a manager that doesn't acknowledge and believe this.
Partying when you are young isn't something always looked back on fondly. Fun is good now and in future expectation.
Then with less than half left theres countless taxes built into the things you spend on (e.g. sales taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, import tariffs, etc etc etc etc and oh yeah more etc)
Because the US takes up the slack. Something we need to seriously STOP doing :p
To clarify, I just mean I always moved horizontally between businesses and not diagonally. Although at a business I may have also moved vertically (w/ more responsibility) but that's moot.
Sample size of 1:
- Job 1 -> Job 2: Neither in tech; 80% raise; even in terms of stress / work
- Job 2 -> Job 3: Move to a Support group in a tech company; 11% raise; much higher stress / work
- Job 2 -> Job 3: Support to Technical Sales; 70% raise (after 5 raises at job 2); less work / higher peak stress (maybe) but lower average stress
So if you need a lot of money for your lifestyle the high hours/high pay job might be your only option.
Maybe you'll see how that $20k car is twice as expensive to maintain as the $10k car. Or maybe you'll get a taste of life in a city with public transit that is faster than walking. Or maybe you just move to a cabin in the woods with satellite Internet and grow your own food.
Their lack of work life balance is why they earn 300x the pay, correct? That's the narrative I am most familiar with as their rationale for the income gap.
I am amused at the article's pin that some of the c-level work life balance changes could trickle down via policy...this thinking is broken.
I literally laughed out loud. This is how it is, this is always how it is. LOL
sure but that's not how leadership works.
Part of leadership is prioritization and ownership.
I'm not making this up. I've heard leaders comment in private about how their compensation has dipped due to the recent stock market crash. Since the higher you go in the chain, the biggest the share of your comp is in stocks, it's very attractive to change employment during a market dip. Sure it's risky, but the payoff is big.
Because the boss applying more corporate coercion to subordinates is clinically proven to help them relax.
Every morning I meditate on the peace that only a corporate hierarchy policing my every action can bring.
I wonder if we should go back to sending managers to the golf course more regularly.
the risk being that the new boss takes the autonomy away from you (and much more)
What instantly becomes glaringly obvious is that the company should comp you better and leave you be, as you quite obviously do not need said boss.
Yet, every single time they will waste money interviewing people, spend more on hiring and onboarding and training, and then this other person is magically in charge of not only you but your comp.
Fuck what businesses have all become.
a) Tree communication graphs are known and proven to not provide reliable message transmission against an adversary. As a boss you (should) know and live that but most prefer to hear the flattery and see the grass as green until it's too late.
b) You have stressful knowledge as a boss that you decide to not share with your underlings -- usually because you don't trust them. Some companies have been known for their openness on every topic. We are talking about software engineering here not factory mindless work. If you don't share and bottle things you are doom ing yourself.
c) I am sorry but if as a boss you are unable to downgrade yourself -- tells me either you don't know you can hire another boss to be the CEO/..., you are inept and can't do anything useful in the company besides "bossing," or you live in an illusion.
Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO people stop working for their next meal. And few CEOs care more about employees future than their life's work.
P.S. That said being a middle manager in a growing or cash cow company means making sure the status quo remains. Thinking otherwise is the illusion I think a lot of people becoming middle managers have for too long a time.
It's good for cappie PR to create a narrative of empowered, entitled workers. It's just not true, though. Most of the current worker attrition has to do with COVID-related disability (long COVID), gas prices, and displacements caused by rising rents. It's not that people are suddenly deciding not to work because the Capitalism Fairy is putting seed capital under their pillows--it's that people who had few options now have even fewer.
https://money.yahoo.com/older-americans-head-back-to-the-wor...
Heaven help us :)
The only reason we haven't seen 85% of society give up all at once is that some people still hold out hope that the BoomerJobs, once vacated, will be given to them. That isn't going to happen, though.
People work "hard" in our society, because they have no other choice, since there is no social safety net and employers can do whatever they want in this country, but no one really cares anymore. This has manifested itself as survivable mediocrity for quite a while, but as soon as our society finds itself in any kind of serious crisis it will collapse. It almost did, during COVID.
Yes, boomers had better pay where a middle class blue collar job could afford you a nice house and kids in the suburbs, but this idea you quote, I'd need much more data on because the entire culture of being a boomer is much more top down, listen to your boss, do what your told then the modern culture.
My experience of Boomers (my parents and their friends are early Boomers) is that most of them were working as two-income families, whereas my granparents' generation (late Greatest and early Silent), it was much more common for there to be only one outside income coming into the household.
If anything the reverse is true, and a general message that it's hard to find a job is much more benefecial for the capital/employer class, who would then find laborers who are happy to accept anything they can get and have no interest in taking the risk necessary to start or join a union
PS: The last time unions started doing well in the US was also a time when labor was in scarce supply just after WWII. Europe had been destroyed and the USA was the China of the day, but even moreso, in that almost the entire surviving industrial capacity of the world was in the USA. A laborer in the USA, able and willing to operate a factory machine, was thus in terrific, just terrific demand. Unionization happens in good for labor times, to prepare for bad for labor times, not the other way around.
Q1 real GDP growth in the US was negative. It seems quite likely that we're in the start of a recession by either of the definitions above, but we'll know with greater certainty in a little over a month when the advance estimate of the Q2 figure is released.
I think the term recession was not being used in the sense of "two quarters of real negative GDP" but in the more colloquial sense.
"The NBER's definition emphasizes that a recession involves a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months. In our interpretation of this definition, we treat the three criteria—depth, diffusion, and duration—as somewhat interchangeable. That is, while each criterion needs to be met individually to some degree, extreme conditions revealed by one criterion may partially offset weaker indications from another. For example, in the case of the February 2020 peak in economic activity, the committee concluded that the subsequent drop in activity had been so great and so widely diffused throughout the economy that, even if it proved to be quite brief, the downturn should be classified as a recession."
From my perspective, I'm seeing the last 6-or-so months of the Great Resignation as a zeitgeist of irrational optimism. Money was cheap, "post-COVID repairs" were a goldmine of opportunity, and companies were thriving regardless of their actual performance. If the burnout is catching up to people, it is probably because "returning to normal" no longer seems so palatable. So why not try a new normal in a fresh environment?
If we see a 2001-level decline, I can only hope that a desire for the good old days helps people get their priorities straight and figure out a way to balance happiness, dignity, and success that doesn't involve LinkedIn recruiters.
Which is all to say that if executives are inspired to move to four day work weeks and better work-life balance, will this trickle down to blue collar/minimum wage jobs (i.e. Musk advocating for 9-9-6)
Increasing capital gains taxes would have obvious meaningful implications for financial markets, so the debate really should be about what's the lesser of two evils here: reducing inequality or reducing the strength of the US financial market. You decide.
The other elephant in the room that no one talks about is that housing shouldn't be that much of a problem in a country where the population is not growing (but it is because it is used as an asset although it should be for living not for wealth growth, thus having 2nd or 3rd homes should be massively discouraged through taxes).
Other values need a seat at the table, not just scraps from the shareholders.
So, broadly speaking, if you’re a worker, you very very likely have a stake in companies generally being profitable.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/11/in...
Climate change projections say that we're headed to economic collapse.
For big change to work there has to be the right culture set by the board and this has to feed down.
Heck, maybe in the not so distant futures a DAO like setup will exist that will flip all this on its head.
I like my job, but the fact that I have to do it or else lose my house makes it less joyful than it might otherwise be.
Not sure what my boss can do about that.
Imagine how much harder the chinese telephone game gets if some people actively sabotage it.
As a c-suite exec, I spend most of my time in meetings that lead to very little change and I look on with a bit of envy on ICs who get to improve things without asking for permission first.
The IC at the bottom is likely limited to a specific project or feature. They have a lot of space to roam in that box, but they inevitably have a small box.
What else can be done differently other than giving up and doing everything yourself? But once you start doing everything yourself you are no longer at the top. You are at the very bottom.
- the labor market dictates how many people you can hire.
- Speaking of budgets: they are not unlimited;
- Often what you can build depends on the levels of tech and organizational debt you have built up. A small startup simply doesn't have the organizational set-up and know-how to become a hospital and vice versa. This limits how far you can take your plans.
- Vested interests in your employee pool; if the company is (say) a dedicated Ruby on Rails shop and you decree a big rewrite in Rust then you can expect a large part of your employees to go looking elsewhere. This limits what you can build.
- Prior commitments; if there is a long-running project going on then you need to keep that staffed to maintain internal knowledge or else it will dissipate. It's not uncommon that 90% of employees is already assigned to something and you can't start new things without dropping old things.
- etc etc etc
It is extremely common for an executive to come in and start off with bold plans to improve things, then slowly discover why things are the way they are.
The same is true of a new IC coming into a new code base.
The things you mention are not great excuses for not being able to make any change. If those things overwhelm an exec, that exec should probably step aside and let someone else try.
Source: Daily experience. :-D
Are these the same 81% of executives driving return to office?