How can I ask my employer for more work without risking my job?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Hmm…our household is mostly full of Lego.

I’m not really qualified to address your personal issues, but career doesn’t have to be at the cost of family, wealth, and community.

I guess maybe my question is if your dream is to own a coffee shop or hostel or whatever, why wouldn’t you suck it up and try and earn as much as you can until you can put the capital together to actually do it? I don’t know if this is you, but I have an uncle who has a lot of talent but never really did anything professionally. He always had some “could of, should of, would of’s” about his ideals and childhood and whatnot. But I always felt he just used those as excuses to not do anything.

My mom (my uncle’s sister) was sort of the opposite as is my wife (because men tend to marry their mother I suppose). They tend be very driven by work almost to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. I think it comes from not growing up with money or something.

42

As any household should be! I just introduced my partner to them this year — her first time playing with Lego in almost 40 years of life, and she loves them now!

Absolutely. So far all my jobs have had some balance of those. They just often tend to lean more “community” than “wealth”, but I’m not exactly living in poverty either. Between my partner and myself, as two DINKers, I’d say we live a pretty good life! But neither of us have a realistic retirement plan, something that I’ve only recently started to remedy, with my first 401k and some money in a CD (certificate of deposit) while I learn about other investment vehicles, largely due to the help of this board (including many of your posts in the other threads).

In short, because my career & life trajectory was not very traditional. I was a high school dropout (but also eventual college grad), and I went from homeless to minimum wage to earning six figures in a little under a decade, really more due to luck and connections than anything I did. Along the way, nobody ever taught me basic household finance or anything about investment or retirement, so I had to start learning about them only very recently, mostly on my own, and only once I finally achieved some bare semblance of career and life stability… right in time for the country to implode, go figure.

It’s a dream, for sure, and something I’d love to work towards and have started saving for. Just not at the expense of the present (i.e. not FIRE or anything like it) because, frankly, I don’t know if there will be much of a future worth living in…

Heh, that’s absolutely fair criticism, and indeed sounds very much like my dad :slight_smile: My situation isn’t THAT bad, thankfully. I’ve done a few things I’m quite proud of, but nothing notable enough to share, and certainly nothing that my dad would’ve been proud of.

It all ultimately comes down to daddy and mommy issues, doesn’t it? Lol.

You’d think, right? Except my dad grew up in a middle-class merchant family while my mother was a literal farmer peasant (before bootstrapping her way into early IT). Yet it was her that had by far the more balanced life, the more fulfilling family life and relationships, outside hobbies, etc. — all while earning significantly more than my father, in a time and place where women were severely disadvantaged. I still don’t know what she ever saw in my dad…

My partner is like me — we’re both more just touch-feely, happy-go-lucky types who only very reluctantly and half-assedly participate in the vision of modern, responsible adulthood. We’re better off than some of our peers, worse off than others. Life isn’t perfect, but it’s quite good, and we’re thankful for what we have while also trying to be better planners about the future.

43

Unfortunately, financial planning that is based on the end of the world kind of leaves you screwed if the world doesn’t, in fact, end. And if the world does go to shit, I can think of few scenarios where you wouldn’t be better off having extra cash.

Modern, responsible adulthood is overrated. Still requires money though.

I think I figured out pretty early from my various crappy high school and college summer jobs that don’t pay very well that not having much money was kind of a shitty way of going through life.

I suppose I also don’t suffer from a debilitating idealism when it comes to wealth creation.

44

Heh, that’s a good way to put it. I once tried to negotiate my wages down for a contract job because I felt they were overpaying me… got in a fight with my co-contractor over it because he was worried it would impact his rate too.

But, all in all, I have enough. A little more than that, even, but I do need to be better about planning for the future. You’re right, whatever comes, having a bit more in the bank would still give us more agency. At the very least, it’d be a few more beers for the end of the world party :slight_smile:

45

I suppose the advantage @Reply has is that it’s a small company (20 people?) so he can sort of see who everyone is and what they do on some level. That’s one thing I’ve always liked about small to medium sized companies.

I’m kind of in a similar situation with my new job. After months of looking after being laid off from my consulting firm I decided to take an open-ended contract to hire job “project manager” job in the “change management office” of a 30 billion $ multinational insurance conglomerate.

Setting aside it’s a big step backwards for me in terms of comp and title, it’s actually not an unpleasant place to work, nor is the work itself isn’t particularly tedious.

But I find my job incredibly stressful for many similar reasons to what @Reply describes and what you describe here.

As a “project manager” I’m “responsible” for seven different projects. The thing is, I don’t really feel like I’m actively involved in any of them. Most of them just seem to be running or on hold of their own accord. So most of what I feel like I’m doing is either trying to catch up on what other people are working on and hounding them for status so I can contribute to our monthly leadership report to the COO.

And it’s not like I don’t know how to run projects. But that’s the thing. There’s no process or methodology for anything. Nothings documented. We have a daily call with the head of our group where she just pontificates for 30 minutes or she drills down on one project that has nothing to do with me.

Like I don’t get it. I don’t know the politics. I’m still trying to learn who the people are outside my team and the systems and processes and what my role actually is. I go through periods where I have nothing to do while waiting for something to happen but I’m a bit hesitant to start just blundering around setting up meetings with Senior Vice Presidents like a “bull firing a gun in a China shop”. But I also don’t want to be sitting idle as if I need my boss to hand hold me.

So yeah, it’s kind of stressful navigating this organization where nothing seems to work or ever get done knowing that any moment they can just cancel my contract

46

Damn, that sounds way more stressful than my situation. At least in my case, it’s just a small company with a generally relaxed attitude, not deliberate and obstinate bureaucracy. I also at least have one bucket of clearly defined work to do — there just isn’t enough of it at times.

At bigger orgs in previous jobs, the PMs I’ve worked with or under did spend some portion of their time managing up and reporting down, but that wasn’t the entirety of their roles. They at least had the frequent opportunity (if not the explicit mandate) to facilitate new project planning, review stakeholder inputs at all phases of projects (and use that to steer direction), push back against idiocy, research competitors and market norms, come up with new research, etc.

They were often way busier than me or the other implementers-of-things because there’s no real upper limit to what they could do aside from bureaucratic ceilings. Whereas I could tell when my work was complete because there were measurable deliverables (this code works or doesn’t, this UI feels good or it needs more polish, etc.), their work was never really identifiably “done”, just constantly moving from one phase to another.

I was grateful for them being there, taking a load off the stuff I didn’t enjoy as much. We worked together many hours of most days, both alone in our teams and through numerous meetings with external teams and stakeholders.

Those particular people all shared a personality trait of wanting to be changemakers in the org, fighting to make their own teams more efficient and also trying to reshape the bureaucracy around them. Those attempts were usually met with mixed success, sometimes resulting in good changes and sometimes backfiring, with the bureaucracy (i.e., some exec with different ideas) fighting back and shutting them down, in some cases causing layoffs of the entire team.

I guess I just think of those situations as a prolonged two-way interview, or maybe a game of chicken. One side or the other eventually budges; the only question is whether it’s worth your sanity to fight/wait it out…

Still, sorry you’re in that situation. I would assume a multibillion multinational is much harder to change, especially insurance, than my dozen-person small biz. Those ships steer in decades, and there’s a lot of infighting on the bridge…

Heh, I gotta say though, I was surprised by this. In my head, you were an independently wealthy retired millionaire… didn’t realize you were a working person too :sweat_smile: Your maze may be a little bigger, but I guess we’re both in the rat race.

47

I’m in the same situation and have been since just before COVID. My strategy is not to ask for more, but to find it. If I ask for it, the burden is on my manager to find something for me to do, and it kind of shines a light on the fact that they could get by without me. If I take it upon myself to find ways to contribute, it presents as initiative, and makes me seem more valuable than I probably am.

48

Back when I needed a career change around year 2000 I looked into project management. It was IT-adjacent without the tech learning curve of catching up on 15 years’ change since my last IT job.

Ultimately I decided against, and largely for the ideas @msmith537 touches on. In most orgs big enough to have PM as a job role, not just a vague concept, the project “manager” doesn’t manage. They have responsibility for everything and authority over nothing. Which is a total recipe for unending stress, whether one is a go-getter, or trying to simply find a place to hide & draw a paycheck.

49

Actually, it’s mostly just hounding people for status and then taking credit for stuff.

The stressful part of being a “project manager” as I see it is the notion that you can take a PM and plop them into any project or any environment and just have them “lead” the project. Maybe in a large company if all they do is collect status updates, “RAG” charts, and “RAID” logs that just get passed up and down to executives who thoughtfully look at them and say “hmmmm”. But in companies where I was actually responsible for getting something built, there’s like an entire ecosystem of people and systems and procedures I need to know before I can even run the project. Stuff like - How do I assign staff with the right skills? How do I allocate and track budget? What are all the contractual obligations? What do we use for creating project plans/backlogs and tracking work? What is our actually delivery process? All that shit.

Which is actually interesting and feels like I’m actually doing something.

Big corporations, I don’t see any of that shit. All I see are meetings where people just talk in circles and nothing ever gets done.

50

Shoot; I mighta been a whiz at that. Missed my calling. :grin:

Seriously, thanks for the insights.

Had I never gotten side-tracked into aviation, which was kinda an afterthought / backup plan in my original high school and early college career thinking, I might well have lived out a career sorta like yours, just ~15 years in the future from your POV. I always enjoy learning about your career life, harrowing though it’s sometimes been.

51

Like there’s the sort of harrowing that comes with working with highly intelligent, smart, capable people with high standards and demanding deadlines and there’s the harrowing that comes from working with complete fucking idiots.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see real life side by side comparisons. Let me give you an example as I think it’s relevant to the OP’s problem of “not enough work to do”.

Years ago I took a contract job at a large insurance company (similar to what I have now). I didn’t know much about it, but it turns out they were trying to create a sort of “startup” company within the company to do data science. They put together this weird mix of smart people with all sorts of backgrounds. Data scientists, MBAs, quants, actuaries, ex consultants from Mckinsey, Deloitte, etc, former three-letter agency types (CIA, NSA, etc).

But then you had the legacy insurance company folks who were just sort of lazy and dumb. And as the program went on the startup culture sort of got drowned out by adding more layers of VPs and Directors to “oversee” and “provide governance” and whatever.

Some examples:
I was chatting with one of my colleagues, a former Mckinsey alum who was trying to get some information from some group about their overall strategy. He looked a little frustrated so I asked him was wrong. He showed me the “strategy” this group provided which went something like “our strategy is to help align the business to be more strategic.”

Another one of my fellow PMs had one job as far as I could tell. He was to go around to about a dozen different directors once a month and get an update on a report which mostly consisted of pasting a star to a graph like a 3rd graders homework. And apparently he considered that too much work.

After about a year working in this group they couldn’t afford to renew my contract. I found out that of our Project Management Office team of five, me and they other contractor (a Columbia MBA grad) were the only ones who had actually been working on projects this entire time!

In working in Corporate America, I’m frequently reminded of this quote from Wall Street:

Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents, each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can’t figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents.
-Gordon Gekko, Wall Street

52

Is “Wall Street” a movie in this case?

53

You’ve never heard of the film Wall Street? Gordon Gekko? Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen? Directed by Oliver Stone?

54

This is the PM role as I’ve seen it in my corporate career. It’s a thankless task, lots of work, bad hours, and no authority. It sounds like the PM roles you had in consulting are completely different; you had the responsibilities and authority to actually manage a project. They are such different roles, they shouldn’t get to use the same name.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever been laid-off before, but for me it planted a new anxiety at all future jobs. I’m sure it’s much worse since you’re on a contact (and even worse for @Reply since, IIRC, it led to temporary homelessness). There is something so unsettling about having other people make fundamental decisions about your life for you.

Film? Don’t you mean documentary?

55

I don’t know who any of those people are, sorry… I mean, I’ve heard their names before, but I don’t know any movies they’re in and can’t picture them.

56

FWIW, I think people are surprisingly adaptable and can learn to “make do” in many different situations. While I wouldn’t choose to be homeless again, honestly, it was quite a bit less stressful than dealing with inane corporate bullshit.

For me it’s more about the people you surround yourself with. Even when I was down and out, I had good friends, college teachers (that college had a significant houseless student population), part-time employers who treated me with humanity and kindness, etc. Even the police who frequently had to shoo me away from parking lots and rest stops were gentle about it and sometimes provided tips about where to go instead. The main thing was that nobody was power tripping.

Meanwhile some corporate types are real dicks, especially in the C-suites. I think some amount of ruthless ambition and frankly psychopathy is often needed in those jobs, and they don’t make for very nice people or workplace environments.

I’d much rather be poor than have to work for or with people like Musk or Bezos, for example. Thankfully, in my life there’s been a steady enough supply (though rarer now) of middle-of-the-road jobs with good people that paid enough. The billionaires may still control my life in the end, but at least I don’t have to interact with them day to day :slight_smile:

57

Is it a good movie? I enjoyed the Wolf of Wall Street and the Reluctant Fundamentalist, the only finance movies I’ve seen. Oh and that one where George Clooney flew around the world laying people off.

58

documentary; it is a fictional crime-drama film directed by Oliver Stone. While it realistically portrays 1980s high finance and is inspired by real-life corporate raiders like Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn, the characters and plot are dramatized for film.

[image]Wikipedia +3

From Wikipedia. It’s fiction, not a documentary.

59

I don’t know. Is “greed” good?

Yes, it’s an iconic movie that has more or less defined Wall Street in film (and I suspect IRL as well).

I don’t want to get too off topic, but some other great finance movies I would watch Margin Call and The Big Short, both about the 2008 financial crisis.

60

The “project manager” role can have different names in different types of organizations. In consulting and professional services, it’s often called an “engagement manager” because you are managing the client engagement team. For all intents and purposes for the people on my team (at least the ones who are from the firm) I am their “boss” (at least while they are on the project). I determine if they stay or leave the team. I write their performance reviews (which impacts their raises, bonus, and promotions). I have a big part of working with the client to define the contract most of the time.

One thing I find particularly frustrating is that our well meaning manager keeps telling us that her vision for our group is like a high performing group of elite consultants. That’s great but you’re not really. AFAIK, I’m the only one of our group whose worked at an “elite consulting firm” and the others don’t really seem like “Mckinsey material” to me. And I’m not exactly here because my career management consulting career is “on track”.