Why did you hate your high paying job?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Insurance investment flunky, 1989-91.

  • No training; little or no mentoring.
  • Visits to borrower companies in several interesting industries did nothing to influence company’s spreadsheets-n-jargon investing culture.
  • Suffocating office culture left little room for personal interaction even at slack times.
  • New York attitude in a Fumbucket, Ohio business sector.

This was my first, and last, full-time office gig. I learned the meaning of the word “work,” and that meaning was not at all positive.

All I got out of the job was a year or so of health coverage, most of which I blew on psychotherapy, and enough savings to sit around for a year or so with no phony responsibilities, only real ones (not that that’s a cakewalk either).

22

My boss was constantly undermining my authority, often going directly to my people for stuff that I had already told him we didn’t have time to do. Always telling me to get the staff to adhere to a reasonable schedule, but not allowing me to discipline the one person who broke the rules. Often committing to development that we couldn’t do - not because we weren’t talented enough, but because it was physically impossible with today’s technology. Basically, I hated the job because he made it tough for me to do it well.

23

Government.

Enough said.

24

The tyranny of the time sheet. I had a quota of 7.25 billable hours out of an 8 hour day.

I loved, loved, loved my clients, though.

I made a commitment to stick with it for a year and then get out before I experienced the golden handcuffs of the annual bonus. I’d been there a year and a month when I turned in my resignation.

25

Working for an 8(a) company. You never know when you will be kicked to the curb in order for the company to show a healthier bottom line. I was the chief operating officer, making $155K/year one day and zero the next, with no reason given.

26

Not me, but my dad recently retired from his long-hated high paying job because he thought it was boring and his industry was stagnant and non-dynamic (he was an inventor and has something like 80 patents). On the other hand he admits that it gave him the ability to be there for me and my sister growing up. Now he’s writing a book and successfully daytrading.

27

I walked away from an associate position at a large law firm (I’d have been doing IP transactional work) in order to work as a partner’s assistant at a different large law firm.

My reasons for doing so were essentially as follows:

  1. Associates at large corporate law firms either do not work any hours at all and are therefore in constant danger of being asked to leave (with less chance of finding a new position than a third-year law student has) or work hours that range from “unreasonable” to “ungodly”. Successful associates at the firm I work at (which has similar expectations to all the other firms in the market), are expected to be billing a minimum of 3,500 hours per year. That’s 70 hours per week (with a two week vacation). Note: Billing that many hours. Hours spent doing non-billable tasks (of which there are more than you’d think - a lot of research time is effectively unbillable, for example, as a result of the contractual arrangements my firm has with its clients), do not count towards the billable totals. In practice, in order to make 3,500 billable hours, an associate typically has to put in about 1.2 - 1.4 hours to the billable hour - which woks out to be between 84 and 98 hours per week. More is better, of course. The ultimate brass ring is partnership, and the primary metric for whether or not one is considered for partnership is how much cash one brings into the firm. There are associates at my firm who work in excess of 100 hours per week, every week. Not just a couple of die-hard mental cases - I can think of half a dozen off the top of my head.

  2. Being a lawyer is stressful. Or at least I found it very much so. I also found that by Christmas break of my third year of law school, my blood pressure was 205/148. As it happens, my blood pressure is very, very much affected by stress level. Once I stopped practicing, my stress dropped like a rock, and my blood pressure went with it. It’s borderline still, but it’s no longer high enough to make medical professionals flinch and use the phrase “Holy Jesus, that can’t be right!”

So, mostly, I quit because I wanted to have a life. In both the literal and figurative sense of the word. I make less money, but corpses don’t have much earning potential anyway - and that’s where I was headed. Quickly, if my doctors were to be believed. Also, now I can use the phrase “work-life balance” with a straight face.

I make less money as a legal secretary, but I get to go home at 5:30 and my time off is purely my own. It’s still interesting and challenging work - I work at the senior partner level (if I worked at, say, the junior associate level, I wouldn’t have much to do other than surf the interwebs). My health is better and my life is my own again. I wouldn’t go back for all the money in the world, frankly.

28

I don’t mean to quibble with your post, but I have never, ever, heard of such a billing target. Generally speaking, billable hours targets at large firms are 1800-2000, with significant bonuses kicking in at over 2000. My husband is a senior associate at a large corporate firm, and billed approximately 2400 hours last year, which entailed working many 16 hours days and most weekends with minimal vacation time (i.e. the very occasional long weekend). Where are you located?

29

As you may have started to notice, many high paying jobs - lawyer, accountant, investment banker, consultant, technology, sales rep, etc - have some things in common:

-High stress
-Long hours
-No respect for your personal life
-Unreasonable deadlines
-Work with, and for, a lot of self-absorbed jerks
-Excessive travel or other lifestyle issues
-Performance driven
-Up or out policies
-High risk for termination or “counselling out”
-Cult-like corporate cultures
-Ethical issues
-You will never make enough money to fill the empty void in your soul that is driving you to work like a donkey on crack

30

Heh, at our firm the target is 1750, with a discretionary bonus potentially kicking in over that. I worked 1800 hours last year and got a 10% bonus.

I’m in Toronto, not New York or London. Nevertheless …

If I saw someone had billed 3,500, I’d assume they were faking their hours.

31

Not to mention that the billable hours requirement is disclosed during interviewing. Anyone who would take a job with a 3500 target is nuts.

32

I think we have two different questions here:

  1. Why do you hate your high-paying job?
  2. Why did you leave your high-paying job?

For the first, I don’t hate my current line of work: I love it. I love being able to help people solve problems they thought were unsolvable. But that’s when I’m actually allowed to do it, which isn’t always the case.

For the second, every time I’ve left a high-paying job it’s been due to not being able to do my job properly and/or boss/employer stupidity:

  • I was working legally in the US and going home once a year, my employer’s legal department conspired with my immigration lawyer to make me work I-legally and make it extremely risky for me to leave and reenter for years. I/O error! (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
  • The boss had it against me and another person because we didn’t go out drinking with him every night. I got an offer from another company and jumped ship.
  • “I don’t pay you to think, I pay you to solve problems!” It wasn’t adressed to me directly, but that sentence sent the whole team into CV-update mode.
  • The last one had an enormous need for control. At one point, something sent her into overdrive: every day each one of us had to write a letter telling her what he’d done the previous day and what he intended to do on that day; then we had to report verbally (in person if we were in the same country, over the phone if not), again individually. Then she went one up: those of us who happened to be in the same country needed to report to her before and after every single meeting. She forbade us using any program she wasn’t completely familiar with (“you can’t use Access to prepare the data cos I don’t understand it cos I don’t know it cos I haven’t used it cos I don’t know it cos I don’t like it” - very logical). I told her I couldn’t get any work done like that (plus it was making my possible-MS-or-maybe-not flare up, and I dislike having vertigo but hate having the shakes), she said it was Her Way or Her Way. I took the highway instead :stuck_out_tongue:
33

My job isn’t high-paying compared to lawyers and the like, but it’s the highest-paying job I’ve ever had. I also can’t stand it.

My top reasons:

  1. The organization is very, very small and gossipy and people are two-faced. If I have one more conversation that starts with “so-and-so said that you said <some bullshit that I never said or some ridiculously out of context quote>”, I’m going to scream. I didn’t like junior high the first time I was there, and I don’t see why I should be stuck there again.

  2. My boss seems to expect us to work all the time. Last Friday, he said we could have Monday off. Then requested something be done “in the next 24 - 72 hours”. Which is it? Do I have time off, or not?

34

Night shift differential wasn’t worth the no food, interrupted sleep, family just couldn’t wrap their brain around 3pm is 3 am and the wrong-ness of a no sunshine type of life. Throw in 12 hour shifts morphing into 14 hour shifts back to back, other RNs jumping ship and patient acuity increasing with the local population and taking a giant pay cut for a Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 job case managing weekdays only was one of the better decisions I ever made.
Cyn RN, who loved delivering babies, but come on, 5 c-sections a shift?

35

Go on. How do you feel about that? How should we?

36

I think you should put it in context: we’re “programmed” - at least many kids growing up middle-class but wanting to “make it” - to have a clear definition of what “making it” looks like - and one way to make it is the professional services route. Others have emerged like dot-commer or other web-based plays, but consultant, lawyer, banker and even venture capitalist all represent the Bucket of Gold at the End of the Rainbow.

And we bust our butts to achieve this dream - and some of us actually get there. And you know what? It turns out it isn’t YOUR American Dream. It’s Sales - once you reach a certain level in professional services, you are, in simplest terms, a salesman. You have a quota that is zeroed out each year - go fill it, by whatever means you can. It can crush you - read the play.

So many of us stop and reevaluate and try to see if we can redirect things so we can find a Dream that feels more like ours. Sometimes we can use the stuff we learned before, sometimes less so.

It’s all part of growing up - there’s a reason many/most folks have mid-life crises: because we break out of our programming to look around and decide what OUR definition of success looks like.

So it is not surprising that someone can end up in an enviable position but feel soul-crushing, life-unbalancing angst over it, is it?

37

I dunno, seems to me very much a grass-is-greener sort of thing. You gotta decide what you really want, and pursue that.

I’m a lawyer myself and I make a very decent amount of money - and yes the hours are long and it is stressful.

OTOH, I have been poor, and it sucked - I worked in a pottery studeo, making crafts (I know many would find this ideal). I was young then, and I can only imagine how much it would suck to be poor, middle aged, with family responsibilities on top.

There are upsides and downsides to everything; people can love (or hate) just about any occupation. I thought I would love making things with my hands - I was pretty good at it; but what I discovered is that what I liked to make, as a hobby, would not sell, and what I could sell for a profit was stuff I did not particularly like to make; this was simply inherent in the medium - the stuff I liked to make was too time-consuming, I could not charge enough to make it worthwhile.

Plus, even the best paid artisans don’t really earn a lot (they are competing with a lot of talented people who do not need, for one reason or another, to live on what they earn).

I decided I simply did not want to end up making stuff that I could sell. I could easily see myself making stuff I did not like, and still barely earning a living if I was lucky. I didn’t like where that road was leading.

Frankly, I’m happier being a lawyer. The work I do is challenging - it is a new problem every day, ones which do not have any set solutions; there is real creativity in dealing with them, which is very satisfying. The focus on dockets and billing is harsh, but really no different from selling crafts - you have to charge people for what you do; no occupation is free of that, in one way or another - it is merely a method of justifying, to others, the resources you are given; even academics have to go through that, with grant applications and the like.

38

Ah, but you have learned a great Truth: Life is Sales.

You can be an artist and you still have to sell your work. Or an actor and sell your abilities. So you have to decide what you are okay with selling - where the compensation is worth the effort, and the compromising you have to do along the way.

Lots of folks come to realize that Life is Sales while they are in the middle of trying to “make it” - this coincides with them breaking out of their programming I reference above. From there, they walk away from the high-paying-but-soul-crushing job and try their hand at a passion. But, they realize, the money stinks and the amount of compromise they have to accept sucks out the passion. Some even are ready to jump back into their original career path.

It ain’t easy finding that Right Thing, and the target moves over time…

39

The nominal target is disclosed, but often not the “real” target - you have to get associates to talk off the record to find that out. For example, my old firm allegedly had bonuses kick in at 1900, but if you weren’t routinely billing 2400, there better be some other damn good reason to make you a partner anyway (e.g., having your own significant book of business). 3500 is nuts, but I don’t disbelieve that there are firms out there that have that as the “real” number.

40

The only reason I hated my (relatively, I guess) high-paying job was my boss. She kept insisting she wasn’t a micromanager but she was the worst I ever had, and it was just me and her. Nobody else to bounce stuff off of and the one time I did just a teeny tiny bit I was ratted out. It ended when some other projects were cancelled and permanent staff were transferred in at the same time my contract ran out. I constantly had this raggedy adrenaline edge going, slept badly, was basically miserable. Now I’m at a slightly more high-paying job working with normal people.