Word.
Word word word.
I hate my high paying job because I feel like a fake. I’m an environmentalist in the oil and gas industry. Hey, guess what, all that crap about how O&G really does care about the environment is FALSE. They care about profit. They’ll bargain their way into environmental destruction just to make MONEY. And the government and regulating agencies are in on it too.
I also am SO SICK of the old boys’ club always getting their way. I am now to the point (just this afternoon) where I’m going ahead with my project regardless of whether the old boys’ club likes it or not. I’m willing to get fired. ‘Oh, why do we have to track greenhouse gases if we don’t have to by law?’ BECAUSE IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO ASSHOLE. FUCK OFF.
Can you tell I’m worked up today?
I guess it makes more sense when you list out the reasons people work in those jobs:
-Challenging
-Interesting work
-High standard of living
-Feeling of acomplishment
-Work with competent, motivated professionals
-Interesting travel and other perks
-High earning potential
-Oportuniy for advancement
-Professional respect
-Ultimately you want to feel your career is challenging and worthwhile
You might have a high paying job that sucks because it lacks those things.
I think it’s important to understand that there are diminishing returns on happiness in both directions.
You can take jobs that are less stressfull for less money, but at a point, not having any money or feeling that you aren’t meeting up to your own expectations will reduce your happiness.
You can work harder and make more money, but eventually you will be working so hard that all you will be doing is working, and for what?
Basically you just have to find something you like about whatever it is you do for a living.
The one I walked away from was in Seattle, actually. I’ve since moved across the country - but I know that the number of billable hours the associates at my NY firm are told is the target is 2400, but the target they’re told and the actual target are not the same number. Associates making the stated target, but not the real target start getting invited to have little chats about their productivity. Partnership track associates need to be above 3,500 - or have some other tangible and obvious upside to them (a personal book of clients, for example - or possess some speciality such as patent bar membership). I can tell you that no associate at my firm has made partner since I started here with an average over their last five years (the offer usually comes between years 8 and 10 - if it doesn’t come by 10, you’re expected to understand you should be finding another job) of at least 3,500 billables/year. The lowest average in that time period was actually 3,578.
Here’s a question for you lawyers. What the F are you working on for 3500 a year?
Consulting has a similar model where you have billable hours and targets. Problem is, you don’t just invent billable work. Usually some partner or other senior person has to generate the business. Every firm I’ve been in, when things get slow the management keeps coming around harping about “billable hours” but it’s like “dude! Go sell a fucking project!”
Haven’t you just described about 85% of all the white collar work out there, and a good portion of the blue and pink collar as well?
It should be more surprising that there’s anyone who doesn’t.
“Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.”
-Khalil Gibran, 1923
Somehow I don’t think he was talking about 100 hours a week as a law firm “associate” flunky, or the endless litany of kissing the ass that chews yours that is so often entailed in making a living above the level of garbage truck driver.
Something has been lost sight of, and I see many people counseling resignation to that fact, if not outright embrace of it.
I wonder then what work he was talking about. I’ve worked in many ways in my life - from wedging clay in a pottery studeo and hauling boxes, to (now) being a lawyer, and in my experience all work can suck if the people you are working for are jerks and/or you have a bad attitute yourself towards it - and conversely all work can have its good points.
The vast majority of the population does stuff they don’t really want to do in order to earn money - hauling crap in various forms, whether physical boxes of junk and piles of shit, to metaphorical “junk” in the form of sales, docket sheets and contracts. Is the poet saying that you shouldn’t haul crap? My sense is that the poet is counselling the sort of resignation you decry - that, in spite of the fact that you get sweaty, tense, stinky or wound up, working is overall a part of life to be embraced and not hated. But I could be wrong.
Lucky is the person whose work involves no hauling of crap and is in fact their hobby as well.
Somehow I think the poet was talking out of his ass. I wonder if his mother and sisters felt the same way about working as seamstresses while putting him through poetry school.
Heh, Ex Open Hole Wireline Operator here, thirty years back now. I was like you; loved the money but hated the spontaneity required at any and all hours. Remember Gearhart Owens, The GO Company?
This is the one I hate and am wrestling with. The boss thinks that higher salaries and career advancement should be justified with ridiculously higher amounts of workload and task juggling–you should be suffering and paying penance for your higher pay by working the jobs and hours of multiple people as one.
It’s never about how much you are saving or achieving with your experience, it is all about stuffing more budgeted hours into a single head.
I have the boss from hell. I work as a financial analyst.
Last week, I was tracking some payments from US to UK and back again. The thing is, there was an error at every single stage:
USA to UK - error
Uk internal stuff - error
UK back to US - error.
None of this shit was my fault, and I have no visibility of UK financials anyway. So I’m working on figuring it out, and it get’s to the stage where I can’t do anymore, I have to wait until the next day so I can contact somebody in UK to get further info.
I go to my boss’s office at 1145pm and hand in what I’ve done, and tell him I’m going home, I’ll call UK in the morning to get further info. The fucker goes “No, no, no you can’t go yet, this needs to be done, you can’t leave yet”. I say,“You can’t force me to stay, I need to sleep!”. He says fine, and asks me to email him my work. Then this piece of shit sends back an email timestamped 1151pm, which says “SomeBodyUK, I have noted that you left without completing the work etc…” as an arse-covering email.
I’d walk out of the job in a second, except, the economy’s really bad, and it’s even harder for me cos I need sponsorship.
The team loathe the guy, and crack jokes about shooting him! 4 out of the 5 people he managed complained, and 2 quit within the last month.
My current manager is the biggest micromanaging fucker around, he walk around the cubicles in the evening to see who’s there, and he has to review all our work before it gets sent on to upper management. He also has no life, he claims he has a girlfriend in Mexico, but because he’s in LA, all he ever does is work. He expects us to do the same shit.
Thankfully, I’m due to have a new boss in a few weeks, and he seems a lot nicer.
You probably ought to define “high salary job” because that’s a very different thing to different people.
To my wife, a non-practicing but still licensed lawyer, a high paying job is somewhere in the 200-300k range, with a low-paying job being in the 80-100 range.
For me, an IT professional with 10 years of experience and a master’s degree, a high paying job would be in the 90-110k range, with low paying being in the 40-55 range.
The two jobs I have quit were probably pretty high-paying by some people’s standards (45k 10 years ago when I was 26, and 52k about 7 years ago), but I didn’t really quit either because of the jobs themselves, but rather because I had better options.
In the first case, my company was having hard times, and I wanted to be where the IT/computing action was in my state, so I moved and found the 2nd job. I quit the 2nd job because I felt like I was pigeonholed as a developer in an obscure language and didn’t like that career path, so I got accepted to grad school, then quit.
Since then, it’s been layoffs, not voluntary termination.
Hmm. Put me down for a big :dubious: on all of this UNLESS you work at Wachtell. That is the only firm (OK, maybe also Cravath) where I would believe any of this. I’m not calling you a liar, I just think you are repeating bad information.
Let me ask you this: what is your source for the information that the lowest average hours over 5 years for a group of associates that are in the partnership-range years was 3,578? Did someone tell you this or did you see reports from DTE or Carpe Diem or whatever?
I’m not her, but she doesn’t say what you say she said. She said that 3,578 was the lowest 5-year average for an associate who actually made partner, not the lowest average for a group of associates in an age or tenure range. Her point was that this was the minimum level at which partnership was awarded, not that all associates in that age or tenure cohort billed more than that. As to her source of information, she’s talking about the firm where she works. Wouldn’t associates in a law firm have access to billing figures for all associates? These seem analogous to sales figures, and salespeople usually know what everyone is billing.
Well that’s usually the tradeoff. If you want a job that pays $100 k-200 k, they typically will work you like crazy because they can.
I think a lot of people who make in the $25 k- 60 k range or less are thinking “if you’re making $100 k - $200 k a year, what do you have to complain about?”
This varies across firms. Also, I think she’s an administrative assistant, not an associate (not sure you meant to say otherwise, just saying).
Seven or eight years ago I thought about going to law school like most other people with my kind of education. I figured before I bit the bullet, I would try to paralegal for a year or so, get some experience, and maybe collect some recommendations.
I live in NYC, have an ivy league degree, and Wachtell called me in to interview. I will never forget this interview for as long as I live. The paralegal coordinator was a shriveled bag of a woman with twitchy fingers and beady eyes. I asked her the same question I asked everyone I interviewed with: how is the culture at your firm different from other NYC firms of the same size?
Her answer was brief and to the point.
“You will wear a beeper. It will be on at all times. If you are paged at any hour of the day or night, you will come into the office. At Wachtell, we make paralegals and junior associates cry. All the time. So you might as well get used to it. Junior associates who bill fewer than 3500 hours per year are fired. Your pay will be $30,000 per year plus overtime. You will do nothing but administrative work and will have no opportunities for advancement. Is this clear?”
I did end up working for two other firms for about 18 months. I decided not to become an attorney.
Sloppy use of words on my part, due to ignorance of the legal world. In the sector of corporate America where I labor, we’re all “associates”, even the administrative assistants. I see in rereading her first post that she is currently a partner’s assistant and was formerly an associate in another firm. Seems plausible to me that she would have some access to billing figures, but you and she would know better than I.
ETA: Maeglin - WOW!
Wow, that was inspiring. 
I am, in point of fact, a lawyer, and all I have to say is - it isn’t like that for me.