Me too, although I wish I had even more time to spend with my kids. I will say than in general I have seen higher rates of job satisfaction among patent lawyers (like myself) than in other practice areas. I have also never met a patent lawyer who thought about cocktail parties when deciding to practice law (although I know a few who did it primarily for the money - they tend to be somewhat less happy).
I neither hate nor love it. It might be a function of the fact that I’m 90% transactional (commercial mortgages) but I find it very boring compared to law school. At the end of the day, I also feel like high end support staff, which is why I’m planning to leave to go to business school (I’d more interested in the financial transactions than I am the legal end of making them happen).
I don’t think any of my colleagues are drastically unhappy (or unhappy at all) but we’re all government lawyers and don’t have to work the crazy hours. Nearly everyone who is here either admits that they hated their private sector work hours or they deliberately started out at the government to focus on their family.
I know a lot of people think I’m nuts to leave a reasonably well paid (low six figures) 40-hour a week law/finance/transactions job but it basically just bores me. I also feel the tradeoff to working for the Feds is that it isn’t a very…dynamic workplace. They are awfully slow to cotton on to anything novel, career federal employees, especially management, are VERY entrenched in their ways, red tape and paperwork is always the top priority (I remember learning the “acronym language” was my first order of business four years ago) and I find it’s very easy to fall into a rut (specialization wise). Not to mention, half the time they advertise jobs they already have someone picked for it so lateralling to another agency can be more arduous than people assume.
I’m sure if I worked for a firm I’d probably just bitch about the hours. Anyway, I don’t hate it, but I don’t want to settle for something I’m good at but not especially interested in.
Sorry to derail all this lawyer talk, but I’m at my highest paying job I’ve ever had. Starting here was a 45% pay raise from my last job.
I loathe it.
The shift is terrible (graveyard with no weekends off so my social life is shot) there’s very little to do (I like to keep busy at work) I’m in my early 30’s and almost everyone in my department is in their 40’s and older (I bitched about one of my coworkers in another thread somewhere). Sure, squeezing in 6 to 7 hours of internet surfing a night sounds like a cake job, but I really just can’t take it anymore. And of course, with Oregon having a 12% unemployment rate, it’s impossible for me to find another job that pays this much without fighting HUNDREDS of qualified applicants who can start right now.
Oh sure, I’m not driving myself into the grave with stress and working 200 hours a week, but I more than make up for that by not being able to sleep more than 4 hours at a stretch during the day. I always revert back to sleeping at night on my ‘weekends’ even though I try every time to stay up late so I don’t end up staying awake 24 hours straight on my Monday. I usually end up doing that. It’s so awesome having sleep deprived hallucinations while on my way home from work!
You make it sound as if being a seamstress was… being a stereotypical medieval serf. My grandmother was one and she loved it 
The last time she made a blouse for my aunt was while in her 70s; she still prefers to fix storebought clothes herself than bring them to another seamstress to fix or use the store’s.
As I already said in my answer, I do love “being able to solve problems that people thought were unsolvable.” Further, I often can do it in 40 h/wk or less. Any boss who’s happy with that has my eternal gratitude; any who gets sourmouth over not enough face time (we CAN’T bill more than 40 hours!) is a moron who looks a gift horse in the mouth and the hoof, discovers it’s a thoroughbred in perfect shape and whines cos he wanted a carthorse. Solving problems is something which makes a better world, at least the kind of problems my clients often have. OTOH, being at the office for 72h/wk watching everybody’s blood pressure go up doesn’t seem to help anybody.
I left my last job because I agree with Gibran. Staying in that job was costing me my health, and as far as I can tell there’s only two jobs that are worth risking life and limb: those you do out of love of the people you help and those you do cos you love the job itself. Some people love jumping off bridges with a rubber line attached to their belts, some people love being research librarians and some love pulling in the big bucks. Whatever rocks your boat, but yes, something in which you spend that much time should rock your boat.
Baylor grad?
I guess I’m thinking of those sweatshop factoriess with rows of seamstresses sewing Nike’s together or something. I have no idea.
No, I went to a big midwestern state school.
Think self-employed artisan then. Grandma worked on her own, as do most of the seamstresses I know (both in Spain and in other countries), but before marrying Grandpa (they moved quite often for the standards of the time, thus the “working on her own”) she was headmistress in an atelier of twenty women. It was all made-to-order stuff, no sweatshops there, and actually in Spanish there’s a word, “modistilla,” which literally means “young seamstress” but implies “a well-dressed, financially, mentally and sexually independent woman.” The self-employed artisan or small group of seamstresses working together are, in my experience, much more common than the sweatshops.
I was an invst banker earning 7 figures - well in my last year I did anyway -2007. And as soon as I started earning that much I walked away.
I was working 7am-6/7 pm in equity sales and I was just fed up with it. kept thinking there has to be more than to life than working all these hours.
So I trained to become an actor which was a “dream” id had for years which I tght was just a dream.
It turned out I hated the lifestyle, the long periods of unemployment and the instability.
Andnow I really regret leaving my job. And I cant go back to it - that door is closed - if i want to go back to finance it would have to be at way lower pay.
So the moral is grass is always greener
Does anyone have any advice for me? At the moment im stuck in regret
The two jobs in which I had access to everybody’s salary information were the ones where I worked as a receptionist and data entry.
Travel.
Business travel’s fun if you don’t do it very often or you get to go to really interesting places in a way that allows you to see points of interest. But when you do it often and you do it to pretty ordinary places it gets old really, really fast.
You can’t eat healthy when you’re running through hotels and airports and driving down highways all the time. You get very sick of hotels in general. You get very sick of restaurants. You get really sick of driving and flying and driving some more. Practically speaking it increases your workweek from 40-50 hours to 70 or more. You miss your family, and with enough travel you get positively heartsick about it. It’s bad for your health, sucks away huge portions of your life, and makes you feel guilty about never being home. And for some reason some people think it’s great.
I travelled a LOT. Between 2002 and 2007 in my previous job I visited the following cities: Halifax, Saint John, Dartmouth, Quebec, Montreal, Islandia, New York City, Herkimer, Utica, Ithaca, Rochester, Troy, Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, Alexandria, Richmond, Atlanta, Kingsport, Nashville, Chattanooga, Raleigh, Charleston, Jacksonville, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Birmingham, Little Rock, Lousiville, Indianapolis, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Brainerd (you betcha), Des Moines, St. Louis, Kansas City, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, Vancouver, Dallas, Houston, Wichita Falls, Texarkana, Beaumont, San Antonio, Denver, Phoenix, Tuscon, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, San Jose, and Honolulu, all just business. Plus like 50 places in Ontario. And that’s a low estimate, and a simplification (I’ve been to 25 different Chicago suburbs but I’m counting them all as Chicago; I’m counting Alpharetta, Georgia as being Atlanta, etc.) If I never see Atlanta’s airport again it’ll be too soon. I averaged 3 nights away every week. I got so sick of flying I started driving ludicrous distances - nine hours to Baltimore for one day of work, sure, why not? Then I got sick of driving.
I remember, sometime in late 2006, once sitting in some airport (SFO, I believe) utterly spent after days of non stop work, on a hard plastic chair, my flight fucking delayed again, facing a flight to another goddamned shitty airport and another stay in an uncomfortable hotel bed, me smelly and exhausted and surrounded by people having no better a time than I was - an airport is a terrible, terrible place - and looking in dismay at my shitty sandwich I’d bought for $8 that was obviously on sale at the airport because it had been rejected by a pig farmer as unfit for swine. In a flash of insight, a moment of clarity, it suddenly occurred to me that I felt about as miserable as I had ever felt in my entire life. I could not have been more lonely. I served in the Canadian Forces for five years and did things like running 15 miles and pulling 48-hour shifts in the field and I had never, doing any of those things, felt as tired as I did at that moment in SFO. And I looked up, and immediately spotted about ten men and women dragging their cheap carry-on bags past me, thousand-yard stares in their eyes, who I knew felt just like me, but the scary part of it was that some were my age and some were a LOT older. And I thought to myself, looking at some bedraggled guy who was about 15 years older than I was (34 at the time) “Can I take 15 more years of this?” And the answer, quite clearly, was no. It was going to kill me.
Right then and there I began looking for ways to engineer my departure. (I could have just quit but I wanted a layoff package.) The opportunity arose six months later and I was gone so fast I left fire trails behind me like the DeLorean in “Back to the Future.”
Business travel sucks. It sucks a LOT. Switching to a job with far less travel was a blessing for me, my health, and my family. I’d have taken a pay cut of every single penny I could possibly spare without seriously depriving my wife and daughter.
Somehow, I don’t think you are going to get much sympathy.
My advice to you is to find a job you actually like doing, even if it is at a lower pay. Cause if you’re walking away from a job that pays a million dollars, you REALLY gotta hate that job.
Besides, I don’t think this is a great time to be an i-banker anyway.
I’ll echo what **RickJay **said about travel. It’s fun once every month or so, but living out of a suitcase sucks. You get to a point where you almost feel like some sort of aimless drifter. I’d come home to my appartment and it would be like I had no more connection there than I did at any random Starwood hotel.