And when you get older you’ve seen or experienced these death march projects that get canceled or fail miserably, leaving those who sacrificed their life to them screwed. In fact I’d wager that any project badly planned or under-budgeted enough to become a death march project has a better than even chance of failing.
Yeah, there’s a real once-bitten-twce-shy thing going on with these kinds of projects. After you’ve been subjected to at least a couple, you tend to be leary about new ones.
One thing I’ll add, it’s not always the young kids plowing in and doing the 80 hours, sometimes there’s a boiling of the frog that can happen. First you’re working 45 to 50 hour weeks to get ahead, and then you get promoted, and then you get promoted again, and then “suddenly” you’re in the 70 to 80 hour range.
Oh, I can smell them without knowing anything about the project. Probably why the first thing I posted online after interviewing with who would be my boss was that I wasn’t sure I wanted to take the job.
Years ago, I had an offer to return to a consulting firm I’d worked for in my 20s. I had just taken a contract PM job with another company, but I actually kind of enjoyed it. They consulting firm was so desperate to hire me to lead this “high profile project for an important client” that it just felt “off”. Like it’s so important you are going to just hand it to some guy you hired off the street?
This is true. At a lot of law and consulting firms, the reason the associates work so hard is the partners are working even harder.
I’ve heard it called “golden handcuffs”. You just get so used to the lifestyle of big salary, big house, private schools, etc that it’s tough to scale it back.
I would just like to mention that the “most creative when younger” is a meme that originated in a study that tracked how often scientific papers were quoted in later papers.
That’s not quite the same thing as saying that older members of an organization cannot make valuable contributions. One of my professors (mumble mumble) years ago told the class of a University of Michigan study which showed that technical workers showed increasing productivity up to the age of (about) 50. Then they showed a slight drop - and even that drop could be overcome.
Sorry, no cites on either statement.
Saw this bit, and just had to add in…
I’m a user. Not IT. Never been IT. That being said, I was an Actuary; am now in compliance. The computer is my friend. I do quite a bit of work in SQL and SAS. It absolutely burns my butt when our consulting IT programmers have to ask me to write SQL for our ETL. WHY THE ^*#& ARE WE PAYING YOU IF THE USERS HAVE TO WRITE THE %&@%ING PROGRAMS? Actually, this is part of my rant on why farming out all of your IT is a really bad management decision - these are not people who are in the industry and know the industry. If you want efficiency, hire full-time programmers. [/rant]
So, yes, I feel for your “It was something I ended up doing”. Been there, done that.
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize it this way. Let’s assume you work professionally from 25 to 65 at 40 hours per week. Now I offer you a deal to work 80 hours per week for twice the money and you can retire at age 45. I’m sure many people would at least think about it.
That’s really the whole point of the thread right there.
If you want to earn retire-early money (or retire at normal age but decently rich) while working for somebody else you pretty much have to take one of the so-called “80 hour per week jobs” to have any chance of that serious money.
Or you can schlub along as a wage slave for 40 hours for all your life and retire at SS eligibility to your crappy bungalow & aged Toyota.
For anyone with much ambition the former is far more attractive.
To be sure, just like with aspiring pro athletes, a lot more folks assume they’ll win that competition than will actually win that competition. There are a lot more entry level positions for wannabe high fliers than there are actual high flier positions for them to move into in 5 years. They’re all expecting everybody else will get cut and they’ll get the brass ring. Some of those folks are even right about that expectation. Far more end up being wrong.
What other less demanding jobs use their legal skills?
There are tons of jobs that value or necessitate employing lawyers that don’t involve working for large law firms. Many lawyers work in-house at other companies (such as working in the legal department of a corporation). There are lawyers who work in non-profit organizations dealing with policy. Public interest attorneys. Legislative staff. A whole host of government jobs.
Many of these can involve working 9-to-5 (or close to it) hours.
It’s a strange thing to watch, because a lot of what happens is those folks work so hard that they feel like they’ve earned those extras (and sure, maybe they have), which start out little, but which end up very large. So not only the things you listed, but also that second house, those extravagant vacations, and that great car. Or even something like collecting wine or being a member of a golf club or whatever. Not only is that tough to scale back, but it takes a pretty significant bite out of that money that you could be saving so that you could retire earlier.
Depends on the industry. Lots of tech industry jobs (Google, Facebook, etc.) pay $300k+ and don’t require crazy hours. Sometimes I’ll work as long as 50 hrs/wk, but that’s pretty rare, and mostly I’m at 40. You can convert that salary into a pretty nice early retirement if you can manage not to spend it all.
That said, I am pretty passionate about some hobbies, and have had a decent handful of times where I was putting in 40 hrs/wk at work-work, and another 40 hrs on a side project of some kind. None of these went much more than a couple of months, though; I do get burned out eventually.
Fully agreed. I see this all around me, and experience it myself, by any objective measure. I wonder at the things I had the stamina and drive to do when I was younger. Now I can only try to work smarter, and carefully consider where to expend the limited goodies that I have.
I’ve written about this before: this is also what is driving the college admission process to such ridiculous competitive heights. There’s a lot of children in households with like $250-400k in income who grew up with that sort of lifestyle as normal. They have parents who value that lifestyle. The expectation is that they will also put themselves on track for that lifestyle. And if you want a “sure thing” path to making that kind of money, you really, really want to go to a top 20 University and plan for a career in law, medicine, or finance. Sure, anyone can be successful with a degree from Local U, if “successful” means “household income in the top quartile of the US”. But if you want to work on Wall Street and make Fuck You money, or even be a top cardiac surgeon or a partner in law firm, your chances of achieving that go down significantly if you go to a normal college.
So kids and parents go crazy to get into the “right” school, because who wants to be the asshole who can’t live the same life as the rest of the family? Having a wealthy family tremendously increases your own odds of reaching that level of wealth. You now have a 75% chance, say, of making it work, when a “normal” person has about a 2% chance. But for those kids, taking advantage of the 75% isn’t an opportunity, it’s an obligation. So they work those 70-100 hour weeks starting in high school, and they expect to continue like that.
I’m sure they would think about it because they probably think they need that extra money for all the things they think they need (but of course there isn’t a neat, linear relationship between salary, spending and happiness)
It is entirely possible to work much less and retire early if you have modest tastes. Which takes us back to my original point, if you are acquisitive (or think you should be) then the deal you offer seems like the right option because of course you you need all the expensive trappings of wealth because how else can you be happy?
I don’t think that path leads to happiness as often as we might imagine and it certainly shouldn’t be promoted as the only path, the obvious path or even the preferable one.
I don’t know about that… that’s like saying there are “lots” of 300k lawyer jobs out there. Overall sure, but relative to the number of lawyers (or IT people), they’re still few and far between. Most IT people and lawyers are doing very well if they top out at $150k in their career.
I kind of suspect that the reason we have this is that there seems to be a real rift developing between higher-paying knowledge worker type jobs, and lower-paying non knowledge worker projects, and the hours are sort of a consequence of some of those jobs- if you choose a career track in certain knowledge worker areas, the long hours are part of the deal, and people are willing to pay that price to be in that knowledge worker group.
Yeah, it’s called “inheritance”. Or possibly a sinecure in the family business.
It could also be the connections that come from being rich. It’s much easier to get a job when your best friend’s (who you met at your $30k/year high school) dad is the hiring manager or the hiring manager is your dad’s golf buddy. Your start up is more likely to succeed when you can get meetings with people with money (to buy your product or invest).
As an example, in 1980 when Bill Gates was trying to get a deal for Microsoft to sell an operating system to IBM, his mother, who was on the national board of United Way, talked to John Opel, who was the chairman of IBM.