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Even your boss wants to quit

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Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people don't realize is the job that pays 30% or so more than your current job requires alot more work and a ton more stress, and for me that is not worth the extra money - which by the way most of which goes to taxes anyway. I really feel like it doesn't "pay" to move up in an org mainly due to the extremely high tax hit along with stress the title comes with.

There isn't a tax bracket in the US where most of any income goes to taxes. There should be though!

In CA it’s 13.3% for incomes over 1 million

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#42
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. In big tech, as you get more senior, the job becomes miserable. I wouldn’t want to be a Director, or even a Senior Staff engineer. At a certain point you sacrifice your sanity to be in that many meetings.

My career trajectory was Dev -> Senior -> Lead -> Director -> Senior. I left a company and purposefully looked for my next job further down the ladder, after having profound burnout that made me question whether I wanted to keep working in the industry at all. I decided I like making software, I just didn't like the amount of stress, anxiety, uncertainty, politics, and bickering I was experiencing. In my experience,…

How do you find a job at a lower level? I was trying to do this and no one would hire me. I guess I could lie about my experience.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people don't realize is the job that pays 30% or so more than your current job requires alot more work and a ton more stress, and for me that is not worth the extra money - which by the way most of which goes to taxes anyway. I really feel like it doesn't "pay" to move up in an org mainly due to the extremely high tax hit along with stress the title comes with.

There isn't a tax bracket in the US where most of any income goes to taxes. There should be though!

Not quite right: California + Federal tops out over 50%. Not by a lot and it obviously won't hit most people but it's an interesting benchmark.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#44
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. In big tech, as you get more senior, the job becomes miserable. I wouldn’t want to be a Director, or even a Senior Staff engineer. At a certain point you sacrifice your sanity to be in that many meetings.

My career trajectory was Dev -> Senior -> Lead -> Director -> Senior. I left a company and purposefully looked for my next job further down the ladder, after having profound burnout that made me question whether I wanted to keep working in the industry at all. I decided I like making software, I just didn't like the amount of stress, anxiety, uncertainty, politics, and bickering I was experiencing. In my experience,…

Thanks for sharing. Sorry to hear you had to go through all that.

What I've realized is the corporate ladder is a fiction that serves to keep people working harder and harder without significant pay bumps. It is an artificial status game that has real ramifications; however, since it is a zero-sum game, it ends up bringing out the worst in everyone.

What are your goals now around your career?

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#45
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a factor too, and I think that as Millennials and Xers realize that the BoomerJobs--the jobs in which you actually have some choice in what you work on, where you write your own performance review because the boss sees you as a friend rather than an exploitable resource--aren't going to be allocated to them, but written out of existence, we will see an acceleration of the discouragement and "presenteeism" that…

> BoomerJobs--the jobs in which you actually have some choice in what you work on, where you write your own performance review Yes, boomers had better pay where a middle class blue collar job could afford you a nice house and kids in the suburbs, but this idea you quote, I'd need much more data on because the entire culture of being a boomer is much more top down, listen to your boss, do what your told then the moder…

I think it’s now; do what you’re told or I’ll replace you with someone cheaper. Then it will be do what your told or I’ll fire you and you’ll lose your visa and have to go back to your home country. It’s also hard for me to think of it getting any worse than the gig economy where you’re one capricious algorithmically driven decision away from being fired. And don’t get me started on Amazons intentional grinding down of employees. I think the attempt at adopting a culture to placate millennials with some agency is simply a way to replace the older workers with cheaper newer workers. I think the reality is millennials on average have fewer good options and will always have to accept worse conditions.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#46

There was some other comment about how objectively good things are right now and how good the future looks for most of the world(humans, not environment) and it makes me wonder if somehow the better things are the worse things get since wealth is still so unevenly distributed. With all the talk about work-life balance and the great resignation and worker power, I have to imagine that maybe 50 years ago if you were po…

Nothing meaningful will trickle down to blue collar / minimum wage jobs from these types of "changes" because capital gains taxes are much lower than income taxes. If you 80-20 the issue of inequality, this is what you should spend most of the time discussing. The fact that many can afford to let money sit in the bank earning virtually risk-free ~7-8% year (~3% for "true" risk free) and pay ~20% on those gains instead of the fucking 42% of our income some of us pay in places like NYC is where this is really at

Increasing capital gains taxes would have obvious meaningful implications for financial markets, so the debate really should be about what's the lesser of two evils here: reducing inequality or reducing the strength of the US financial market. You decide.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a tax bracket in the US where most of any income goes to taxes. There should be though!

In California the top marginal tax rate can be over 50%. 37% federal tax, 12% state tax, 3.8% net investment tax.

Not sure what the net investment tax is, but just the normal Medicare tax (2.35%) is enough to get over 50% with federal and state income taxed there

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been my experience moving from individual contributor to c suite exec. As an individual contributor, I was free to just do what I thought was best for the company and contribute to any project that I thought I could add the most value. As a c-suite exec, I spend most of my time in meetings that lead to very little change and I look on with a bit of envy on ICs who get to improve things without asking for permi…

You're at the top. Why can't you choose to do things differently? Who or what else are you waiting on?

If you are at the top, you are waiting on everyone else. Being humans with their own thoughts and feelings they need to be won over if you want them to stay aligned with you.

What else can be done differently other than giving up and doing everything yourself? But once you start doing everything yourself you are no longer at the top. You are at the very bottom.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#49
post #5

I’ve been wondering how the great resignation narrative will fare with the looming recession.

"Great resignation" is mostly that, a narrative. Workers aren't actually becoming powerful. They're just slightly less powerless, and everyone knows it's transient--barring an overthrow of corporate capitalism, but I think we all know that such things are unpredictable--which is why people are itchy to move now before things go back to how they were and everyone is stuck in place for a while. It's good for cappie PR…

[deleted]

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#50

I wouldn't want my bosses job. I don't think it pays all that much more than mine but it requires a lot of days full of meetings and late nights. I may even do better on a hourly basis. I think some people get wrapped up in the headline salary number (XXX,XXX per year, that's a lot of money!) and never break it down into a hourly number to see if it's actually a better deal.

Hourly is meaningless if you can’t choose more hours. If you had a job that paid $1000/hr but you only work 1 hr/week that is not enough for many people to live on. So if you need a lot of money for your lifestyle the high hours/high pay job might be your only option.

But you'd have time to do another $1000/hr job elsewhere.
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