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Even your boss wants to quit

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Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#51

Post by andsoitis »

mikkergp wrote: post #27

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…

The more senior you are, the more responsibility you have. Responsibility doesn’t keep office hours. The CEO and other senior executives cannot say to shareholders that they had a bad day, were sick, wanted to spend more time with their family and expect that shareholders won’t look for someone who they perceive can work harder for them.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#52

Post by rot13xor »

fnbr wrote: post #9
willcipriano wrote: post #4

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.

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.

I'd even say you need a degree of sociopathy to reach upper management. I can't imagine being responsible for 1000 other people and keep them working in sync. At some point those people become a faceless resource in a spreadsheet.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#53

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

The past 5 recessions saw unemployment between 6.3% - 14.7% with a mean unemployment of roughly 8%. If you're among the many who think we are entering a recession, and I'm with you on that if you are, then strap in for an inversion of the job market and your boss' desire to quit.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#54

Post by whimsicalism »

sokoloff wrote: post #33
bachmeier wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise a good point, but not necessarily the one you intended. "Looming recession" is not an accurate characterization. "Possible recession" is, and frankly, the probability might not be that high. On the one hand we see stories about the great resignation and blaming the government for overheating the economy and causing inflation. On the other we hear claims, based on limited evidence, that we're obviously headi…

A recession is defined as a multi-month long period of declining economic performance. (Another common definition is two quarters in a row of negative growth.) Q1 real GDP growth in the US was negative. It seems quite likely that we're in the start of a recession by either of the definitions above, but we'll know with greater certainty in a little over a month when the advance estimate of the Q2 figure is released.

Given that labor markets remained relatively tight while we had negative GDP in Q1, I think it is likely that labor markets will remain relatively tight even if there is negative GDP for this quarter.

I think the term recession was not being used in the sense of "two quarters of real negative GDP" but in the more colloquial sense.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#55

Post by lesuorac »

subsubzero wrote: post #25
willcipriano wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Anecdotally, I don't think any of the moves I made with over 20% pay increase really came with an increase of responsibility. Some businesses just have better margin so they can pay more.

To clarify, I just mean I always moved horizontally between businesses and not diagonally. Although at a business I may have also moved vertically (w/ more responsibility) but that's moot.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#56

Post by magicroot75 »

cs137 wrote: post #5
johnwheeler wrote: post #3

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…

It's not about workers actually becoming more powerful. It's about them more frequently exercising it.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#57

Post by hansword »

> What we found was that the majority [of C-suite executives] want to do something about it, but they just haven't done something about it

I literally laughed out loud. This is how it is, this is always how it is. LOL

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#58

Post by lelandfe »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #42
karaterobot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I stepped back from a lead to a senior dev this year. I was open about it to recruiters, saying my intent was to get back into being an IC.

No one was even slightly put off by my resume or career direction. I'm not sure what "no one would hire me" means, precisely, but I didn't have an easy time – it took many months and near 100 applications to find the right spot.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#59

Post by danuker »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #37
willcipriano wrote: post #4

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.

There's always the chance you discover frugality, when you stand back, account for the expenses in time and money, and what you've gotten in exchange.

Maybe you'll see how that $20k car is twice as expensive to maintain as the $10k car. Or maybe you'll get a taste of life in a city with public transit that is faster than walking. Or maybe you just move to a cabin in the woods with satellite Internet and grow your own food.

Re: Even your boss wants to quit

#60

Post by WJW »

civilized wrote: post #28
nicolas_t wrote: post #20

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?

Even a CEO has tons of constraints, they don't have infinite power. Just some examples:

- the labor market dictates how many people you can hire.

- Speaking of budgets: they are not unlimited;

- Often what you can build depends on the levels of tech and organizational debt you have built up. A small startup simply doesn't have the organizational set-up and know-how to become a hospital and vice versa. This limits how far you can take your plans.

- Vested interests in your employee pool; if the company is (say) a dedicated Ruby on Rails shop and you decree a big rewrite in Rust then you can expect a large part of your employees to go looking elsewhere. This limits what you can build.

- Prior commitments; if there is a long-running project going on then you need to keep that staffed to maintain internal knowledge or else it will dissipate. It's not uncommon that 90% of employees is already assigned to something and you can't start new things without dropping old things.

- etc etc etc

It is extremely common for an executive to come in and start off with bold plans to improve things, then slowly discover why things are the way they are.

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