Some of you don’t believe me that it’s better to retire in a bear market, when all is in shambles, than in a bull market. I, for one, found it very hard to quit the money when times were good. I was always suffering from the “one more year syndrome.”
Seriously, as soon as my year-end bonus hit my bank account in mid-February, I would tell myself why not stick around for another 10 months to at least hear how much I would get. During the period when I was told (mid-December) and when I got paid, I had the option of just taking it easy if I wanted to do something else.
Finance Gets Frowned Upon
But after bonuses dried up during the financial crisis and main street really started hating anybody who worked in finance, I found it so much easier to walk away.
When you had nothing to do with someone welching on their mortgage, yet still got blamed for the crisis while you continued to pay your own, working in finance started to get real old.
Then there was the issue of getting micromanaged by an insecure and uninspiring colleague out of NYC. Finally, a large part of my compensation was being paid in company stock that was also plunging.
Why stick around? It’s not like I was doing something meaningful like helping disabled children with abusive parents find safe homes and loving caretakers.
The Exodus In Technology
The same conflict is going on now with many big tech workers, especially those who work at Facebook. I sat down with an old acquaintance who works as a Product Manager at Facebook for a beer the other day.
“Roger” went to Phillips Exeter, U Penn, then Harvard for his MBA. He’s basically every parent’s dream child who landed what he thought was a dream job after building a stellar educational resume.
Who wouldn’t want to work at a company that figures out how to track your every move online, to then sell your habits to the most pertinent advertisers?
Who wouldn’t want to help enrich their leader so he can buy 700 acres of land in Kauai and then sue locals to give up their ancestral land rights?
But after just 15 months at Facebook, he wants to quit.
He lists the following reasons:
- A growing perception that Facebook and Instagram simply make people sad and lonely because everything is BS and curated.
- Enabling the Russians to meddle with our elections.
- The Cambridge Analytica data breach.
- The NY Times highlighting how the CEO and COO withheld information about the data breach.
- An article by ex-employee Mark Luckie saying “there’s a Black person problem at Facebook,” which punctuates an overall diversity problem at FB.
- Uninspiring senior management who talk like robots.
- Allowing Netflix and Spotify to read user’s private messages
- An emptiness upon realization that all his education and smarts aren’t doing the world much good.
Make no mistake about it. These problems have been around for a while. But something changed starting in July 2018. Facebook’s stock no longer went up. Instead, it started to tank.
Desire May Be Ruining Your Life
When Facebook’s stock was going up, my friend was more than happy to ignore all the bullet points that were bugging him. After all, the pay was great and firm was consistently ranked as one of the top employers to work for.
But now, with his equity worth much less, he wants to do something that makes him feel good. He’s 34 years old, coincidentally the same age when I decided to leave finance behind.
The desire for money and prestige may be ruining your life. Yes, it’s good to get a taste of making big bucks and working at a firm with a low acceptance rate. But if you don’t like it after a year or two, get the hell out.
The longer you stay, the more empty you will feel. You may actually start feeling dirty because you’re accepting money from an institution you don’t believe in.
The Joy Of Helping Others
Contrast this bad feeling to a guy I know named Nate, who works as a child counselor at the Edgewood Center in SF. The center is primarily there to help neglected, abused, or mentally ill children. At 38, he makes 1/5th of what my Facebook pal makes, but he loves going to work every day to help the kids work out their problems.
He told me the joy he gets from helping others is more than any amount of money some tech company that promotes fake news could ever pay him. When a child gets placed at a foster home after months at Edgewood, each time he feels like he has won the lottery.
Do Something That Makes You Feel Great
Roger has no doubt most of his colleagues love Facebook and enjoy what they do for a living. Facebook just isn’t for him any longer, so he has to move on. It’s natural for all of us to become bored and try to find something new.
In the beginning, most of us will need to accept working at jobs that might not be ideal in order to survive. Some of us like Roger, might accept a job offer that sounds ideal but turns out not to be the case. After you’ve built up enough of a financial cushion to be more selective, don’t stick around if you don’t truly enjoy what you do.
The good times may very well be coming to an end. If and when it does, the lean years might be the best thing that will have ever happened to you. When the financial incentives go away, you’re left focusing on what truly matters: family, friends, purpose.
Recommendation If You Want To Move On
I recommend everybody negotiate a severance if you want to leave a job you no longer enjoy. If you negotiate a severance like I did back in 2012, you not only get a severance check, but potentially subsidized healthcare, deferred compensation, and worker training.
When you get laid off, you’re also eligible for up to roughly 27 weeks of unemployment benefits. Having a financial runway is huge during your transition period.
Conversely, if you quit your job you get nothing. Check out How To Engineer Your Layoff: Make A Small Fortune By Saying Goodbye.
It’s the only book that teaches you how to negotiate a severance. In addition, it was recently updated and expanded thanks to tremendous reader feedback and successful case studies.
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It’s a poignant thought. I’ve sent two former employees to work in data @ FB.
It reminds me of a common sports analogy. There are no chemistry problems on winning teams.
This goes to show that working for an up and coming company is a better working enviroment because you want to show the industry that the company will be a force by the products they offer, marketing campaigns and all the intelligent people who work with them. That was what Facebook in the 2000s. Today being a one of the more recognizable companies today they have to deal with the politics and scrutiny being a well-established brand and they have become more of a corporate environment in which your friend experienced.
To answer the question posed to readers… I tolerate what I feel are some inadequately skilled senior leaders, including in my own area. I tolerate it because a) I generally like the field I’m in, b) I’m well compensated and the income enables my personal financial plans, and c) I think this is the kind of thing one has to put up with when pursuing a traditional corporate career. The science behind how people are hired and promoted largely explains (to my satisfaction anyways) why this is not atypical. I’m hoping my current senior leader decides to move on before I do! lol I work in corporate strategy in financial services. Prior to that I worked at a profitable tech startup that got bought out.
*Tounge firmly in cheek* I sincerely hope that one day I have a job that pays me so well the main reason that I don’t want to leave it is the money being so good. Sounds awesome. Golden handcuffs #signmeup!
HH
It’s definitely one of those not-really-that-bad sort of bad thing, right? I’ve been there, and really it’s the trade off of being miserable in the morning, squeaking through a week, and then gasping for some time on the weekend to unwind. You tell yourself week after week, “I got to stop doing this shit,” might even plan your escape, then you rationalize one more bonus, one more stock payout, one more summer, one more holiday season, I mean you barely work during the holidays anyway! Then, it’s almost bonus time again and you wake up and a decade has blown by.
Sad thing is for a lot of my friends, when the money flows in like that, you don’t really save like you should and after a decade you maybe have a nice 401K, maybe a few thousand in savings (if you’re lucky) and not much else. Then, the handcuffs are really on. Your near, or at, burnout from pushing one more season, and have little to show but a high cost of living you’re married to for some reason.
It’s not all bad, and you can easily unplug and reset your life, but the funny thing about money is unless you really set up a plan, you’ll spend all of it (and likely even more) than you make and have little to show for the bigger salary. I came to speak less of what I make, and instead what I save. Saving is the real take home money, the rest is just accounting balances moving around the sheet.
I too hope you find a job one day that ups your lifestyle, and that the smarts that brought you here mean you never get caught in the cuffs and really make the best of it.
Your first paragraph is my life.
I do save about 45% of the Before Tax income, so I am hoping that it won’t be forever and I will be able to walk away someday. Not quite yet though.
The ideal, of course, would be a job that you love that pays well. Perhaps that’s mostly an exception instead of reality. I became a veterinarian knowing that I would never be highly paid, but I still enjoy 20 years after graduation what I am doing. We are frugal, live in the same town that you went to high school in, Sam, so are not extravagant. And we’re happy! Thanks, as always, for this post!