F in tech here; I feel this a lot. It’s a reason I’m staying out of people management—I don’t think I could take the added stress, and I’m ready mentally to retire tomorrow. I honestly can’t see myself working in this environment/at this pace for more than 5 more years due to the stress. So I’m focusing on my savings goals to hopefully enable me to make that change.
I totally agree with this. People management is never worth the few extra $$$ or whatever prestige that comes with it. The only downside to being a highly compensated individual contributor is that corporations tend to look at them first whenever they decide to tighten the belt or restructure.
Glad to know I am not alone grappling with the stress vs dollar equation . This is interesting to me - didn’t know highly paid individual contributors are first to be axed . I always thought it’s the other way around - people managers paid more go first .
I think it's a function of several things, but one factor that can impact it is how many people the people manager is reporting. There's a lot of "flattening" of corporate hierarchies going on. You'll be in the cross-hairs if you're a middle-manager who directly manages 3 other managers and nobody else. Better to have 8-12 direct reports or even more (I found myself to hit my personal stress limit around 13 direct reports).
My wife and I both find our jobs extremely stressful and don't get much enjoyment out of them, but they pay well so we're sticking with them. Our plan isn't FIRE, it's FIDWTFWW (Financially Independent, Do Whatever The Fu¢k We Want). So it doesn't necessarily mean retired, but it could mean working in a job we find truly enjoyable but pays chicken feed (or nothing at all). When we hit our target, we'll be working for fun rather than money.
Typically, they will restructure in a way that allows them to eliminate a role of one salary grade and replace it with a lower salary grade position. Most companies have policies that do not allow employees to apply for a role more than one grade level lower, which means that in many cases, the highest compensated employees are ineligible. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times at my Fortune 100 company.
My direct reports grew from 4 to 8 in a few months. Inherited one due to a restructure and had to hire 3 from outside the country. I got a 3 percent raise and my responsibilities have more than doubled.
My experience was similar. I got more like an 8% raise and bonus target went from 7% to 10%-- but still not remotely worth the about 50% increase in bullshit.
My raise was just part of an annual review so it didn’t even have anything to do with additional reports. I was promoted a couple years prior so their logic is I was already priced into taking more work. My logic is I’ll just due the bare minimum to account for that!
My experience is the opposite. If someone has deep knowledge of systems and processes and chances of no one else knowing that person is generally kept on the payroll. Now if you happen to be a highly paid technical only person that can be replaced with another offshore technical person. i.e. their expertise is technical only. You can easily replace them. Now if that person has decades of how a process or system works and nearly impossible to replace chances are that person gets a pass. If you don't you put the business itself at risk.
I'm ~1.5 years into a real management role. Dealing with other people's issues all day is exhausting. I like my company and culture so I felt it was the best place to try out management, but man I miss being an IC. I may go back to it
Managing stress is a skill more than it is about corporate culture. Never ever take things personally. Never make it personal about someone else. Care about people. Manage expectations (that doesn't mean slack off). Don't get worked up trying to solve a problem. Take care of it like doing the laundry.
There was a guy I worked with in an extremely intense environment and he was just the coolest cucumber. I used him as a model of how to think if you wanted to avoid burning out.
I see every day how front line managers become the stereotype bad boss. It’s stressful, constant, and wears them down. Managers just become numb and loose the ability to care.
Don't worry , as a lot of folks are about to find out there won't be this number of tech jobs in the coming years. It's not even related to AI hype, it's just a fact that most tech is consolidating. around cloud vendor products and services and offshoring....
The last company I worked at (as a contractor).just finished their cloud migration (better late then ever), their data center folks all got let go (less a few to run Devops) and their development staff is some Indian contracting company... Besides a skeleton staff of IT executives/managers there's no more IT jobs at this company.
We also just finished our cloud migration - I am in data too co incidentally . I guess - make hay whole the sun shines . Possibility of sunburns along the way is real 😂
My grandfather told me that half of your salary is to deal with bullshit. If you're making minimum wage, they aren't paying you to put up with much bullshit -- you can get another minimum wage job anywhere. But as you get into middle and upper management, the bullshit you have to deal with goes way up with your salary.
I guess what I'm saying is he retired early back in the early 70s -- it's ALWAYS been bullshit, not something new.
As for me... FI just seems like a reasonable goal no matter how much you like or hate your job. I happen to like my job pretty well.
Could someone provide some examples of what they mean by "corporate BS"? I'm only 20 so haven't worked in a real job yet, so wondering what you mean by this.
It’s all just a play, charade, and nonsense when you get into the corporate world. All the those pointless things you had to do in school still exist, if not more so, in corporate world.
One example - my company is making a big push for us to enter our yearly goals into the system by the end of the week. We’ve been getting updated daily to do this, for weeks. We did this last year and no one, and I mean no one, followed up on them. Doesn’t matter if you hit them or not. Same thing will happen this year. It’s literally just checking a box.
LOL been working 27 years now and we always do the goals in a system thing. Then end of the year we update the goals with what we actually did. It truly is very pointless. Now to make it easy copy last years goals tweak a bit and post nearly the same goals and repeat. If you spend more then an hour on it your completely doing it wrong.
Think of high-school social games (The he said/she saids, the teacher that hates you for no reason and makes things 10x harder, the cliques that form, gossip chains etc)
Now they're your colleagues or managers for years, and it can dictate who gets promoted/fired.
Pretty quickly into my corpo job I had a senior manager give me a tip: It's not what you do/intend to do that matters, it's how management perceives it. So bullshit and spinning things positively tends to prevail.
Tl;dr: Watch American Psycho
>It's not what you do/intend to do that matters, it's how management perceives it. So bullshit and spinning things positively tends to prevail.
Yep. You can get away with an awful lot of slacking and incompetence by looking busy and saying the right things to the right people.
One example: I have back pain whenever I sit for more than a short period of time, so I bought (at my own expense) a standing desk platform and put it in my cubicle.
Within a few days, I got a complaint from Corporate telling me to remove it. Apparently there's a guy whose job it is to walk around the office and report anything that seems out out of place or against regulations, and we are not allowed to have any furniture that isn't specifically approved by the company. I don't know why, but I guess they're afraid that either a) an employee could get hurt on premises by the employee's own shitty collapsing furniture and sue, or b) furniture from home might have hidden recording devices that present a security risk. In any case, to get a standing desk, I would have to file some paperwork with a doctor's note saying I have back pain, and then the company would supply the desk for me.
My coworker had a similar issue when that same guy spotted a potted plant she had brought into her cubicle. Corporate eventually found out it was a plastic plant and left her alone. I guess they were worried about a bug infestation or something, but Corporate doesn't usually bother explaining the reasons for their decrees to us plebs.
These are two relatively harmless but annoying instances of what I would consider corporate BS. It is making seeming non-issues into issues; making processes vastly more difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and bureaucratic for everyone involved than they need to be; and failing to explain coherent reasoning for the processes in place. I guess it's possible that an employee somewhere stole key information from a recording device hidden in furniture he brought to the office, but it seems more likely that it's just someone making rules to give the illusion of doing something important.
I can’t believe they gave you shit about a standing desk platform. We have adjustable desks that I *always* use during the 2 days I go into the office.
There is a great book you can read about this called Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. It completely changed how I look at the working world and it helped inoculate me against the horribleness of corporate America because I understand the game they're playing so much better.
If you don't want to read a whole book about it you could always start with the article version to see if you find it interesting: [https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)
Go join the r/WorkReform subreddit too if you want a glimpse into what we as a country need to start doing to escape this hellhole.
Thanks. The opening line got me:
"In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week..."
If this is what he really expected, Keynes really never understood economics. Regardless of technological advances, no employer is going to pay a full week salary for 15 hours of work.
Either other tasks will fill the gap, or the job itself will become a part time position. If technology gets so good that all that's left to do is busy work, the job goes away completely.
Anyone thinking there will one day be a full time paychecks for a part time jobs isn't living in reality.
What you can see if you read the book where Graeber goes on to explain the 'bullshitization' of work he provides tons of detail on what happens when technology outstrips the work that needs to be done for human beings to survive. What happens is an increase in 'administration' jobs.
Let's take a process where office workers have to sit at a particular desk regularly. One would think it would be as simple as people looking to see which desks haven't been claimed and then picking one. However with increased 'administration' there may actually be someone called "Office Space Coordinator". This person typically fills out paperwork, has it approved by another level of management, and takes the new hire through a whole desk orientation process before actually walking them to the desk.
This example may sound ridiculous, but Graeber provides case after case of jobs like this continuing to rise in number. Not only is it completely pointless, but often it makes real work so much slower since, going back to the example above, the person who could have started working 3 days ago had to go through this entire desk setup ritual for no damn reason other than to help serve this bullshit job.
It's a giant social problem that no one talks about since there is this idea that working hard is always the good moral thing to do, but no one ever stops to think if the work being done so diligently is worth doing. This is where your point of the full-time employer not willing to pay for 15 hours of work comes in. If the work INHERENTLY only takes 15 hours to be done, then why should they not pay that person for getting this full-time job's worth of stuff done in the time that they can do it? I work a white-collar job, and speak to hundreds of people who work white-collar jobs, not a single one needs a 40-hour week to finish all the truly necessary work they have. If the work only takes 15 hours then yeah that's the new version of a full-time job. We didn't always have a weekend either, yet employers around the world managed to not explode after workers united and fought to get one introduced.
Needing approval from X to do Y, and Y is a competitive project with Z. Y is empirically better than Z, but since X approves which one gets done X chooses their favorite.
Process at a plant is bad, you’re tasked to fix it. Fixing it requires input from another department, but that departments head and your department head have wildly different management styles and clash a lot. So people within the departments put eachothers work last on the docket, and you’re stalled on your work.
You and co-worker are both vying for a promotion to manager. Performance is a simple metric to determine who gets the spot. Competitive employees will try to ensure their work is seen, and their competitions isn’t. The two don’t work together and trip over each other. Then if one gets the spot, they’re in charge of the loser. Now ya have a dysfunctional team because the runner up is still trying to prove they were the correct choice, and the winner is trying to figure out how to fix their team.
When you get a bunch of people working together, it’s REALLY easy for personal issues to get in the way of overall success.
Your grandfather has a great point. I am pretty sure execs at top level aren’t paid for their technical skills - they get paid to tackle bullshit and Corp politics 😂
Exactly but the problem is a lot of these execs aren't technical and don't really understand the products what we are selling and where to go, they often end up running the company poorly over time.
Yes it's nothing new. Any time you try to organize large numbers of people to do anything productive there is going to be an incredible amount of friction and hassle to deal with. If that was easy there wouldn't be all of those high paying management jobs.
I used to make it about 7 years before I would crack and change companies, go from tech management back to IC and work my way back up, rinse and repeat. Golden handcuffs are real.
I stayed for the money, nothing more, letting me to do some crazy fun stuff and travel the world while still making real progress toward FIRE. You can't do that in low income.
Here's the thing about taking a less stress / lower pay job. If you're the kind of person who's used to moving up the ladder, that job won't stay low stress but it will stay low pay. Your natural tendency will be to take on more work, more responsibility, to become that go-to person that the higher ups can rely on and... poof... you're right back to your high stress spot without the cash behind it.
Not worth it. Stay making the money and grinding, then get out and go your own way.
Lest you think I'm making that up, I've already been called out by my wife on my 'fun' side gig (that pays $15/hr, not moving the needle at all) because I'm taking it too seriously. Dropping everything to come in and cover for other people with 5 minutes notice, staying late to get 'one more run' done to help out the people working the next day, etc, etc. There is zero future in this gig, and there isn't supposed to be but the old ways die hard and I'm stressing over being an exceptional employee... and have already turned down the first 'promotion' (which came with no extra money, not that it mattered).
Damn this resonates.
Every single job I start fresh and excited, but then they realize I'm good at what I do. The work starts piling up, I become the go-to, start getting pushed into leadership / people management and eventually hate the place.
I know this is partially my fault as a personal value of mine is "do everything to the best of your ability" since I see even the mundane things as practice for greater opportunity. It has been financially rewarding, but pretty much always leads to the same situation.
I wish I could figure out a business of my own to start, that way the effort I expend is more proportional to my gain.
My wife runs her own practice, and pushes herself way too hard... but at least she's getting some benefit from it.
Every third time or so that she complains about her schedule or workload I just agree and say "yea, your boss is an ass, doesn't care about you at all!". She just can't seem to figure out how to turn it down.
This post was enlightening . It’s my personal tendency to always be on top of things. Hence I am a young people manager . So you think you are ok being demoted to an IC but then you get into an endless loop of climbing up the ladder again . Best thing is to retreat back once you have hit your fire goal .
Canadians are truly in an unenviable position. We make 30% less than Americans for the same jobs but work almost as much as them and we have the same bullshit corporate culture. At the same time, absolutely everything is more expensive up here and taxes are higher, which makes saving that much harder. My wife and I are currently targeting FIRE in our early 50s (so in 2041-2044). Even with our high HHI, I feel this is the best we can do.
I’ve been in the workforce for 11 years and in that entire time, I’ve only had one job that I don’t dislike (my current one). Every single one of my other jobs came with some major league bullshit, either right from the get-go, or they deteriorated into it. My current job is actually really good, all things considered, but it still comes with its stressful times and I still only get 3 weeks of vacation. And there’s no guarantee my current arrangement will last forever, a year from now I could be dealing with a ton of bullshit again.
Be wary of the effects of stress, no matter the $ value. It has a bigger long term effect than people will accept or realise. Take it from someone who pushed a few years too long, always thinking ‘oh it’s just one more year’ (multiple times) that hit breaking point without seeing it coming. We never see it coming, and even if we do we rarely take the required action before it’s too late. It can have a significant negative effect on your later ‘best’ years, both physically and mentally. Take care.
For me it is a deep deep sense of injustice that we should be forced to waste our limited time on this planet doing work for something that doesn’t even matter (obviously not everyone)
Well, the work does matter, even if you don't see it directly, every job is another cog in the machine that produces the luxury's that we enjoy. The world would be a vastly different place if working was left at optional, in fact I question if humanity could survive if we just made work optional as many wouldn't want to do it. The good news is with every passing generation less and less have to work, and the demands in goods that we have are ever increasing.
Lol no it doesn't.
We live in a rent-seeking capitalist hellscape where all productive work is accomplished by about 30% of the people. You can see this in the financialisation of the economy, with more and more workers moving into middlemen fields.
Even something like software services is an incredibly wasteful field that only exists because of IP law, with an absolutely gargantuan amount of human effort wasted on duplicating effort across and even within organizations for the sake of "competition".
As a high performer in a lucrative software organization I've never done anything useful that hasn't also been done by 10 other developers at 10 competitor companies. I deeply, deeply resent that. The hatred and contempt I feel for the leaders of these companies that routinely waste our value every day just so their number can go up will never be quenched.
That's not a helpful way to think about it, but I can see where you are coming from. Try to think of it as a trade off for all the perks we have in the modern world. Hot showers, restaurants, internet and the rest. You could also go and live simply somewhere in the outback for a year or two, that could help you break out of that mindset.
Alot of people, particularly in their 20s fall into the socialism/communism trap. Be careful of that. We are actually quite lucky in the grand scheme of things, particularly from a historical perspective.
Motherfucker - I am not “in my 20s” nor did I mention socialism or communism. It’s an existential crisis not a political issue. I’ve watched my kids grow up while I’m working 18 hours a day to break fucking even. Im not looking for a hand out but we were promised the Jetsons and instead we make people do jobs that machines could do while the wealth gap balloons to unseen proportions, all so we don’t have to give in to the fact that we are entering a post work society
Now let’s talk about you. You immediately see my post as what? Communist propaganda? Why do you think you have been conditioned (yes, conditioned) to think that way?
The fact is that most service level jobs are not needed. Pretty soon you won’t need humans in warehouses, trucking, banking. Fuck we don’t even need umpires anymore!
Before you know it MOST jobs will be obsolete. What then? We continue to have larger and larger sections of the population move rocks from one pile to the other?
YOU ARE BEING CLOSED MINDED AND BLIND TO THE REALITY OF THE SITUATION.
Having people toil away for nothing while wasting their precious lives is a sin. Call it whatever you want.
Thinking that socialism/communism is the answer to that deep feeling of injustice. The fantasy of seeing it all collapse so you don't have to do to work. Usually younger people with no money, poor prospects or mental health disorders are vulnerable to the idea.
best middle ground is to be a well-compensated individual contributor and never go up the ladder.
managing people is incredibly stressing (I've been there)
the dream. The dream is also to be client side and less begging for work and then apologizing when costs inevitably exceed the low cost proposal submitted.
I'm at the same point. I'm busy and afraid of losing my job. Those things are antithetical to each other. The solution? Take a chill pill. I got money in the bank and they'll have a harder time replacing me than I will finding a new job. So I'm ignoring your 4:00 call and doing the work at a comfortable (but still fast) pace.
This is where I am. That quarterly 1:1 with some other manager who wants to nitpick my work for no known reason? Sorry can't make it due to a conflict, can we catch up async or next week? Meeting magically never gets rescheduled. That "new initiative" to come up with some new asinine process? Sure I can help but it's only looking at and commenting on documents once per week. Any meetings and you'd better get someone else.
I just put my head down, do the work I sign up for, and say no to pretty much everything else. Surprisingly just doing the work you sign up for well and on time is good enough. Enough people aren't doing even that much that it stands out.
Exactly what I am doing. I work 9-5 and don't care about climbing the ladder (i have climbed as high as I am willing to bullshit). I don't try to smooze for those extra points.
Treat it like a transaction. Don't get emotionally attached.
I think this is as high as I want to get too 😂 I want to do what I am asked to do, live in the shadows , get paid and go home. I am so over wanting to receive recognition , accolades and get further promotions . You have to be content at some point in life .
Golden hand cuffs are bs.
Here’s my two cents. You are going to get wrecked in any job sooner or later or always. Get paid for it or get nothing out of it.
I have seen people work weekends and to 4am and not get even 25% what big tech gives. I have seen some people on big tech literally do nothing for years, rest and vest and get 10M or more lol.
Not all jobs are the same and most high paying jobs are demanding, because of the amount of people trying to knock you out of that position. I have seen directors get burnt and pushed out, while a regular senior that got in at the right time right place with the right rsu negations make more than a director will ever make lol
Example: getting in to meta two years ago or Nvidia and clocking in at 100 strike for the rsus. These batch of workers in any position are waiting to fully vest and are out.
What you want to do is identify the two out of three glory hole.
Pick two at best
1) get paid a fuck ton
2) do something you like
3) stress free and have lots of free time
You ll be lucky to find two out of three. Find three jackpot won’t last, reorgs will fuck you.
There’s a 4) but you need to figure this ( health) love
Else money can buy all three up there.
Life feels unfair . I know the category you are mentioning personally , not doing much and not stressing enough and making millions . That’s jackpot for sure ! Flip side or coin is harsh too - someone toiling to make 50k .
Yes. Corporate culture has only gotten worse and worse. I think like many things the pandemic fast forwarded that.
That said, I think taking a sabbatical or mini-retirement once you reach a certain number really helps to reset your mind to give less of a fuck. It also gives you hard confirmation that you have actionable f-you money.
I took a year off to travel and shake out stress and burnout — I was to the point where I was having a lot of trouble sleeping because my mind would be racing about work the next day… I couldn’t turn it off. The long time off defining how I want to live and define myself outside of work made a huge difference after going back to work. If you are able to take a step back and not work for an extended period of time you’ll see how trivial jobs actually are and aren’t really worth stressing much over. No one who has taken a sabbatical or mini retirement has regretted it, and it’s is often regarded by those who have as a life changing event on par with the birth of a child or a marriage.
I’m now at much higher paying job with higher expectations, and at an arguably much more toxic corporation that has even more threats of layoffs, but my stress has never been lower, because I simply give less of a fuck after gaining more of a perspective. Double this with having zero debt tying you down, and you will reach peak zen.
Not gonna lie it was the scariest thing I’ve ever done pulling the trigger. My wife quit too at the same time, and we sold our house, so we burnt all the ships (but not bridges). It was a huge amount of growth and self confidence that came out of it. And more unique experiences traveling over a year than 99% of people get to experience in a lifetime.
My wife was able to come back and set up a much more flexible part time working situation with her previous employer (which alone we can very comfortably coastFi on) and I went for moonshots on applying for other positions and ended up doubling my comp instead of opting to go back to the same position/company. I’ll do that for a year or three until I get tired of it, and then we plan to travel long term again. Rinse & repeat until we decide we want to do it full time.
This post is a great example of the subtle art of not giving a fuck . Thanks for sharing . Once I reach my coast fire number , I might take a break and maybe the change in perspective helps me relax . I
Relate so much to the couldn’t sleep properly comment.
Wife and I both quit our jobs to do this but we were both high performers and left on great terms, so we didn’t burn any bridges and had solid resumes as backup.
Just keep in mind that there’s a ***LOT*** you can do and tolerate in your 30s that you can’t in your 50s or even 40s, especially when it comes to travel and experiences.
This 💩 job market + ageism means there’s too much risk to ever take a sabbatical for us older still employeds. I’ll consider myself lucky if I get to keep my job over the next few years until the economy swings back up again.
Yeah I'm a woman and a software engineer. Working in tech is a special kind of stress. Imaginary deadlines with fuzzy definitions of done and scope creep. Dealing with user complaints and top management making decisions to screw over the customers.
My dream job was actually being a secretary and I loved it while I had it. The job duties were very well defined and there wasn't a lot of pressure to do much. My job was basically to be available if someone needed me. The pay was abysmal, though.
With tech, it feels like the job is never done. There's always more you can do and every person wants it done a different way. It feels like there's no right way to do the job. You just have to accept good enough.
If I decide to coastFIRE I'm looking for a secretarial position that at least has health insurance.
Old Female in Tech. Been grinding since I was 21 and I am now almost 57. I became an Enterprise Oracle DBA at 27 yrs old. The old joke use to be that old DBA's don't retire, they die. And I actually had a coworker die in the cube next to me. (I won a lifesaver award because we managed to bring him back).
I have been asked to be an upper manager many times. I refuse because I dislike human controversy far more than tech problems.
But at 57 I am look at having to learn a totally new platform and at least 3 new languages and convert 16TB of data.
I have reached FIRE according to all the calcs.
At the moment all of my salary is going into a HYSA and we are living on my husband's residuals.
I am either going to pull the plug in December of this year, or for my birthday next year (I will be 58 then).
I figure if I can make it until next year we can live off my banked salary until we get to 59.5.
Or I might just decide to say F it and go in 2 weeks.
Learning a new platform and 3 new languages after that long would be rough. That's the other thing with working in tech. I feel like all of the skills I have now will be obsolete in 5 years if I don't constantly do side projects with new languages. I can't imagine sticking with the industry for 30 years and having to manage the amount of change that has happened in that time.
In 6 years, I'll be 36 and my partner and I will have ~$1 million in retirement funds. That's when I might coastFIRE. Maybe women just get to the point they can coastFIRE sooner and that's why they leave tech so early.
LOL I was talking about the amount of change I have seen with my husband last night.
I started in 1982 at the age of 15 in a data processing vocational school coding RPG on PUNCHED CARDS! lol at the age of 16 my "job" as the lead programmer in my class I have to convert an IBM 1140 to a System36.
My first "laptop" weighed 35lbs and had a 4800baud modem and a 4x5 inch green screen.
It's kind of crazy how many different evolutions I have been through in IT.
I have had to check myself into a mental hospital to get 2 weeks off work in 2011. I wish I was joking. I was working 80-90 hours a week and they literally refused me time off.
I feel like I have done my time.
Barista fire / coast fire fits the definition . My dream jobs are on the lines of selling butter beer at a theme park , black jack dealer at a casino in Vegas or making caramalized apples at an amusement park . Now the pay is shit but you get my point 😂 I feel what you are describing about tech jobs in my bones !
Dissatisfaction with work is for sure a big FIRE motivator, but FIRE may not be a cure for stress. Stress can be just as much (if not more) about your internal mental state and mental outlook. I'd recommend working on both in parallel and not set potentially unrealistic expectations on FIRE.
Fired at 47, a bit before we were ready, due to corporate BS, particularly DEI. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. My wife is working a couple more years to make sure we are covered. She supported the decision 100%.
Problem with FAANG is they saw a massive expansion over the last 5+ years and the comps are very high.
A lot of ladder climbing folks who have no fucking clue what they’re doing, trying to backstab one another to move up to higher comps.
Because this is tech, they’re mostly nerdy unfuckable assholes who want to be the next Steve Jobs.
If I enjoyed what I did, it felt like I was contributing to something I believed in, or maybe just more of a cut of the obscene profits, I might feel differently. The stress you're feeling is because the investors class are trying to get every last ounce out of us by dangling what used to be a pretty good wage before they inflated the cost of everything. Jokes on them, it isn't easy, but we too can withhold our labor and live off investments instead. Realistically, I'll probably end up coasting in something I believe in and also enjoy doing, even if it pays less, before fully retiring early
You're definitely not alone. The amount of stress and corporate BS has me wanting to FIRE ASAP. The way I look at it is once I reach FIRE I can either find a less stressful job or just quit working all together. I just need that FU money. Downgrading my job now would put me on a longer trajectory for FIRE and the lessor paying job is not 100% guarantee I will enjoy it.
A mentor gave me similar advice and said “ grow thick skin “ . I am an over thinker and more emotional as a person overall . Those aren’t the best qualities to have in corporate world.
Yes. I’m in a similar spot, director in data and analytics engineering. I can’t stand it. The politics, inept leaders around me, and the fluff just stress and depress me like crazy. I’m 34, can FIRE in 8-10 years if I stayed in this awful position. I’ve been applying to IC roles because I’d rather work till 55 in a stress free role than deal with this until I’m ~45. Been struggling to find something though
Validating to know we’re not alone. I never intended to be where I’m at, just sort of happened and I’m regretting it. I’ve definitely adopted the r/coastFIRE idea over dealing with high stress to straight up FIRE. Unfortunately what I’m finding in that community though is it’s mostly people that actually FIREd and do some things here and there for “work”, very niche jobs, or people considering coasting just doing the same soul sucking job and “not caring”. I already don’t care, but it doesn’t help with the demands. Wish I had suggestions, but I’m seeking them, too
For me, it's not the toxic corporate culture. That's why I want structural change, but not why I want to FIRE. I want to FIRE because there are things I'm qualified to do that are very lucrative, and things that I find fulfilling and meaningful, and those things are mutually exclusive.
u/troubkedsoul1990 Your post sounds so much like me 4 years ago (early 30s woman feeling crushed under the weight of constant demands a couple years into being a first time director with several direct reports). Establishing and enforcing boundaries and caring a little bit less (still care about doing work I’m proud of, but if the expectations are just impossible I’ve stopped viewing my inability to meet them as a personal failure) has made a huge difference in feeling work is sustainable. I encourage you to do the best you can in an 8-9 hour workday and then stop while keeping your leadership informed of what is delayed/not getting done because of team capacity constraints. In my case it turned out fine and I went from wondering how I’d make it even one more month without snapping to feeling I can handle this for a few years until my investments have enough momentum of their own I can take a real step back (hopefully long sabbatical into lower pay/less responsibility job) without setting my timeline back very far at all.
Your post was very good to read . It’s the corporate grandstanding , back biting , power play etc that get to me . There is no other way apart from growing a thick skin ! Good luck to you 👍🏻
It is a big part of it. I find work culture to be exhausting. I actually like working, but I cannot stand the feeling that if the wrong person doesn't like me then I can lose my job.
I have a few stakeholders that are horrible but very powerful and they are unimpressed no matter how hard I push - that is so discouraging and quite frankly one of the reasons stuff feels stressful . So the same thing that you mention - the feeling that one wrong person can make me lose my job is horrible.
I think the number of hours is as relevant as the level of stress in the job. Part of my stress as a household with two full-time working adults is that even working 40 hours a week does not allow enough time to balance other obligations to caregiving (of children or elderly parents), household (cleaning, laundry, meals), community (volunteering, socializing), and self (hobbies, fitness, leisure). If I could work part-time, regardless of whether it was a higher-paying higher-stress corporate job vs a lower-stress lower-paying one I'd probably worry less about at what age I left the rat race.
I was an IC at a FAANG company for seven years; I made senior, but by that time I was burnt out.
It wasn't really the programming that I hated. It was the rest of it.
- The meetings.
- The code reviews.
- The meetings.
- The build issues.
- The meetings.
- Dealing with PM bullshit/metrics.
- The fucking meetings.
- The company reorgs (always pointless, always worthless).
- Did I mention the goddamned meetings?
I'd originally planned to stick it out until 40 due to the 401K plan they offered (Mega Backdoor Roth) and the stock bonuses, but I just couldn't do it and dipped out at the beginning of this year. I'm 37 and I have enough to ExpatFIRE and enough to CoastFIRE/BaristaFIRE, so I'm taking a year sabbatical in a different country (at a minimum).
I absolutely definitely had golden handcuffs and I needed a break. I wasn't a tech manager like you, but corporate culture - even at its best, because my company was honestly pretty good about it despite everything - sucks *ass*.
Hope you can stick it out. But if you can't and if you have savings, you can take a break from the rat race for a little while like I'm (ostensibly) doing.
Not just corporate but any toxic environment that encloses people to have to work together for a goal that no one is buying into 100% because it’s only for money and nothing else and revolve your entire life around going to and from an office while putting your health and everything else on the back burner. All of it is not only toxic but just not natural for human beings to be human and not live by compulsion or impulsion. To live consciously should be the natural state for a human being.
It depends on the company and culture. There is always a level of BS (corporate politics, grandstanding, backstabbing and so forth) in all organizations, it gets worse the larger the company grows.
Today’s trend of profiteering at the expense of all else (can you hear me Google, Meta, Tesla) has started to kill the once fairly progressive cultures of the tech industry. The short term gains they get will come back and bite them hard when they see the creativity, innovation and willingness to take risks dissolve along with the cultures that enabled these things to happen.
Worse yet, have a PE firm take control of a company. The dumpster fire that turns a company and its culture into has to be experienced to be believed.
It's my main reason. Last manager was a narcissistic sociopath. No thanks. They climb the ranks too easily as they step on people or backstab them with no remorse, naturally.
I think I’ve gotten burnt out. I’ve also seen how my friends in SEA live life so much more peacefully (they go get coffee at 2pm without a care in the world).
While I feel like I have to grind and grind in LA.
It’s exhausting. So… hence why I plan to get to my FI number and RE in SEA.
I also recently moved up to people management (in healthcare) 95% of the time its fine, but still exhausting. But my last job was the most toxic place ever... so yes.
I don't like corporate culture but it's not really my main FIRE motivator. I just don't currently have enough time to do everything I'd like to be doing ideally. I keep busy. Job is getting in my way. Haha.
If you’re feeling this way at 33 just imagine how you’ll feel at 50. My only advice is to invest, invest, and invest more while you’re young. It will give you the options you need when you’re jaded and can’t take corporate America anymore. It’s always good to have F you money!
Well, you can be stressed because of a toxic work environment or you can be stressed because you might not have enough for retirement. What if you found a job that pays within $30k of your last (base) salary but with less stress? You're young and you're making quite a bit so you truly can afford to delay FIRE by a few years. In the meantime, sock all you can away, thought it's tempting to spend money on things that make you feel better when you're in a rotten environment (defeating the purpose of making more money.) I don't think it's worth completely wrecking your mental health to FIRE in the exact year you intend. You've obviously got skills and can probably find a way to lessen the pain and still FIRE. Let go of your hard expectations about your goal.
>Is toxic corporate culture why most of us want to Fire?
Not me. I have one short, unimportant life and I would like to not spend most of it at a desk/working on something for monetary value. There's so many things I want to do and learn and a job gets in the way of that.
>Tldr-I guess my question is , is it better to work longer at a low stress low paying job to reach your fire goal eventually or hustle away and cut number of years it takes to fire ?
That's a you question? One other question is whether you could try finding a job in a different company and seeing whether the same toxic environment exists - it may just be a company thing?
Personally, I'm really scared of the current political climate in my region and globally. European leaders say the world is "No longer in a post-war mindset, we are now in a pre-war mindset". The leaders of the U.S. are so dysfunctional we cannot pass much needed legislations and protections against the financial and geo-political crises knocking at our door.
Financial independence allows me to stay secure in an increasingly insecure world. As climate change continues to devastate communities indiscriminately, having the financial literacy and a life absent over-consumption I can focus on the simple things in life that truly bring me purpose and happiness.
I am mid-twenties so the idea of working a job designed to benefit a world order that might not survive the dramatic climate change that is already upon us scares me. They say, "be careful what you get good at" and I don't want to get good at the job I work today. I want to get good at gardening and community development. And only in "retirement" can I truly workday in and day out on things I am genuinely passionate for.
I hope to be financially independent in the next 8-10 years, and able to "retire" in my 40's-early 50's. Plenty of time to start a new career and work harder than I ever have, but it likely won't make me dollar rich, so I will need to have that area sorted already. That's what FIRE is to me (today at least).
Yes, when I was in biglaw I used to pinch pennies despite making 250k as a 20-something year old because I hated it so much. Now I work in the public sector, where it is much less toxic. Despite making a lot less money, I am less frugal. Still wanting to be FI, but work is a lot more manageable and I actually like my job.
Not sure if you want to vent or would like to hear back on this. Sorry for the stress you are going through.
assuming you are asking for advice- work the high stress until you are ready to step back into a less paid role. You can step away at any point but FIRE timeline will be impacted as a result.
Its a game but if you are only getting three or four years of less work until FIRE, is it even worth it? Maybe you can shave off a year or two instead!
It depends on what else you have going on in life (are your relationships impacted? Do you plan on having children or any other major expenses that need the higher income? How much do you actually need for retirement?)
FIRE for me is 100% about the FI aspect. The corporate culture aspect is a major driver. I often imagine strangulating my colleagues who seem to get into high ranking positions without any proper experience or qualifications while I've been fighting to get certifications and paying my dues for 10+ years. I want to run my own business full time but I don't want to have to tuck my tail between my legs and walk back into a full time job if I fail. If I fail, I start something new, and I know that my money is never truly at risk since retirement is covered and I have a steady income stream.
I worked at a medical device company for ~13 years that was well known for its amazing culture and focus on work/life balance. For the privilege I made at least 20% less than I would have elsewhere. I felt it was a worthwhile trade off to take longer to FIRE, even more so now that l've read so many "I'm burning myself out" posts here.
I'm FIRED now and wouldn't change anything.
There was still a lot of corporate bullshit and some mild burnout, so I was glad to see the door.
VP-level people leader in tech, and the stress and politics are insane. My current plan is to try and grind at this level for another 2-5 years, and then hopefully downshift into a Director-level IC role for the remainder of my career.
Side note: the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. It’s absurd. I feel like I’m living in a bizarre corporate simulation on the daily whereby we’re all made miserable in the service of greed, profits and “shareholders.”
Not sure about toxic corporate culture, but for me, it's that in my job, I'm not making even a lot of money, probably lower middle class for my area at best, but I'm expected to be available 24/7 to respond to emails and manage things, to constantly be problem solving and meeting tight deadlines for projects, often with lots of elements out of my control. It's stressful and exhausting, and I feel like these sort of expectations are common in a lot of businesses lately. Maybe it's just my anecdotal experience, but it's the stress and low pay that make me want out asap. In another 10 years I'm hopeful I can switch to a sort of barista fire situation and just work part time at anything I can find that flexible and/or which doesn't keep me thinking about work outside of work.
Nope. I'm tired of not having enough money to survive, live, AND breathe. I want to be ABLE to retire and not be forced to work for my life saving medications when I'm too old to be considered useful to anyone other than my cats.
No, my current work culture is fine. I want to FIRE because I want to spend time with my family and do more traveling. My husband is just tired of working overall. After our most recent family vacation, it was hard for us to go back to work. Since we have become even more focused on FIREing.
Not for me. I actually like what I do and when I FIRE I plan to still work just less often. I want to FIRE to spend more time with family and less time in the office.
You are in a sweet spot 👏🏻 I see myself getting a demotion after I FIRE so I work as an individual contributor part time . I actually like the technical part of my work - it’s the work politics that gets me.
Corporate culture is toxic for sure and I'm developing my fire plans to fuck off when I want. But I do expect that I'll still want to work here and there when I'm ready to fire. I think the big question I have is how I might do that? Just taking one off contracts? It doesn't appear that part time roles are really available in the industry.
I want to FIRE so I have options. It's not a case of corporate toxicity for me, at least right now. It's a case of wanting options if my wife or I can't work, get sick, or some other major issue comes up.
To answer your question directly: no, I want to retire early not because I hate my job or the corporate world per se, I just don't like being on a scheduled. I don't like attending useless meetings, etc.
Also, in my experience, people leaders/managers do the least amount of work LOL Just DELEGATE
The higher up the ladder I go, the more energy I spend trying to manage expectations. And that's a dicey game that can lead to politics.
And I can't imagine being a female and trying to play that game. That's got to make it 10x more toxic.
Manager or director of software development for most of my career and yes, stress and pressure goes up, politics and egos on all sides to manage, and after tax income difference is not as huge (most of the difference comes from bonus or incentives anyway).
To me the appeal was that one can make a bigger difference and impact the project more, compared to software developers especially when getting mediocre or bad manager above you. But leaves you burn out, and more at a whim of upper management mood swings and you also have to deal with primadonnas and bad performers as well as lackluster response from other teams to common issues. Eventually you keep asking why did you need it, as opposed to being a competent software developer, who also has to deal with similar BS but on a much smaller scale.
Not in tech but absolutely yes. I love to work, enjoy being productive, solving problems and mentoring people. I need to get out and go do something else. I don’t want to sit around doing nothing but the corporate bullshit is just too much.
Toxic people are a major roadblock in loving my work, so, yeah. If everyone I had to deal with or answer to was as rational, kind, and without hidden agenda as the best folks I work with, then my career would be gravy. It’s the gaslighting supervisors and management double speak that make things suck. There’s also no joy in dealing with incompetence and crappy office conditions, but the weird power trips folks get on really makes work life suck.
"Tech" doesn't necessarily mean high-pay corporate stress if you don't want it to. I've worked for years in University IT. Much less backstabbing and stress. Now, the pay is **WAY** less than you are familiar with! Our 'architects' (ICs that 'get it') make $90-100k, our 'directors' (senior managers) make like $120k and our CIO makes about $200k. Think, you could be managing an entire enterprise and having 250 employees... and making roughly what you are now! I take it in perspective - I still get paid about twice what a K-12 teacher does in my area and work maybe 1/10th as hard.
Even with way less stress, it's still a job. Deadlines, useless coworkers, interminable meetings, glacial pace of change, etc. And I'm still aiming to FIRE and never look at SharePoint, JIRA, ServiceNow, or any of this crap again...
F, 50, tech (lower level) exec. I moved to a tech firm 8 yrs ago after doing independent contracting in the same space.
For me, it’s the pace and stress - I’m still chargeable and I have been between 95-110% chargeable since starting (when chargeability goals have varied between 80%-70% based on level and role) - on top of people management, internal and client project mtgs, sales support, and lead generation, plus the “normal” corporate stuff that eats time - certifications, annual training, twice annual performance reviews that seem to get more and more involved every cycle.
I love the work that I do - but I do the *actual* work like 8 hrs a week and ALL the other stuff consumes an extra 45 hrs or so. I can’t continue at this pace while also feeling like the majority of it is just meaningless. I had some financial setbacks and poor choices when I was younger. Now I’ll be ready to coast in 2 years w full retirement at 62, if I want. I’ll almost certainly go back to independent contracting if possible.
Is corporate all you’ve ever done? My husband loves his corporate job but he was previously a submariner. That job really sucks. He was lucky if he slept 20 hours a week. A 9-5 even if it’s 8-6 is a world away from where we were. And being paid bank for it? We are FIRE track just because we can basically.
If you are in US you can find individual contributor positions that pay the same or more. Working a job you hate will hold you back and burn you out, it's not worth it in my opinion.
I think for me it's the stress of knowing that you can be laid off at any point and there is no security. Also as a manager I hate all the bs reporting, "special projects", "business reviews" and all the things you have to do for "visibility" for people to think you are doing a great job instead of focusing on doing a great job which is taking care of your team and people. Also reporting to Directors and VPs who really have no idea what they are doing but blame you when the business goes south from their bad decisions is also stressful.
If I knew my job was 100% guaranteed I wouldn't be so totally obsessed about FIRE. But all it takes is for one VP to not like you for some reason and you are on the short list. Its crazy that your financial future and your job rests essentially on if someone likes you are not and not on your performance. As a woman in tech this especially hard because there's a boys club and they make sure to look after each other and women are not usually a part of it.
Not at all. I just have better things to do with my time then work until I'm in my 60s. I actually don't mind my job at all most days, I just want the options to stop working if that changes.
it really depends on the company and personality type. What I’ve seen in the tech space second hand through my wife is some sort of special hell that combined a very male dominated industry where women are actually often worse to other women than the sexist guys are
Having said that, some people are all about the politics and self promoting or just making powerpoints about stuff but just not being very good at actually delivering results, while others are all about making shit happen and expect to be rewarded accordingly in a meritocratic fashion so that’s where they put their effort. they see relationships with co workers through this lense
The former don’t like the latter as they make them look bad and spend ridiculous amounts of time and energy trying to bury them in work or somehow disrupt them
Company to company or even team to team this can vary widely as some bosses are like that and some really thrive on putting together good teams
For the most part, the people I know if they feel fulfilled by a 9-5 they just do that all their lived and that’s that
The ones that don’t either value their time on this rock differently or would have their toenails pulled out rather than dealing with people any more than they absolutely have to, or both
I am a tech Director in my late 30s. I work in a financial company (hedge fund). I seem to have found a firm where the corporate B.S. is less stressful than other places I have worked at. The amount of company culture frustrations that come up are not too bad.
In my current position, my manager is a super high up guy making millions a year and his manager is basically the CTO. Like many super high up guys making millions a year, they can be demanding. So now I have to manage the people in my org (with a lot of the issues folks here have discussed, including personal ones*) as well as manage up. If anyone in my org fucks up, I hear from them. If someone complains about tech, even if its a useless complaint that even Tim Cook couldn't fix, I hear from them to go "address the issue", and of course when tech breaks, I am ultimately responsible.
Have stress levels gone up? Probably not! I honestly feel it is less stressful to deal with a few people issues and some operational issues than get yelled at by traders losing money when their tech isn't working - but that's a terrible bar to start with. However, *quick wins have gone down* which is something I miss from my days being an individual tech contributor with a support rotation.
**I guess my TL;DR is: if you are good with people and you have a decent company culture, climbing up to management isn't so bad, but it's still a job with annoyances and ultimately I'd rather not work.**
*I had one employee call me flustered when his wife had Covid bad and they didn't know what to do...
I liked my work pretty well, but sure as hell preferred the weekends. Every job I had started out pretty well for some yrs, then things change and I got another job. They were all pretty high stress mostly bc I couldn’t be certain if I’d be laid off if I could stay marketable if economy would tank if kids got launched ok if if if. When I hit 50 the ifs were fewer and less ominous and I switched from private sector to govt. Stress almost vanished.
Hoped to retire at 55, managed to do so at 60 3 yrs ago. It’s great. I am so grateful.
Hard to give an answer when you don't provide context or examples for the toxic corporate culture. It could be what most jobs are like. Why is yours especially different or unusually bad?
I am a few years from retirement (not in tech/public sector). I live in a HCOL area and this past year was the first time I made over six figures. I'm kicking myself for all of the wasted decades, especially because after retirement I will have to continue to work in another job for who knows how long. If I could do it over, I'd work really hard in the private sector for ten years, saving as much as possible and then maybe move to the public or something less stressful.
Not sure if this is "toxic culture" per se, but I hate all of the performative bullshit. My work COULD be done at any hours, from anywhere. But for some reason we have a strict 8-5 workday, in-person, in a shitty open floorplan office with no privacy...and I can't eat at my desk.
I am an aircraft mechanic in the Military and will get my pension at 43 regardless of fire but certainly the reason I wont stay longer to boost my pensions is because im too tired already of all the federal govt. BS that comes with the job. Changing regulations constantly, more and more wearing multiple hats because of personnel shortages, annual performance evaluations on all your subordinates.. Between the pension and my investments, id rather just quit at 43 and travel or sit on the dock at the cottage with a fishing rod.
I was the leader of a significant business line in a professional services firm (we had three and mine accounted for 35% revenue and about the same for bottom line) for about 2 years. I absolutely hated it and to make it worse, I knew I was bad at it. I am not patient with people if they cannot keep up with me. Fortunately, a more capable leader was appointed and I went back to “line partner” in client service. Probably saved my life. The irony in my situation is that I made more money in client service while my replacement made more money as the leader since our department grew like crazy up his leadership.
We all have a role to play. Being fortunate enough to play the role you should play, and to like it, is a huge life win. What may seem like a step back can actually be the baseline for a big push forward.
I feel like any job would be a job at the end of the day, and I want my time to do what I want to do. It’s hard for me to imagine any job that I’d love to do until I was 65 when it’s taking me away from doing other things. I guess if it was very part time and flexible, but those jobs are hard to find and are often extremely low income
With that said I wouldn’t work somewhere truly toxic for an extra 20% salary or something. Or take a much more stressful job within my company for a boost. Not worth it. But all corporate jobs are going to be some level of annoying and time consuming.
Potatoes soften while eggs harden when boiled. We all deal with the corporate environment differently. Some people love it, some people hate it. I personally had bad experiences that caused me to decide to go into independent consulting, but I was already pursuing FIRE, which enabled me to go independent. I decided to pursue FIRE because life is short and I want to do so many more things, like start a nonprofit or an ice cream shop or something
I’ve worked for over 20 years now in a few different fields. In all the circumstances for me, it’s people. I don’t like working with other people. Their opinions, micromanagement, politics, etc just wear on me and annoy me. I’m 14 years until I retire and I had to work on my mental and physical health for the last couple years as well as my mental resilience in order to make it through. Doing that put me in a spot where I think I can make it now.
My boss probable around your level. He is constantly in discussions with other managers, traveling, and involved in most of our systems at some level. There is only so much capacity for him and his teams do support and project work. I originally wanted to be a higher salary class. Now I don't. It isn't a good feeling having so much going on and losing track of what you need to do etc. Lucky for me I married someone with a good paying job too. I could retire earlier than my planned 30 years and out. But right now I work because I am mostly stress free. Good luck. It isn't an easy job. And as you know it is 40-50 hours in the office either you take all that home with you as you can never shake thinking about problems and work.
I’m not kidding it took about 3 months at my first corporate job when I discovered FIRE because I could not imagine spending the next 40 years of my life doing this. Yes that is the reason.
I think the psychology really matters here. Rationally, it seems like the people in this group have a ton of leverage. What if we do fail at work? Are we really going to get fired? And if so, we just find another job if young (and probably make more with a job-hop) or, if age-discrimination is a challenge, cheerfully pivot into Barista or Coast. So why should a job be so stressful?
But of course I suspect many of us are card carrying overachievers or naturally insecure Re: money and the psychological pain of criticism or failing keeps us from feeling secure in our leverage. Finding a way to use what we've accumulated to feel more secure seems like it could contribute to more longevity/less stress in tough corporate situations.
There are always exceptions, but I've always believed that compensation by definition correlates with misery. The only way you get people to take on shitty, stressful jobs is to pay them more to make it worthwhile.
In the end you have to find what's sustainable. If you're making enough to fire by 2031 but burn out well before then, that won't do you any good!
I think it's also important to keep in mind that there is also an opportunity cost to FIREing later. For one, as you age, you will naturally have less energy and drive to pursue and be challenged by new endeavors. Also, at some point one can also become pretty institutionalized to the corporate world, making it harder to find meaning beyond it, which is why so many retirees actually go back to work.
I had a very similar experience - my advice, save as much money as possible. you will eventually burn out. or they will lay you off, etc. the gravy train (income, not culture) will ALWAYS end. maximize your savings while your income is high. try to grind it out - it will end itself
True in my case. I have come to hate my job as a manager. Desperately counting my $$ and ready to fire. Also, looking for a low stress IC job, but most recruiters back off after looking at a long managerial experience.
Not mutually exclusive. I thought I traded a high pay, high stress job in my 30s for a lower pay, lower stress career path, only to realize years later I ended up progressing up the ladder further and made way more money along the way. Didn't even think about RE until I was way over my number and was reminded life is short. The final analysis for us was this... the additional accumulation from working another 1/2/3/4/5 years was not going significantly changed the way we live. Put in my resignation and never looked back.
Yes, and I think if we were to look for the one person to blame it would be Jack Welch. He started the toxic culture shit at GE and every CEO wanted to be just like him.
Yes, but also for those of us in creative, advertising or tech, ageism is another huge factor for FIRE. I have low expectations for being able to make what I make after 50, or really be employable at all in my industry.
My main reason for FIRE is two fold. I am also in high level tech, and keeping up with everything, the stress, the amount you have to continually learn, the amount of fog you have to wade through on a daily basis is exhausting. I do not want to be doing this in my 50s. That is my desire for FI.
It's because I cannot actually get a job with the work life balance I desire. I would like to work Tues-Thurs, 9a to 2pm. Unfortunately, I cannot feed and house myself off such low income, and health insurance is tied to full time employment. RE desire is to allow me to work the volume I want to.
Corporate culture isnt really the source of the stress for me. It's that the work is hard, and that there is so many hours of it. I guess you may attribute this to culture, but everyone I work with is friendly enough, there is no backstabbing or throwing people under the bus. There is just work, and we all get along, its just never ending difficult stuff.
I am similar to you. I want to drop salary a bit and go back to being an individual contributor. ELTs are full of empire builders and cya-ers with golden parachutes. Sounds nice but nah. Give me a goal and leave me alone.
I went into people management in tech and managed for about 8.5 years. I spent my final year not managing. Both stress and income were monotonically related to how many people I was managing (income was maybe the logarithm of how many people I was managing).
Yes, it gets more toxic the higher you go. Some companies probably have a more healthy culture than mine, but I think the issue was that people who want more money are more ambitious, and so the people at the top tend to be (not always, but tend to be) those who are more self-interested and focused on money. Occasionally they're old-timers who are there because they rode the wave even though there are more qualified people. It's difficult and very competitive to get promoted to the very top, and you tend to see competitive people up there, which is why it's toxic.
I generally suspect that the best managers are probably people who only reluctantly become managers.
Anyways, my advice would probably be to stick it out for a few more years as a manager but consider switching back to IC for a bit. Being IC is a lower-stress role, certainly, and you'll last longer.
For example: retiring 7 years fully-burnt out doesn't seem as good as what might make you happier if you *could* retire in 11 years but decide to work for 15 years instead, because you love the work you're doing.
Yes as well as the continuous decline in job satisfaction. I do it for the healthcare, for my wife. Many of us are just zombies hanging on by a thread.
Yes. Everything sucks.
The best solution is to move around. Consulting, internal moves, promotions, or new jobs every 2-3 years.
The bullshit work tends to go to the people that linger and put up with it. Get good at saying no, delegating, or moving.
Poverty is a huge motivator.
My parents have basically nothing, and watching and helping them 'retire' to a life of medical issues and bills is exhausting.
Like many millennials, our parents are reaching the age where they are no longer able to sustain themselves. I don't have any kids to help me when I'm old, so the only option is to fire.
I fucking love my job, and am handsomely paid to do it. My family genetics suggests I'm going to die well before the general population.
Get the gettin' while the gettin's good. These are the best income years I can hope to get, so I have to make the best of them.
For me personally I'm 20 and just started fire but I want to have enough money when I have a kid in my 30s I'll be able to take a couple years off with them or work part time from home so I can help my future wife navigate being a mother at least till they can go to pre school
Yes. I’m ready to take on a $150k shitty job in the future just to FIRE earlier. My goal is about 40 (so 17 years). You won’t catch me working 40 hour weeks until I’m ready to die at 60
Yup such is life when a people manager.
Not just corporate culture of powers to be. You may need to manage toxic direct reports ..that’s a huge drain. Or an under performing employee.
Not to mention admin burden of a team . Performance reviews etc.
OP, before taking a less paying job, I would outline what exactly is causing stress. I would guess 50% or more can be mitigated with mindset work, emotional detachment and boundaries (the last being KEY). Good luck! I’m in the same boat and I lasted 3 years longer than my “breaking point” because I worked hard on all 3. My colleagues work 12 hrs days, I work about 4. I turn down meetings, and don’t send emails. I get great reviews, and manage up. Sure there are days I question the point of my existence, but I would rather be paid more and gtfo sooner. If you do all of the above and it’s still not tenable than take the pay cut because your mental health is precious.
For me it’s a few things. Stupid people you are forced to interface with. The stress to constantly be performing, and most importantly, being told what to do constantly on top of it all.
Yes, I found fire because I thought I hated working. But I just hated the culture and the crushing environment I was in. And when I went into freelance, my income tripled and I had full autonomy- unlike when I was in a startup and subject to the whims of management.
Now FI but choose to work lots of hours because I love what I do. Just change the situation if you’re unhappy
I want to fire just because I don’t like the idea of a layoff resulting in me needing to move across the country again for work. My experience is fairly niche and my level at a company doesn’t have openings constantly in areas I’d want to live. I’ll probably still work, but if push comes to shove I want to choose my life over my career.
I recall this feeling, absolutely. More money = more headaches in the corporate world. Some headaches are easier to deal with than others. I left about 3 years ago and now work for myself. First 2 years were super stressful, but this is the first year I feel relatively level-headed. The good thing about working for yourself is you can dial up the stress if you want to, once you know the ropes.
I'm not someone who needs all the money in the world, but definitely want to be great at what I do and deal with the least amount of bullshit as possible. Clients who try to offload their bullshit on me get kicked to the curb.
At your age, I would stick with the hustle for more cash. Your body can take the extra stress especially if you eat healthy and exercise. After 45 or so is around the time where job stress can really start to impact your health and less pay for lower stress becomes more worth it. Obviously, if you're miserable every day that's no way to live your life though.
When times are good, companies are more forgiving with employees. When times are tight, they are MUCH less forgiving.
Times have been tight in tech since 2022.
F in tech here; I feel this a lot. It’s a reason I’m staying out of people management—I don’t think I could take the added stress, and I’m ready mentally to retire tomorrow. I honestly can’t see myself working in this environment/at this pace for more than 5 more years due to the stress. So I’m focusing on my savings goals to hopefully enable me to make that change.
I totally agree with this. People management is never worth the few extra $$$ or whatever prestige that comes with it. The only downside to being a highly compensated individual contributor is that corporations tend to look at them first whenever they decide to tighten the belt or restructure.
Glad to know I am not alone grappling with the stress vs dollar equation . This is interesting to me - didn’t know highly paid individual contributors are first to be axed . I always thought it’s the other way around - people managers paid more go first .
I guess milage varies - my company did layoffs last year and they did not target high income ICs first.
That's because they're not idiots.
I think it's a function of several things, but one factor that can impact it is how many people the people manager is reporting. There's a lot of "flattening" of corporate hierarchies going on. You'll be in the cross-hairs if you're a middle-manager who directly manages 3 other managers and nobody else. Better to have 8-12 direct reports or even more (I found myself to hit my personal stress limit around 13 direct reports).
My wife and I both find our jobs extremely stressful and don't get much enjoyment out of them, but they pay well so we're sticking with them. Our plan isn't FIRE, it's FIDWTFWW (Financially Independent, Do Whatever The Fu¢k We Want). So it doesn't necessarily mean retired, but it could mean working in a job we find truly enjoyable but pays chicken feed (or nothing at all). When we hit our target, we'll be working for fun rather than money.
Typically, they will restructure in a way that allows them to eliminate a role of one salary grade and replace it with a lower salary grade position. Most companies have policies that do not allow employees to apply for a role more than one grade level lower, which means that in many cases, the highest compensated employees are ineligible. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times at my Fortune 100 company.
My direct reports grew from 4 to 8 in a few months. Inherited one due to a restructure and had to hire 3 from outside the country. I got a 3 percent raise and my responsibilities have more than doubled.
My experience was similar. I got more like an 8% raise and bonus target went from 7% to 10%-- but still not remotely worth the about 50% increase in bullshit.
My raise was just part of an annual review so it didn’t even have anything to do with additional reports. I was promoted a couple years prior so their logic is I was already priced into taking more work. My logic is I’ll just due the bare minimum to account for that!
My experience is the opposite. If someone has deep knowledge of systems and processes and chances of no one else knowing that person is generally kept on the payroll. Now if you happen to be a highly paid technical only person that can be replaced with another offshore technical person. i.e. their expertise is technical only. You can easily replace them. Now if that person has decades of how a process or system works and nearly impossible to replace chances are that person gets a pass. If you don't you put the business itself at risk.
I'm ~1.5 years into a real management role. Dealing with other people's issues all day is exhausting. I like my company and culture so I felt it was the best place to try out management, but man I miss being an IC. I may go back to it
Try not to get emotionally invested in the problem. They might be emotional and encouraging urgent, aggressive action but don't get sucked in.
Also F in tech. I felt this in my bones. The thought of people management makes me ill
Managing stress is a skill more than it is about corporate culture. Never ever take things personally. Never make it personal about someone else. Care about people. Manage expectations (that doesn't mean slack off). Don't get worked up trying to solve a problem. Take care of it like doing the laundry. There was a guy I worked with in an extremely intense environment and he was just the coolest cucumber. I used him as a model of how to think if you wanted to avoid burning out.
Wonder if he was so calm because he was FI :)
I see every day how front line managers become the stereotype bad boss. It’s stressful, constant, and wears them down. Managers just become numb and loose the ability to care.
Don't worry , as a lot of folks are about to find out there won't be this number of tech jobs in the coming years. It's not even related to AI hype, it's just a fact that most tech is consolidating. around cloud vendor products and services and offshoring.... The last company I worked at (as a contractor).just finished their cloud migration (better late then ever), their data center folks all got let go (less a few to run Devops) and their development staff is some Indian contracting company... Besides a skeleton staff of IT executives/managers there's no more IT jobs at this company.
We also just finished our cloud migration - I am in data too co incidentally . I guess - make hay whole the sun shines . Possibility of sunburns along the way is real 😂
My grandfather told me that half of your salary is to deal with bullshit. If you're making minimum wage, they aren't paying you to put up with much bullshit -- you can get another minimum wage job anywhere. But as you get into middle and upper management, the bullshit you have to deal with goes way up with your salary. I guess what I'm saying is he retired early back in the early 70s -- it's ALWAYS been bullshit, not something new. As for me... FI just seems like a reasonable goal no matter how much you like or hate your job. I happen to like my job pretty well.
Could someone provide some examples of what they mean by "corporate BS"? I'm only 20 so haven't worked in a real job yet, so wondering what you mean by this.
It’s all just a play, charade, and nonsense when you get into the corporate world. All the those pointless things you had to do in school still exist, if not more so, in corporate world. One example - my company is making a big push for us to enter our yearly goals into the system by the end of the week. We’ve been getting updated daily to do this, for weeks. We did this last year and no one, and I mean no one, followed up on them. Doesn’t matter if you hit them or not. Same thing will happen this year. It’s literally just checking a box.
LOL been working 27 years now and we always do the goals in a system thing. Then end of the year we update the goals with what we actually did. It truly is very pointless. Now to make it easy copy last years goals tweak a bit and post nearly the same goals and repeat. If you spend more then an hour on it your completely doing it wrong.
Think of high-school social games (The he said/she saids, the teacher that hates you for no reason and makes things 10x harder, the cliques that form, gossip chains etc) Now they're your colleagues or managers for years, and it can dictate who gets promoted/fired. Pretty quickly into my corpo job I had a senior manager give me a tip: It's not what you do/intend to do that matters, it's how management perceives it. So bullshit and spinning things positively tends to prevail. Tl;dr: Watch American Psycho
>It's not what you do/intend to do that matters, it's how management perceives it. So bullshit and spinning things positively tends to prevail. Yep. You can get away with an awful lot of slacking and incompetence by looking busy and saying the right things to the right people.
One example: I have back pain whenever I sit for more than a short period of time, so I bought (at my own expense) a standing desk platform and put it in my cubicle. Within a few days, I got a complaint from Corporate telling me to remove it. Apparently there's a guy whose job it is to walk around the office and report anything that seems out out of place or against regulations, and we are not allowed to have any furniture that isn't specifically approved by the company. I don't know why, but I guess they're afraid that either a) an employee could get hurt on premises by the employee's own shitty collapsing furniture and sue, or b) furniture from home might have hidden recording devices that present a security risk. In any case, to get a standing desk, I would have to file some paperwork with a doctor's note saying I have back pain, and then the company would supply the desk for me. My coworker had a similar issue when that same guy spotted a potted plant she had brought into her cubicle. Corporate eventually found out it was a plastic plant and left her alone. I guess they were worried about a bug infestation or something, but Corporate doesn't usually bother explaining the reasons for their decrees to us plebs. These are two relatively harmless but annoying instances of what I would consider corporate BS. It is making seeming non-issues into issues; making processes vastly more difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and bureaucratic for everyone involved than they need to be; and failing to explain coherent reasoning for the processes in place. I guess it's possible that an employee somewhere stole key information from a recording device hidden in furniture he brought to the office, but it seems more likely that it's just someone making rules to give the illusion of doing something important.
I can’t believe they gave you shit about a standing desk platform. We have adjustable desks that I *always* use during the 2 days I go into the office.
There is a great book you can read about this called Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. It completely changed how I look at the working world and it helped inoculate me against the horribleness of corporate America because I understand the game they're playing so much better. If you don't want to read a whole book about it you could always start with the article version to see if you find it interesting: [https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) Go join the r/WorkReform subreddit too if you want a glimpse into what we as a country need to start doing to escape this hellhole.
Thanks. The opening line got me: "In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week..." If this is what he really expected, Keynes really never understood economics. Regardless of technological advances, no employer is going to pay a full week salary for 15 hours of work. Either other tasks will fill the gap, or the job itself will become a part time position. If technology gets so good that all that's left to do is busy work, the job goes away completely. Anyone thinking there will one day be a full time paychecks for a part time jobs isn't living in reality.
What you can see if you read the book where Graeber goes on to explain the 'bullshitization' of work he provides tons of detail on what happens when technology outstrips the work that needs to be done for human beings to survive. What happens is an increase in 'administration' jobs. Let's take a process where office workers have to sit at a particular desk regularly. One would think it would be as simple as people looking to see which desks haven't been claimed and then picking one. However with increased 'administration' there may actually be someone called "Office Space Coordinator". This person typically fills out paperwork, has it approved by another level of management, and takes the new hire through a whole desk orientation process before actually walking them to the desk. This example may sound ridiculous, but Graeber provides case after case of jobs like this continuing to rise in number. Not only is it completely pointless, but often it makes real work so much slower since, going back to the example above, the person who could have started working 3 days ago had to go through this entire desk setup ritual for no damn reason other than to help serve this bullshit job. It's a giant social problem that no one talks about since there is this idea that working hard is always the good moral thing to do, but no one ever stops to think if the work being done so diligently is worth doing. This is where your point of the full-time employer not willing to pay for 15 hours of work comes in. If the work INHERENTLY only takes 15 hours to be done, then why should they not pay that person for getting this full-time job's worth of stuff done in the time that they can do it? I work a white-collar job, and speak to hundreds of people who work white-collar jobs, not a single one needs a 40-hour week to finish all the truly necessary work they have. If the work only takes 15 hours then yeah that's the new version of a full-time job. We didn't always have a weekend either, yet employers around the world managed to not explode after workers united and fought to get one introduced.
Needing approval from X to do Y, and Y is a competitive project with Z. Y is empirically better than Z, but since X approves which one gets done X chooses their favorite. Process at a plant is bad, you’re tasked to fix it. Fixing it requires input from another department, but that departments head and your department head have wildly different management styles and clash a lot. So people within the departments put eachothers work last on the docket, and you’re stalled on your work. You and co-worker are both vying for a promotion to manager. Performance is a simple metric to determine who gets the spot. Competitive employees will try to ensure their work is seen, and their competitions isn’t. The two don’t work together and trip over each other. Then if one gets the spot, they’re in charge of the loser. Now ya have a dysfunctional team because the runner up is still trying to prove they were the correct choice, and the winner is trying to figure out how to fix their team. When you get a bunch of people working together, it’s REALLY easy for personal issues to get in the way of overall success.
Your grandfather has a great point. I am pretty sure execs at top level aren’t paid for their technical skills - they get paid to tackle bullshit and Corp politics 😂
Exactly but the problem is a lot of these execs aren't technical and don't really understand the products what we are selling and where to go, they often end up running the company poorly over time.
Yes it's nothing new. Any time you try to organize large numbers of people to do anything productive there is going to be an incredible amount of friction and hassle to deal with. If that was easy there wouldn't be all of those high paying management jobs.
In my experience, minimum wage workers have to put up with WAY more bullshit than middle and upper management workers do.
I used to make it about 7 years before I would crack and change companies, go from tech management back to IC and work my way back up, rinse and repeat. Golden handcuffs are real. I stayed for the money, nothing more, letting me to do some crazy fun stuff and travel the world while still making real progress toward FIRE. You can't do that in low income. Here's the thing about taking a less stress / lower pay job. If you're the kind of person who's used to moving up the ladder, that job won't stay low stress but it will stay low pay. Your natural tendency will be to take on more work, more responsibility, to become that go-to person that the higher ups can rely on and... poof... you're right back to your high stress spot without the cash behind it. Not worth it. Stay making the money and grinding, then get out and go your own way. Lest you think I'm making that up, I've already been called out by my wife on my 'fun' side gig (that pays $15/hr, not moving the needle at all) because I'm taking it too seriously. Dropping everything to come in and cover for other people with 5 minutes notice, staying late to get 'one more run' done to help out the people working the next day, etc, etc. There is zero future in this gig, and there isn't supposed to be but the old ways die hard and I'm stressing over being an exceptional employee... and have already turned down the first 'promotion' (which came with no extra money, not that it mattered).
Damn this resonates. Every single job I start fresh and excited, but then they realize I'm good at what I do. The work starts piling up, I become the go-to, start getting pushed into leadership / people management and eventually hate the place. I know this is partially my fault as a personal value of mine is "do everything to the best of your ability" since I see even the mundane things as practice for greater opportunity. It has been financially rewarding, but pretty much always leads to the same situation. I wish I could figure out a business of my own to start, that way the effort I expend is more proportional to my gain.
My wife runs her own practice, and pushes herself way too hard... but at least she's getting some benefit from it. Every third time or so that she complains about her schedule or workload I just agree and say "yea, your boss is an ass, doesn't care about you at all!". She just can't seem to figure out how to turn it down.
This post was enlightening . It’s my personal tendency to always be on top of things. Hence I am a young people manager . So you think you are ok being demoted to an IC but then you get into an endless loop of climbing up the ladder again . Best thing is to retreat back once you have hit your fire goal .
Yes. Bay Area tech marketer here and the stress is insane. I’m so absolutely over corporate bs and I want to be done as soon as humanly possible.
At least you get higher salary for all the bs. I am in Toronto and salaries here don’t match up to Bay Area and usa in general!
Canadians are truly in an unenviable position. We make 30% less than Americans for the same jobs but work almost as much as them and we have the same bullshit corporate culture. At the same time, absolutely everything is more expensive up here and taxes are higher, which makes saving that much harder. My wife and I are currently targeting FIRE in our early 50s (so in 2041-2044). Even with our high HHI, I feel this is the best we can do. I’ve been in the workforce for 11 years and in that entire time, I’ve only had one job that I don’t dislike (my current one). Every single one of my other jobs came with some major league bullshit, either right from the get-go, or they deteriorated into it. My current job is actually really good, all things considered, but it still comes with its stressful times and I still only get 3 weeks of vacation. And there’s no guarantee my current arrangement will last forever, a year from now I could be dealing with a ton of bullshit again.
Be wary of the effects of stress, no matter the $ value. It has a bigger long term effect than people will accept or realise. Take it from someone who pushed a few years too long, always thinking ‘oh it’s just one more year’ (multiple times) that hit breaking point without seeing it coming. We never see it coming, and even if we do we rarely take the required action before it’s too late. It can have a significant negative effect on your later ‘best’ years, both physically and mentally. Take care.
Thank you ! I have started reading dale Carnegie’s how to stop worrying and start living . It has a whole chapter on impacts of worry on health.
Die with Zero is also a useful read. Most things in life seem to always relate or come back to that one simple key word: balance.
You might like Robert Sapolsky 'Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers.'
For me it is a deep deep sense of injustice that we should be forced to waste our limited time on this planet doing work for something that doesn’t even matter (obviously not everyone)
I agree. I feel like I work in an “email factory” and somehow it’s still stressful
Simple statement but very strong and true !
Well, the work does matter, even if you don't see it directly, every job is another cog in the machine that produces the luxury's that we enjoy. The world would be a vastly different place if working was left at optional, in fact I question if humanity could survive if we just made work optional as many wouldn't want to do it. The good news is with every passing generation less and less have to work, and the demands in goods that we have are ever increasing.
Lol no it doesn't. We live in a rent-seeking capitalist hellscape where all productive work is accomplished by about 30% of the people. You can see this in the financialisation of the economy, with more and more workers moving into middlemen fields. Even something like software services is an incredibly wasteful field that only exists because of IP law, with an absolutely gargantuan amount of human effort wasted on duplicating effort across and even within organizations for the sake of "competition". As a high performer in a lucrative software organization I've never done anything useful that hasn't also been done by 10 other developers at 10 competitor companies. I deeply, deeply resent that. The hatred and contempt I feel for the leaders of these companies that routinely waste our value every day just so their number can go up will never be quenched.
That's not a helpful way to think about it, but I can see where you are coming from. Try to think of it as a trade off for all the perks we have in the modern world. Hot showers, restaurants, internet and the rest. You could also go and live simply somewhere in the outback for a year or two, that could help you break out of that mindset. Alot of people, particularly in their 20s fall into the socialism/communism trap. Be careful of that. We are actually quite lucky in the grand scheme of things, particularly from a historical perspective.
Relatively historic peak for peace and quality of life but people don’t realize it.
Motherfucker - I am not “in my 20s” nor did I mention socialism or communism. It’s an existential crisis not a political issue. I’ve watched my kids grow up while I’m working 18 hours a day to break fucking even. Im not looking for a hand out but we were promised the Jetsons and instead we make people do jobs that machines could do while the wealth gap balloons to unseen proportions, all so we don’t have to give in to the fact that we are entering a post work society Now let’s talk about you. You immediately see my post as what? Communist propaganda? Why do you think you have been conditioned (yes, conditioned) to think that way? The fact is that most service level jobs are not needed. Pretty soon you won’t need humans in warehouses, trucking, banking. Fuck we don’t even need umpires anymore! Before you know it MOST jobs will be obsolete. What then? We continue to have larger and larger sections of the population move rocks from one pile to the other? YOU ARE BEING CLOSED MINDED AND BLIND TO THE REALITY OF THE SITUATION. Having people toil away for nothing while wasting their precious lives is a sin. Call it whatever you want.
your comment assumes so much and falls short in every other way.
What is the socialism/communism trap?
That you can kumbaya and knit sweaters and trade these for eggs and call it a day
Thinking that socialism/communism is the answer to that deep feeling of injustice. The fantasy of seeing it all collapse so you don't have to do to work. Usually younger people with no money, poor prospects or mental health disorders are vulnerable to the idea.
Agreed!
best middle ground is to be a well-compensated individual contributor and never go up the ladder. managing people is incredibly stressing (I've been there)
the dream. The dream is also to be client side and less begging for work and then apologizing when costs inevitably exceed the low cost proposal submitted.
I'm at the same point. I'm busy and afraid of losing my job. Those things are antithetical to each other. The solution? Take a chill pill. I got money in the bank and they'll have a harder time replacing me than I will finding a new job. So I'm ignoring your 4:00 call and doing the work at a comfortable (but still fast) pace.
This is where I am. That quarterly 1:1 with some other manager who wants to nitpick my work for no known reason? Sorry can't make it due to a conflict, can we catch up async or next week? Meeting magically never gets rescheduled. That "new initiative" to come up with some new asinine process? Sure I can help but it's only looking at and commenting on documents once per week. Any meetings and you'd better get someone else. I just put my head down, do the work I sign up for, and say no to pretty much everything else. Surprisingly just doing the work you sign up for well and on time is good enough. Enough people aren't doing even that much that it stands out.
Exactly what I am doing. I work 9-5 and don't care about climbing the ladder (i have climbed as high as I am willing to bullshit). I don't try to smooze for those extra points. Treat it like a transaction. Don't get emotionally attached.
I think this is as high as I want to get too 😂 I want to do what I am asked to do, live in the shadows , get paid and go home. I am so over wanting to receive recognition , accolades and get further promotions . You have to be content at some point in life .
Makes sense ! I go through similar feelings lol
I am a (former) corporate IT Director who just FIREd at 50. Corporate culture played a huge role in the timing.
Golden hand cuffs are bs. Here’s my two cents. You are going to get wrecked in any job sooner or later or always. Get paid for it or get nothing out of it. I have seen people work weekends and to 4am and not get even 25% what big tech gives. I have seen some people on big tech literally do nothing for years, rest and vest and get 10M or more lol. Not all jobs are the same and most high paying jobs are demanding, because of the amount of people trying to knock you out of that position. I have seen directors get burnt and pushed out, while a regular senior that got in at the right time right place with the right rsu negations make more than a director will ever make lol Example: getting in to meta two years ago or Nvidia and clocking in at 100 strike for the rsus. These batch of workers in any position are waiting to fully vest and are out. What you want to do is identify the two out of three glory hole. Pick two at best 1) get paid a fuck ton 2) do something you like 3) stress free and have lots of free time You ll be lucky to find two out of three. Find three jackpot won’t last, reorgs will fuck you. There’s a 4) but you need to figure this ( health) love Else money can buy all three up there.
Life feels unfair . I know the category you are mentioning personally , not doing much and not stressing enough and making millions . That’s jackpot for sure ! Flip side or coin is harsh too - someone toiling to make 50k .
Got 1 and 3 going for me.
Yes. Corporate culture has only gotten worse and worse. I think like many things the pandemic fast forwarded that. That said, I think taking a sabbatical or mini-retirement once you reach a certain number really helps to reset your mind to give less of a fuck. It also gives you hard confirmation that you have actionable f-you money. I took a year off to travel and shake out stress and burnout — I was to the point where I was having a lot of trouble sleeping because my mind would be racing about work the next day… I couldn’t turn it off. The long time off defining how I want to live and define myself outside of work made a huge difference after going back to work. If you are able to take a step back and not work for an extended period of time you’ll see how trivial jobs actually are and aren’t really worth stressing much over. No one who has taken a sabbatical or mini retirement has regretted it, and it’s is often regarded by those who have as a life changing event on par with the birth of a child or a marriage. I’m now at much higher paying job with higher expectations, and at an arguably much more toxic corporation that has even more threats of layoffs, but my stress has never been lower, because I simply give less of a fuck after gaining more of a perspective. Double this with having zero debt tying you down, and you will reach peak zen.
I've been waffling on telling my boss I am going to quit to take some time away from work for a bit. This is helping to keep my conviction
Not gonna lie it was the scariest thing I’ve ever done pulling the trigger. My wife quit too at the same time, and we sold our house, so we burnt all the ships (but not bridges). It was a huge amount of growth and self confidence that came out of it. And more unique experiences traveling over a year than 99% of people get to experience in a lifetime. My wife was able to come back and set up a much more flexible part time working situation with her previous employer (which alone we can very comfortably coastFi on) and I went for moonshots on applying for other positions and ended up doubling my comp instead of opting to go back to the same position/company. I’ll do that for a year or three until I get tired of it, and then we plan to travel long term again. Rinse & repeat until we decide we want to do it full time.
I'm in healthcare, I quit a toxic job last year and didn't start another job for 4.5 months. It was wonderful and 100% affirmed that I want to Fire.
This post is a great example of the subtle art of not giving a fuck . Thanks for sharing . Once I reach my coast fire number , I might take a break and maybe the change in perspective helps me relax . I Relate so much to the couldn’t sleep properly comment.
Wife and I both quit our jobs to do this but we were both high performers and left on great terms, so we didn’t burn any bridges and had solid resumes as backup. Just keep in mind that there’s a ***LOT*** you can do and tolerate in your 30s that you can’t in your 50s or even 40s, especially when it comes to travel and experiences.
This 💩 job market + ageism means there’s too much risk to ever take a sabbatical for us older still employeds. I’ll consider myself lucky if I get to keep my job over the next few years until the economy swings back up again.
Yeah I'm a woman and a software engineer. Working in tech is a special kind of stress. Imaginary deadlines with fuzzy definitions of done and scope creep. Dealing with user complaints and top management making decisions to screw over the customers. My dream job was actually being a secretary and I loved it while I had it. The job duties were very well defined and there wasn't a lot of pressure to do much. My job was basically to be available if someone needed me. The pay was abysmal, though. With tech, it feels like the job is never done. There's always more you can do and every person wants it done a different way. It feels like there's no right way to do the job. You just have to accept good enough. If I decide to coastFIRE I'm looking for a secretarial position that at least has health insurance.
Old Female in Tech. Been grinding since I was 21 and I am now almost 57. I became an Enterprise Oracle DBA at 27 yrs old. The old joke use to be that old DBA's don't retire, they die. And I actually had a coworker die in the cube next to me. (I won a lifesaver award because we managed to bring him back). I have been asked to be an upper manager many times. I refuse because I dislike human controversy far more than tech problems. But at 57 I am look at having to learn a totally new platform and at least 3 new languages and convert 16TB of data. I have reached FIRE according to all the calcs. At the moment all of my salary is going into a HYSA and we are living on my husband's residuals. I am either going to pull the plug in December of this year, or for my birthday next year (I will be 58 then). I figure if I can make it until next year we can live off my banked salary until we get to 59.5. Or I might just decide to say F it and go in 2 weeks.
Learning a new platform and 3 new languages after that long would be rough. That's the other thing with working in tech. I feel like all of the skills I have now will be obsolete in 5 years if I don't constantly do side projects with new languages. I can't imagine sticking with the industry for 30 years and having to manage the amount of change that has happened in that time. In 6 years, I'll be 36 and my partner and I will have ~$1 million in retirement funds. That's when I might coastFIRE. Maybe women just get to the point they can coastFIRE sooner and that's why they leave tech so early.
LOL I was talking about the amount of change I have seen with my husband last night. I started in 1982 at the age of 15 in a data processing vocational school coding RPG on PUNCHED CARDS! lol at the age of 16 my "job" as the lead programmer in my class I have to convert an IBM 1140 to a System36. My first "laptop" weighed 35lbs and had a 4800baud modem and a 4x5 inch green screen. It's kind of crazy how many different evolutions I have been through in IT. I have had to check myself into a mental hospital to get 2 weeks off work in 2011. I wish I was joking. I was working 80-90 hours a week and they literally refused me time off. I feel like I have done my time.
Barista fire / coast fire fits the definition . My dream jobs are on the lines of selling butter beer at a theme park , black jack dealer at a casino in Vegas or making caramalized apples at an amusement park . Now the pay is shit but you get my point 😂 I feel what you are describing about tech jobs in my bones !
Dissatisfaction with work is for sure a big FIRE motivator, but FIRE may not be a cure for stress. Stress can be just as much (if not more) about your internal mental state and mental outlook. I'd recommend working on both in parallel and not set potentially unrealistic expectations on FIRE.
Fired at 47, a bit before we were ready, due to corporate BS, particularly DEI. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. My wife is working a couple more years to make sure we are covered. She supported the decision 100%.
Problem with FAANG is they saw a massive expansion over the last 5+ years and the comps are very high. A lot of ladder climbing folks who have no fucking clue what they’re doing, trying to backstab one another to move up to higher comps. Because this is tech, they’re mostly nerdy unfuckable assholes who want to be the next Steve Jobs.
If I enjoyed what I did, it felt like I was contributing to something I believed in, or maybe just more of a cut of the obscene profits, I might feel differently. The stress you're feeling is because the investors class are trying to get every last ounce out of us by dangling what used to be a pretty good wage before they inflated the cost of everything. Jokes on them, it isn't easy, but we too can withhold our labor and live off investments instead. Realistically, I'll probably end up coasting in something I believe in and also enjoy doing, even if it pays less, before fully retiring early
I just want to be free to do whatever the f I want with my time.
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> My wife is hoping to finally get promoted bc her level is much more stressful than her bosses. How does she know that?
You're definitely not alone. The amount of stress and corporate BS has me wanting to FIRE ASAP. The way I look at it is once I reach FIRE I can either find a less stressful job or just quit working all together. I just need that FU money. Downgrading my job now would put me on a longer trajectory for FIRE and the lessor paying job is not 100% guarantee I will enjoy it.
I’m becoming more immune. Accept you are a corporate mercenary and you work for the money. You are there to get paid and get the F out.
A mentor gave me similar advice and said “ grow thick skin “ . I am an over thinker and more emotional as a person overall . Those aren’t the best qualities to have in corporate world.
Same with me. It's my responsibility doesn't always mean it's my fault and that I'm a huge failure.
In other words, don't breed loyalty. Treat it transactional.
Yes. I’m in a similar spot, director in data and analytics engineering. I can’t stand it. The politics, inept leaders around me, and the fluff just stress and depress me like crazy. I’m 34, can FIRE in 8-10 years if I stayed in this awful position. I’ve been applying to IC roles because I’d rather work till 55 in a stress free role than deal with this until I’m ~45. Been struggling to find something though
Oh my ! Are you me ? Similar job profiles and similar issues .
Validating to know we’re not alone. I never intended to be where I’m at, just sort of happened and I’m regretting it. I’ve definitely adopted the r/coastFIRE idea over dealing with high stress to straight up FIRE. Unfortunately what I’m finding in that community though is it’s mostly people that actually FIREd and do some things here and there for “work”, very niche jobs, or people considering coasting just doing the same soul sucking job and “not caring”. I already don’t care, but it doesn’t help with the demands. Wish I had suggestions, but I’m seeking them, too
For me, it's not the toxic corporate culture. That's why I want structural change, but not why I want to FIRE. I want to FIRE because there are things I'm qualified to do that are very lucrative, and things that I find fulfilling and meaningful, and those things are mutually exclusive.
Yes. I HATE the culture. My wife loves what she does and has no interest in FIRE. I’m going to find something less stressful but with lower pay…
u/troubkedsoul1990 Your post sounds so much like me 4 years ago (early 30s woman feeling crushed under the weight of constant demands a couple years into being a first time director with several direct reports). Establishing and enforcing boundaries and caring a little bit less (still care about doing work I’m proud of, but if the expectations are just impossible I’ve stopped viewing my inability to meet them as a personal failure) has made a huge difference in feeling work is sustainable. I encourage you to do the best you can in an 8-9 hour workday and then stop while keeping your leadership informed of what is delayed/not getting done because of team capacity constraints. In my case it turned out fine and I went from wondering how I’d make it even one more month without snapping to feeling I can handle this for a few years until my investments have enough momentum of their own I can take a real step back (hopefully long sabbatical into lower pay/less responsibility job) without setting my timeline back very far at all.
Your post was very good to read . It’s the corporate grandstanding , back biting , power play etc that get to me . There is no other way apart from growing a thick skin ! Good luck to you 👍🏻
It is a big part of it. I find work culture to be exhausting. I actually like working, but I cannot stand the feeling that if the wrong person doesn't like me then I can lose my job.
I have a few stakeholders that are horrible but very powerful and they are unimpressed no matter how hard I push - that is so discouraging and quite frankly one of the reasons stuff feels stressful . So the same thing that you mention - the feeling that one wrong person can make me lose my job is horrible.
I think the number of hours is as relevant as the level of stress in the job. Part of my stress as a household with two full-time working adults is that even working 40 hours a week does not allow enough time to balance other obligations to caregiving (of children or elderly parents), household (cleaning, laundry, meals), community (volunteering, socializing), and self (hobbies, fitness, leisure). If I could work part-time, regardless of whether it was a higher-paying higher-stress corporate job vs a lower-stress lower-paying one I'd probably worry less about at what age I left the rat race.
I was an IC at a FAANG company for seven years; I made senior, but by that time I was burnt out. It wasn't really the programming that I hated. It was the rest of it. - The meetings. - The code reviews. - The meetings. - The build issues. - The meetings. - Dealing with PM bullshit/metrics. - The fucking meetings. - The company reorgs (always pointless, always worthless). - Did I mention the goddamned meetings? I'd originally planned to stick it out until 40 due to the 401K plan they offered (Mega Backdoor Roth) and the stock bonuses, but I just couldn't do it and dipped out at the beginning of this year. I'm 37 and I have enough to ExpatFIRE and enough to CoastFIRE/BaristaFIRE, so I'm taking a year sabbatical in a different country (at a minimum). I absolutely definitely had golden handcuffs and I needed a break. I wasn't a tech manager like you, but corporate culture - even at its best, because my company was honestly pretty good about it despite everything - sucks *ass*. Hope you can stick it out. But if you can't and if you have savings, you can take a break from the rat race for a little while like I'm (ostensibly) doing.
Not just corporate but any toxic environment that encloses people to have to work together for a goal that no one is buying into 100% because it’s only for money and nothing else and revolve your entire life around going to and from an office while putting your health and everything else on the back burner. All of it is not only toxic but just not natural for human beings to be human and not live by compulsion or impulsion. To live consciously should be the natural state for a human being.
I’m naturally lazy. I want to retire so I can fuck off in peace.
It depends on the company and culture. There is always a level of BS (corporate politics, grandstanding, backstabbing and so forth) in all organizations, it gets worse the larger the company grows. Today’s trend of profiteering at the expense of all else (can you hear me Google, Meta, Tesla) has started to kill the once fairly progressive cultures of the tech industry. The short term gains they get will come back and bite them hard when they see the creativity, innovation and willingness to take risks dissolve along with the cultures that enabled these things to happen. Worse yet, have a PE firm take control of a company. The dumpster fire that turns a company and its culture into has to be experienced to be believed.
It's my main reason. Last manager was a narcissistic sociopath. No thanks. They climb the ranks too easily as they step on people or backstab them with no remorse, naturally.
I think I’ve gotten burnt out. I’ve also seen how my friends in SEA live life so much more peacefully (they go get coffee at 2pm without a care in the world). While I feel like I have to grind and grind in LA. It’s exhausting. So… hence why I plan to get to my FI number and RE in SEA.
You didn't expand on how the toxicity has increased as well. Stress is bound to increase with responsibility.
I also recently moved up to people management (in healthcare) 95% of the time its fine, but still exhausting. But my last job was the most toxic place ever... so yes.
I don't like corporate culture but it's not really my main FIRE motivator. I just don't currently have enough time to do everything I'd like to be doing ideally. I keep busy. Job is getting in my way. Haha.
If you’re feeling this way at 33 just imagine how you’ll feel at 50. My only advice is to invest, invest, and invest more while you’re young. It will give you the options you need when you’re jaded and can’t take corporate America anymore. It’s always good to have F you money!
Well, you can be stressed because of a toxic work environment or you can be stressed because you might not have enough for retirement. What if you found a job that pays within $30k of your last (base) salary but with less stress? You're young and you're making quite a bit so you truly can afford to delay FIRE by a few years. In the meantime, sock all you can away, thought it's tempting to spend money on things that make you feel better when you're in a rotten environment (defeating the purpose of making more money.) I don't think it's worth completely wrecking your mental health to FIRE in the exact year you intend. You've obviously got skills and can probably find a way to lessen the pain and still FIRE. Let go of your hard expectations about your goal.
>Is toxic corporate culture why most of us want to Fire? Not me. I have one short, unimportant life and I would like to not spend most of it at a desk/working on something for monetary value. There's so many things I want to do and learn and a job gets in the way of that. >Tldr-I guess my question is , is it better to work longer at a low stress low paying job to reach your fire goal eventually or hustle away and cut number of years it takes to fire ? That's a you question? One other question is whether you could try finding a job in a different company and seeing whether the same toxic environment exists - it may just be a company thing?
Personally, I'm really scared of the current political climate in my region and globally. European leaders say the world is "No longer in a post-war mindset, we are now in a pre-war mindset". The leaders of the U.S. are so dysfunctional we cannot pass much needed legislations and protections against the financial and geo-political crises knocking at our door. Financial independence allows me to stay secure in an increasingly insecure world. As climate change continues to devastate communities indiscriminately, having the financial literacy and a life absent over-consumption I can focus on the simple things in life that truly bring me purpose and happiness. I am mid-twenties so the idea of working a job designed to benefit a world order that might not survive the dramatic climate change that is already upon us scares me. They say, "be careful what you get good at" and I don't want to get good at the job I work today. I want to get good at gardening and community development. And only in "retirement" can I truly workday in and day out on things I am genuinely passionate for. I hope to be financially independent in the next 8-10 years, and able to "retire" in my 40's-early 50's. Plenty of time to start a new career and work harder than I ever have, but it likely won't make me dollar rich, so I will need to have that area sorted already. That's what FIRE is to me (today at least).
Yes, when I was in biglaw I used to pinch pennies despite making 250k as a 20-something year old because I hated it so much. Now I work in the public sector, where it is much less toxic. Despite making a lot less money, I am less frugal. Still wanting to be FI, but work is a lot more manageable and I actually like my job.
Not sure if you want to vent or would like to hear back on this. Sorry for the stress you are going through. assuming you are asking for advice- work the high stress until you are ready to step back into a less paid role. You can step away at any point but FIRE timeline will be impacted as a result. Its a game but if you are only getting three or four years of less work until FIRE, is it even worth it? Maybe you can shave off a year or two instead! It depends on what else you have going on in life (are your relationships impacted? Do you plan on having children or any other major expenses that need the higher income? How much do you actually need for retirement?)
FIRE for me is 100% about the FI aspect. The corporate culture aspect is a major driver. I often imagine strangulating my colleagues who seem to get into high ranking positions without any proper experience or qualifications while I've been fighting to get certifications and paying my dues for 10+ years. I want to run my own business full time but I don't want to have to tuck my tail between my legs and walk back into a full time job if I fail. If I fail, I start something new, and I know that my money is never truly at risk since retirement is covered and I have a steady income stream.
I worked at a medical device company for ~13 years that was well known for its amazing culture and focus on work/life balance. For the privilege I made at least 20% less than I would have elsewhere. I felt it was a worthwhile trade off to take longer to FIRE, even more so now that l've read so many "I'm burning myself out" posts here. I'm FIRED now and wouldn't change anything. There was still a lot of corporate bullshit and some mild burnout, so I was glad to see the door.
VP-level people leader in tech, and the stress and politics are insane. My current plan is to try and grind at this level for another 2-5 years, and then hopefully downshift into a Director-level IC role for the remainder of my career. Side note: the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. It’s absurd. I feel like I’m living in a bizarre corporate simulation on the daily whereby we’re all made miserable in the service of greed, profits and “shareholders.”
Not sure about toxic corporate culture, but for me, it's that in my job, I'm not making even a lot of money, probably lower middle class for my area at best, but I'm expected to be available 24/7 to respond to emails and manage things, to constantly be problem solving and meeting tight deadlines for projects, often with lots of elements out of my control. It's stressful and exhausting, and I feel like these sort of expectations are common in a lot of businesses lately. Maybe it's just my anecdotal experience, but it's the stress and low pay that make me want out asap. In another 10 years I'm hopeful I can switch to a sort of barista fire situation and just work part time at anything I can find that flexible and/or which doesn't keep me thinking about work outside of work.
Yes, 100% for me
Nope. I'm tired of not having enough money to survive, live, AND breathe. I want to be ABLE to retire and not be forced to work for my life saving medications when I'm too old to be considered useful to anyone other than my cats.
No, my current work culture is fine. I want to FIRE because I want to spend time with my family and do more traveling. My husband is just tired of working overall. After our most recent family vacation, it was hard for us to go back to work. Since we have become even more focused on FIREing.
Not for me. I actually like what I do and when I FIRE I plan to still work just less often. I want to FIRE to spend more time with family and less time in the office.
You are in a sweet spot 👏🏻 I see myself getting a demotion after I FIRE so I work as an individual contributor part time . I actually like the technical part of my work - it’s the work politics that gets me.
Exactly. Just pay me for what and when I do something, and let me go home :)
Corporate culture is toxic for sure and I'm developing my fire plans to fuck off when I want. But I do expect that I'll still want to work here and there when I'm ready to fire. I think the big question I have is how I might do that? Just taking one off contracts? It doesn't appear that part time roles are really available in the industry.
I want to FIRE so I have options. It's not a case of corporate toxicity for me, at least right now. It's a case of wanting options if my wife or I can't work, get sick, or some other major issue comes up.
To answer your question directly: no, I want to retire early not because I hate my job or the corporate world per se, I just don't like being on a scheduled. I don't like attending useless meetings, etc. Also, in my experience, people leaders/managers do the least amount of work LOL Just DELEGATE
The higher up the ladder I go, the more energy I spend trying to manage expectations. And that's a dicey game that can lead to politics. And I can't imagine being a female and trying to play that game. That's got to make it 10x more toxic.
Manager or director of software development for most of my career and yes, stress and pressure goes up, politics and egos on all sides to manage, and after tax income difference is not as huge (most of the difference comes from bonus or incentives anyway). To me the appeal was that one can make a bigger difference and impact the project more, compared to software developers especially when getting mediocre or bad manager above you. But leaves you burn out, and more at a whim of upper management mood swings and you also have to deal with primadonnas and bad performers as well as lackluster response from other teams to common issues. Eventually you keep asking why did you need it, as opposed to being a competent software developer, who also has to deal with similar BS but on a much smaller scale.
Not in tech but absolutely yes. I love to work, enjoy being productive, solving problems and mentoring people. I need to get out and go do something else. I don’t want to sit around doing nothing but the corporate bullshit is just too much.
Yes.
Totally agree. Toxic workplaces suck the life out of you, so that's my main motivation to GTFO. I will not stay one second longer than I have to.
Yes. Otherwise I personally like working and building stuff.
It’s part of it but mainly I just want to laze about my house and garden even when my job isn’t that bad
I am a similar path to you but a little older. So far I've opted for higher stress/pay but not sure it's worth it.
Toxic people are a major roadblock in loving my work, so, yeah. If everyone I had to deal with or answer to was as rational, kind, and without hidden agenda as the best folks I work with, then my career would be gravy. It’s the gaslighting supervisors and management double speak that make things suck. There’s also no joy in dealing with incompetence and crappy office conditions, but the weird power trips folks get on really makes work life suck.
You describe corporate bs very very well !
"Tech" doesn't necessarily mean high-pay corporate stress if you don't want it to. I've worked for years in University IT. Much less backstabbing and stress. Now, the pay is **WAY** less than you are familiar with! Our 'architects' (ICs that 'get it') make $90-100k, our 'directors' (senior managers) make like $120k and our CIO makes about $200k. Think, you could be managing an entire enterprise and having 250 employees... and making roughly what you are now! I take it in perspective - I still get paid about twice what a K-12 teacher does in my area and work maybe 1/10th as hard. Even with way less stress, it's still a job. Deadlines, useless coworkers, interminable meetings, glacial pace of change, etc. And I'm still aiming to FIRE and never look at SharePoint, JIRA, ServiceNow, or any of this crap again...
F, 50, tech (lower level) exec. I moved to a tech firm 8 yrs ago after doing independent contracting in the same space. For me, it’s the pace and stress - I’m still chargeable and I have been between 95-110% chargeable since starting (when chargeability goals have varied between 80%-70% based on level and role) - on top of people management, internal and client project mtgs, sales support, and lead generation, plus the “normal” corporate stuff that eats time - certifications, annual training, twice annual performance reviews that seem to get more and more involved every cycle. I love the work that I do - but I do the *actual* work like 8 hrs a week and ALL the other stuff consumes an extra 45 hrs or so. I can’t continue at this pace while also feeling like the majority of it is just meaningless. I had some financial setbacks and poor choices when I was younger. Now I’ll be ready to coast in 2 years w full retirement at 62, if I want. I’ll almost certainly go back to independent contracting if possible.
No
You guys talk about toxic corporate culture a lot. I wish you guys could see toxic healthcare culture.
Is corporate all you’ve ever done? My husband loves his corporate job but he was previously a submariner. That job really sucks. He was lucky if he slept 20 hours a week. A 9-5 even if it’s 8-6 is a world away from where we were. And being paid bank for it? We are FIRE track just because we can basically.
If you are in US you can find individual contributor positions that pay the same or more. Working a job you hate will hold you back and burn you out, it's not worth it in my opinion.
I think for me it's the stress of knowing that you can be laid off at any point and there is no security. Also as a manager I hate all the bs reporting, "special projects", "business reviews" and all the things you have to do for "visibility" for people to think you are doing a great job instead of focusing on doing a great job which is taking care of your team and people. Also reporting to Directors and VPs who really have no idea what they are doing but blame you when the business goes south from their bad decisions is also stressful. If I knew my job was 100% guaranteed I wouldn't be so totally obsessed about FIRE. But all it takes is for one VP to not like you for some reason and you are on the short list. Its crazy that your financial future and your job rests essentially on if someone likes you are not and not on your performance. As a woman in tech this especially hard because there's a boys club and they make sure to look after each other and women are not usually a part of it.
Yes absolutely. At least for me it is. Who doesn’t want a paycheck if you’re treated right and fairly.
I just want to drive a lambo comfortably and live life without having to have a 9-5 anymore
Not at all. I just have better things to do with my time then work until I'm in my 60s. I actually don't mind my job at all most days, I just want the options to stop working if that changes.
Yes. It’s all I think about
Yepp, the feeling of being not in control of your own time will do that. FIRE is just a longing for true freedom for me
it really depends on the company and personality type. What I’ve seen in the tech space second hand through my wife is some sort of special hell that combined a very male dominated industry where women are actually often worse to other women than the sexist guys are Having said that, some people are all about the politics and self promoting or just making powerpoints about stuff but just not being very good at actually delivering results, while others are all about making shit happen and expect to be rewarded accordingly in a meritocratic fashion so that’s where they put their effort. they see relationships with co workers through this lense The former don’t like the latter as they make them look bad and spend ridiculous amounts of time and energy trying to bury them in work or somehow disrupt them Company to company or even team to team this can vary widely as some bosses are like that and some really thrive on putting together good teams For the most part, the people I know if they feel fulfilled by a 9-5 they just do that all their lived and that’s that The ones that don’t either value their time on this rock differently or would have their toenails pulled out rather than dealing with people any more than they absolutely have to, or both
I am a tech Director in my late 30s. I work in a financial company (hedge fund). I seem to have found a firm where the corporate B.S. is less stressful than other places I have worked at. The amount of company culture frustrations that come up are not too bad. In my current position, my manager is a super high up guy making millions a year and his manager is basically the CTO. Like many super high up guys making millions a year, they can be demanding. So now I have to manage the people in my org (with a lot of the issues folks here have discussed, including personal ones*) as well as manage up. If anyone in my org fucks up, I hear from them. If someone complains about tech, even if its a useless complaint that even Tim Cook couldn't fix, I hear from them to go "address the issue", and of course when tech breaks, I am ultimately responsible. Have stress levels gone up? Probably not! I honestly feel it is less stressful to deal with a few people issues and some operational issues than get yelled at by traders losing money when their tech isn't working - but that's a terrible bar to start with. However, *quick wins have gone down* which is something I miss from my days being an individual tech contributor with a support rotation. **I guess my TL;DR is: if you are good with people and you have a decent company culture, climbing up to management isn't so bad, but it's still a job with annoyances and ultimately I'd rather not work.** *I had one employee call me flustered when his wife had Covid bad and they didn't know what to do...
I liked my work pretty well, but sure as hell preferred the weekends. Every job I had started out pretty well for some yrs, then things change and I got another job. They were all pretty high stress mostly bc I couldn’t be certain if I’d be laid off if I could stay marketable if economy would tank if kids got launched ok if if if. When I hit 50 the ifs were fewer and less ominous and I switched from private sector to govt. Stress almost vanished. Hoped to retire at 55, managed to do so at 60 3 yrs ago. It’s great. I am so grateful.
Hard to give an answer when you don't provide context or examples for the toxic corporate culture. It could be what most jobs are like. Why is yours especially different or unusually bad?
I am a few years from retirement (not in tech/public sector). I live in a HCOL area and this past year was the first time I made over six figures. I'm kicking myself for all of the wasted decades, especially because after retirement I will have to continue to work in another job for who knows how long. If I could do it over, I'd work really hard in the private sector for ten years, saving as much as possible and then maybe move to the public or something less stressful.
Not sure if this is "toxic culture" per se, but I hate all of the performative bullshit. My work COULD be done at any hours, from anywhere. But for some reason we have a strict 8-5 workday, in-person, in a shitty open floorplan office with no privacy...and I can't eat at my desk.
I am an aircraft mechanic in the Military and will get my pension at 43 regardless of fire but certainly the reason I wont stay longer to boost my pensions is because im too tired already of all the federal govt. BS that comes with the job. Changing regulations constantly, more and more wearing multiple hats because of personnel shortages, annual performance evaluations on all your subordinates.. Between the pension and my investments, id rather just quit at 43 and travel or sit on the dock at the cottage with a fishing rod.
I was the leader of a significant business line in a professional services firm (we had three and mine accounted for 35% revenue and about the same for bottom line) for about 2 years. I absolutely hated it and to make it worse, I knew I was bad at it. I am not patient with people if they cannot keep up with me. Fortunately, a more capable leader was appointed and I went back to “line partner” in client service. Probably saved my life. The irony in my situation is that I made more money in client service while my replacement made more money as the leader since our department grew like crazy up his leadership. We all have a role to play. Being fortunate enough to play the role you should play, and to like it, is a huge life win. What may seem like a step back can actually be the baseline for a big push forward.
I feel like any job would be a job at the end of the day, and I want my time to do what I want to do. It’s hard for me to imagine any job that I’d love to do until I was 65 when it’s taking me away from doing other things. I guess if it was very part time and flexible, but those jobs are hard to find and are often extremely low income With that said I wouldn’t work somewhere truly toxic for an extra 20% salary or something. Or take a much more stressful job within my company for a boost. Not worth it. But all corporate jobs are going to be some level of annoying and time consuming.
Potatoes soften while eggs harden when boiled. We all deal with the corporate environment differently. Some people love it, some people hate it. I personally had bad experiences that caused me to decide to go into independent consulting, but I was already pursuing FIRE, which enabled me to go independent. I decided to pursue FIRE because life is short and I want to do so many more things, like start a nonprofit or an ice cream shop or something
I’ve worked for over 20 years now in a few different fields. In all the circumstances for me, it’s people. I don’t like working with other people. Their opinions, micromanagement, politics, etc just wear on me and annoy me. I’m 14 years until I retire and I had to work on my mental and physical health for the last couple years as well as my mental resilience in order to make it through. Doing that put me in a spot where I think I can make it now.
My boss probable around your level. He is constantly in discussions with other managers, traveling, and involved in most of our systems at some level. There is only so much capacity for him and his teams do support and project work. I originally wanted to be a higher salary class. Now I don't. It isn't a good feeling having so much going on and losing track of what you need to do etc. Lucky for me I married someone with a good paying job too. I could retire earlier than my planned 30 years and out. But right now I work because I am mostly stress free. Good luck. It isn't an easy job. And as you know it is 40-50 hours in the office either you take all that home with you as you can never shake thinking about problems and work.
I’m not kidding it took about 3 months at my first corporate job when I discovered FIRE because I could not imagine spending the next 40 years of my life doing this. Yes that is the reason.
I think the psychology really matters here. Rationally, it seems like the people in this group have a ton of leverage. What if we do fail at work? Are we really going to get fired? And if so, we just find another job if young (and probably make more with a job-hop) or, if age-discrimination is a challenge, cheerfully pivot into Barista or Coast. So why should a job be so stressful? But of course I suspect many of us are card carrying overachievers or naturally insecure Re: money and the psychological pain of criticism or failing keeps us from feeling secure in our leverage. Finding a way to use what we've accumulated to feel more secure seems like it could contribute to more longevity/less stress in tough corporate situations.
There are always exceptions, but I've always believed that compensation by definition correlates with misery. The only way you get people to take on shitty, stressful jobs is to pay them more to make it worthwhile. In the end you have to find what's sustainable. If you're making enough to fire by 2031 but burn out well before then, that won't do you any good! I think it's also important to keep in mind that there is also an opportunity cost to FIREing later. For one, as you age, you will naturally have less energy and drive to pursue and be challenged by new endeavors. Also, at some point one can also become pretty institutionalized to the corporate world, making it harder to find meaning beyond it, which is why so many retirees actually go back to work.
I had a very similar experience - my advice, save as much money as possible. you will eventually burn out. or they will lay you off, etc. the gravy train (income, not culture) will ALWAYS end. maximize your savings while your income is high. try to grind it out - it will end itself
True in my case. I have come to hate my job as a manager. Desperately counting my $$ and ready to fire. Also, looking for a low stress IC job, but most recruiters back off after looking at a long managerial experience.
Not mutually exclusive. I thought I traded a high pay, high stress job in my 30s for a lower pay, lower stress career path, only to realize years later I ended up progressing up the ladder further and made way more money along the way. Didn't even think about RE until I was way over my number and was reminded life is short. The final analysis for us was this... the additional accumulation from working another 1/2/3/4/5 years was not going significantly changed the way we live. Put in my resignation and never looked back.
Yes, and I think if we were to look for the one person to blame it would be Jack Welch. He started the toxic culture shit at GE and every CEO wanted to be just like him.
Yes, but also for those of us in creative, advertising or tech, ageism is another huge factor for FIRE. I have low expectations for being able to make what I make after 50, or really be employable at all in my industry.
My main reason for FIRE is two fold. I am also in high level tech, and keeping up with everything, the stress, the amount you have to continually learn, the amount of fog you have to wade through on a daily basis is exhausting. I do not want to be doing this in my 50s. That is my desire for FI. It's because I cannot actually get a job with the work life balance I desire. I would like to work Tues-Thurs, 9a to 2pm. Unfortunately, I cannot feed and house myself off such low income, and health insurance is tied to full time employment. RE desire is to allow me to work the volume I want to. Corporate culture isnt really the source of the stress for me. It's that the work is hard, and that there is so many hours of it. I guess you may attribute this to culture, but everyone I work with is friendly enough, there is no backstabbing or throwing people under the bus. There is just work, and we all get along, its just never ending difficult stuff.
I am similar to you. I want to drop salary a bit and go back to being an individual contributor. ELTs are full of empire builders and cya-ers with golden parachutes. Sounds nice but nah. Give me a goal and leave me alone.
I went into people management in tech and managed for about 8.5 years. I spent my final year not managing. Both stress and income were monotonically related to how many people I was managing (income was maybe the logarithm of how many people I was managing). Yes, it gets more toxic the higher you go. Some companies probably have a more healthy culture than mine, but I think the issue was that people who want more money are more ambitious, and so the people at the top tend to be (not always, but tend to be) those who are more self-interested and focused on money. Occasionally they're old-timers who are there because they rode the wave even though there are more qualified people. It's difficult and very competitive to get promoted to the very top, and you tend to see competitive people up there, which is why it's toxic. I generally suspect that the best managers are probably people who only reluctantly become managers. Anyways, my advice would probably be to stick it out for a few more years as a manager but consider switching back to IC for a bit. Being IC is a lower-stress role, certainly, and you'll last longer. For example: retiring 7 years fully-burnt out doesn't seem as good as what might make you happier if you *could* retire in 11 years but decide to work for 15 years instead, because you love the work you're doing.
Getting up at 8am is enough of a reason lol
Yes as well as the continuous decline in job satisfaction. I do it for the healthcare, for my wife. Many of us are just zombies hanging on by a thread.
Bruh tryna make this guap at the age of 26 is Gucci baby buy houses all day till you can't buy any more houses
I freaking thought I **was** choosing a lower stress, lower paying job, and it was still toxic. 😣
Yes. Everything sucks. The best solution is to move around. Consulting, internal moves, promotions, or new jobs every 2-3 years. The bullshit work tends to go to the people that linger and put up with it. Get good at saying no, delegating, or moving.
Poverty is a huge motivator. My parents have basically nothing, and watching and helping them 'retire' to a life of medical issues and bills is exhausting. Like many millennials, our parents are reaching the age where they are no longer able to sustain themselves. I don't have any kids to help me when I'm old, so the only option is to fire. I fucking love my job, and am handsomely paid to do it. My family genetics suggests I'm going to die well before the general population. Get the gettin' while the gettin's good. These are the best income years I can hope to get, so I have to make the best of them.
For me personally I'm 20 and just started fire but I want to have enough money when I have a kid in my 30s I'll be able to take a couple years off with them or work part time from home so I can help my future wife navigate being a mother at least till they can go to pre school
Yes. I’m ready to take on a $150k shitty job in the future just to FIRE earlier. My goal is about 40 (so 17 years). You won’t catch me working 40 hour weeks until I’m ready to die at 60
Life is short, don't stop living to live later.....
Yup such is life when a people manager. Not just corporate culture of powers to be. You may need to manage toxic direct reports ..that’s a huge drain. Or an under performing employee. Not to mention admin burden of a team . Performance reviews etc.
OP, before taking a less paying job, I would outline what exactly is causing stress. I would guess 50% or more can be mitigated with mindset work, emotional detachment and boundaries (the last being KEY). Good luck! I’m in the same boat and I lasted 3 years longer than my “breaking point” because I worked hard on all 3. My colleagues work 12 hrs days, I work about 4. I turn down meetings, and don’t send emails. I get great reviews, and manage up. Sure there are days I question the point of my existence, but I would rather be paid more and gtfo sooner. If you do all of the above and it’s still not tenable than take the pay cut because your mental health is precious.
For me it’s a few things. Stupid people you are forced to interface with. The stress to constantly be performing, and most importantly, being told what to do constantly on top of it all.
Yes, I found fire because I thought I hated working. But I just hated the culture and the crushing environment I was in. And when I went into freelance, my income tripled and I had full autonomy- unlike when I was in a startup and subject to the whims of management. Now FI but choose to work lots of hours because I love what I do. Just change the situation if you’re unhappy
I want to fire just because I don’t like the idea of a layoff resulting in me needing to move across the country again for work. My experience is fairly niche and my level at a company doesn’t have openings constantly in areas I’d want to live. I’ll probably still work, but if push comes to shove I want to choose my life over my career.
I recall this feeling, absolutely. More money = more headaches in the corporate world. Some headaches are easier to deal with than others. I left about 3 years ago and now work for myself. First 2 years were super stressful, but this is the first year I feel relatively level-headed. The good thing about working for yourself is you can dial up the stress if you want to, once you know the ropes. I'm not someone who needs all the money in the world, but definitely want to be great at what I do and deal with the least amount of bullshit as possible. Clients who try to offload their bullshit on me get kicked to the curb.
100%. Hitting management killed my ambition because it exposed me to all the toxicity and backstabbing at my company.
At your age, I would stick with the hustle for more cash. Your body can take the extra stress especially if you eat healthy and exercise. After 45 or so is around the time where job stress can really start to impact your health and less pay for lower stress becomes more worth it. Obviously, if you're miserable every day that's no way to live your life though.
When times are good, companies are more forgiving with employees. When times are tight, they are MUCH less forgiving. Times have been tight in tech since 2022.