Would You Take A Paycut for More Interesting Work?

HellsAngel asks: "I work in a business consulting firm. While the pay and the benefits are great, the work itself is mundane and boring, consisting of Excel, Access, and VBA macros. Recently, I got a job offer to move to a startup doing OS development and Systems and Network programming, however it would involve a paycut. Would you leave an otherwise perfect job to work on something more interesting?" "Today, I work as an IT Analyst for a multinational firm doing business consulting. From the looks of it, I've got the perfect job: high pay, extravagant benefits and bonuses, flexi-time, can telecommute whenever possible, and best of all the coworkers are great and have truly become my friends, even the boss.

However, the work I actually do seems to be a waste of my CS education. My current project right now involves hooking up Excel and Access with a little VBA and some macros. The other day I was asked to export a Lotus Notes database into an Excel file and format it. The most programming-intensive project that I've done here was an ASP.NET webapp, for the company intranet.

Am I selling out by continuing to work in my current firm? Should I take the pay-cut to work at a startup where I can make more use of my talents? I'm a recent grad with no loans or credit cards to pay, so I have a low cost of living aside from a girlfriend. Which would you prefer: fun at work, or fun outside of work?"

Comments

Re:Paycut for a more intelligent Mgr

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

I manage a small office and every so often, I hear this exact same thing.

I know how to manage -- I hire folks that are smarter than me for a reason -- because if I wanted to do the job myself, I'd have hired someone stupider.

Beyond that, managers have to know skill sets outside of just your own. I can admit I'm not the best coder out there, and I'm not really upset by it. So long as I can create ideas and others can realize them, I'm in good shape. Coming from both sides of the equation, I'd rather be a manger or have a manager that could admit he didn't know more than me and let me do my job -- I've never micromanaged my employees and I expect the same in return.

Personally, I think the folks 'under' me are actually more important in the scheme of things -- but without someone to guide them nothing would get done.

Posted anonymously because I don't want those nerds to get a big ego if they read this. Or more importantly, ask for raises.

Re:Paycut for a more intelligent Mgr

[jkauzlar]

I think you're correct to a point. Managers' jobs are (or can be) wayyy different from software developers'. It depends on the environment. If you're talking about project managers, I think they ought to know more than their underlings. Management that deal in budgets, communicating with higher management, etc, seem totally different. These mgrs can get transferred from unrelated depts into IT and hardly miss a beat. I'm assuming that since you're reading slashdot, you must be somewhat tech-savvy and perhaps not in this breed of mgmt.

I'm just a peon, by anyone's standards, but I would feel dispirited if someone were promoted past me because they couldn't function at the lower level. I've seen it several times (well, a couple times, but I haven't been in the corp. world long) where the clueless employee is promoted because mgmt doesn't want to risk taking the best guys off the lower-rung jobs. On the other hand, the best guys, the geeks, enjoy their line of work and would probably feel less satisfaction at the mgmt level. So they're stuck at a lower pay level, and like the parent suggests, probably would love to have something of a mentor working above them... it would give them some hope of advancement, careerwise.

On a side note, if you're managing geeks, or technical specialists of some kind, its probably best to avoid any micro-management simply because you don't know what you're talking about. I like seeing my manager as an ally in my career, not someone I have to slip past to get anything done. It's a complementary relationship, not a strict heirarchy. She knows much that I don't, and that goes both ways.

Enough of my soapbox.

Work for your sense of self

[DanTheLewis]

Money is great, but all it represents is the investment of your time. It is a limitless commodity. Your time, unfortunately, is not.

I watched Groundhog Day recently. It's nice that Bill Murray learned to love and to play the piano, but I probably would've spent the first million years in the public library. If they'd had the internet then, maybe the first billion years.

Anyway, I digress. You don't have a billion years, you have three score and ten, plus or minus two score. For a huge chunk of that time, say forty hours a week for several decades, you're at work.

Think about what kind of life you want to have. If it's a life filled with a lot of stuff, maybe you belong at a job where you can buy it all. If it's a life where you do what you want after age 40 or 50, maybe you belong at a job where you can save up the millions of dollars necessary. But if it's a life where you do meaningful work, maybe you need to leave.

The meaning of work is intertwined with the meaning of life. I can't tell you what the meaning of your life is. Even if I knew, you wouldn't listen; at some level, you have to discover it for yourself. 40 hours a week is more than a third of your waking life, so figure out if you need your work to mean anything to you.

Also consider that your work is reshaping your personality. I got back to graduate CS after several years of work that was often drudgery, managed by someone else, with my work time accountable to the nearest six minutes. Experiences like that wear away at you; the thousand tasks you do will recreate your mind. Figure out if they're changing you in a direction you like.

Paul Graham wrote a good essay about work recently.

Re:Paycut for a more intelligent Mgr

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a hardcore programmer. Well, at least I was. 2 years into my first job out of college, I got offered another job and the only way my current company could match was to promote me. The promotion came with other benefits such as bonus/stock opts./etc, so I couldn't pass it up.

I had no experience with management, but knew that there were people out there that could do a better job at web development than I could. So, I got the chance to hire some more people for my web dev group and hired super people that knew way more than I did. It ended up workout out great! I was honest about my skill level and let my people know that their expertice and creativity was always appreciated.

I view myself as working for my employees instead of them working for me. I ask on a constant basis if they need anything or if there is anything I can do to help them complete their task. By them doing a great job, I do a great job, and that shoots right up the ladder.

I also know that it helps to be passionate about what you do. I get excited when I think about web development and what it could do for the company and I see that it infects my team. They get excited about it too. They want to learn more and advance and make the corporate intranet easier to use and a pleasant experience for our users.

Re:Get Together

[st1d]

>>A job is a means to an end, and facilitates the other things in life that you really enjoy.

I couldn't agree more, but it's always amazing to me how many people see their job as a major part of their worth as a human being. If they have a bad day at work, they go home and kick around the family a while, get drunk or drugged up, or otherwise compound the effect of a single bad day. Of course, it's hard not to see things like this, because they're practically drilled into you from a young age. What your dad did for a living tends to set the stage for how you grow up, in the sense that whatever job he had you tend to want to at least meet that level of success for yourself. If you don't, you're a "failure".

Somehow, a few of us manage to break that cycle, and realize a job for what it is, a way of earning enough to create a means of doing the things we really enjoy, whether it's traveling around the world, feeding a hobby, etc. Without having some sort of goal like that you're simply chasing rainbows, because there will always be someone who makes a little more, has a little more interesting job, a little less stress, etc.

Of course, the saddest situation is when you see someone whose job has become their life, and this is common whether you're working at a fortune 500 office complex, or tiny machine shop. We've all worked with that one person who had no life outside of work, whose only hobbies were gossiping about coworkers and trying to stir up fights to entertain themselves. These are the folks that get fired and show up the next day with a shotgun. If you're falling into this category, get the heck out!

You should enjoy work, and find it stimulating on some level, though. Perhaps not your duties (I'd be worried about the janitor that looks forward to cleaning the bathrooms), but some aspect of your job that you deal with on a regular basis, maybe working with your coworkers, customers, or simply (like myself) watching company dynamics (watching how various parts of the company interact, for better or worse) in action. You should also make enough to pay the bills, spend on whatever hobbies you have, and put away for later. Lastly, you should have a position that allows you to spend time with your friends and family, and on your hobbies.

If you can do all three, the dollar amount is kind of like a high score on a video game. Cool to have, but not all that important in the long run.