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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?"
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?"
I'd take a cut to have a Mgr that actually knew more than me.
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You should get together with this guy and start a company which does programming-intensive and patent-free works.
I find that this is a common greener-grass syndrome where one doesn't realize how lucky one is, however this is a good syndrome because that is what got us human-beings to where we are today. Imagine what would the world be if we didn't invent TV and we had to sit on an empty couch all day?
My advice is to try out some part-time works that utilize your talents, this will give you time to understand what your talents and interests are without risking what you have right now.
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It's hardly 'an otherwise perfect job' if it's mundane, boring and you are contemplating taking another job that involves a paycut.
I always encourage folks to do something they enjoy. The whole 'work to live' not 'live to work'. Six months ago I quit my job becaue I didn't find it interesting or challenging anymore, and stumbled into some interesting and different work from what I had been doing.
Now that that is over I will look for something else interesting. I am married and have a stay at home wife and daughter and I will still look for something more interesting or fun to do, life should be more than just paying the bills and being bored.
Would you take a pay raise for less interesting work? Hell yes! Make a bunch of money first, then use that money to do something that interests you.
Money isn't everything.. But it IS freedom..
I'm a habitual paycut-taker, so maybe I'm biased. But I stay happy, and money only makes you happier when you're really struggling financially. The world is too wonderful, life too short and precious to waste on VBA programming.
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.
Most people would kill for job conditions like those. The excellence of your coworkers and boss in particular makes me inclined to say that you should stay. If you feel your CS degree is wasted, work on open source projects or try to bring open source into your organization. There are a myriad of ways to apply your knowledge without necessarily quitting your job. The dissatisfaction you experience may not be alleviated in your new job and if your boss and/or coworkers are worse, you'll regret the switch.
If you've got a good salary, and good benefits, stay where you are while you search for an opportunity that can provide you with the kind of environment that you're after without having to sacrifice your current standard of living.
It's not 2002 anymore... You can have a job that you like, and get paid well for it.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
If a lower pay is enough to pay the bills and lead a comfortable life style, I would seriously consider dumping a high-paying boring job for a rewarding low-paying.
But:
The fact that it's a startup complicates things. Startups can fail at any time, and one day you may wake up and find yourself on the street. You need to do your homework and take a very close look at the startup: are they just a dot-bomb wannabe, or do they have a solid business plan, a marketable product, and a firm roadplan? The answers to these questions will guide you to making the call here.
Your other alternative is to find the time in your cushy job and make it interesting. If it's really such a bore you should have plenty of time to spend on educating yourself. Find something you want to learn, some skill, and use your free time to study it. If it's even barely relevant to your current line of work you are on solid ground to justify using your free time, on the clock, on this. No employer -- especially the solid company you claim to be working for -- would object to their employees learning and picking up related skills that might be relevant to their employment; they should even encourage it.
Finally, count on the fact that this company will fail (most do). What back-up plan do you have? If you quit your current job, make sure that you keep your foot in it( i.e. leave on a very good note). For the last 5 years, the economy has been so-so, with a enormously rising deficit, and almost certain that the deal with Iran is about to blow up. When it happens, the price of gas will probably shoot to 3-3.5/gal. That means that the economy will cut back. i.e., there is likely to be at least a softening in the economy. If the economy softens, what happens to the company? Is its product dependant on a growing economy.
Now, with all that, consider going. If you are a true CS, then the current job will guarentee you no future. Why would I hire you if you have shown no initiative. At the very least, if you stay with it, consider doing some OSS work. Since you do Windows, you can do that work in Windows as well. But you need something that shows that you are capable.
Good Luck.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Do you value security and high pay over a potentially big reward (money, experience, personal satisfaction) that may or may not materialize? Would you be willing to leave a "good job" for something else that may be better or worse? How much do you believe in the start-up's chances and the people behind it?
Let me put it a better way. Why bother defining yourself by your job?
Show up at 8. Leave at 5. Every day. Give yourself a good life outside the office. Take up hobbies in your free time, which you'll have now and won't at the startup. Bank some money - if you can live off half your salary, that's a great cushion for the future when you do get the entreprenurial bug (or will let you retire surprisingly early if you don't).
But, in all seriousness, don't try to get everything you want out of life from your job. Take all of your vacation time every year. Insist on comp time and raises, too. Then go to Tahiti. Or train for marathons. Or play around with some cool scratch-an-itch software in your spare time (just don't spend it all in front of a monitor). Hang out with friends. Invest in yourself.
Don't let yourself become a "developer." You are a person. You have a job. The two are, should be, and can be seperate.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Depends on your goals and state in life. If you are married and have kids (like me) you might want to stick with the higher-paying, more stable job. A job at a startup sounds like too much risk even without the pay cut.
However, if you are still relatively unattached, go for your dreams and what makes you happy at work. If you enjoy what you do, you will be more likely in the long run to find a job that does pay well and is fun at the same time. Consider the startup job to be a stepping stone along the way. Rather than let your skills get rusty and find yourself losing your edge later, keep them sharp and keep your motivation and enthusiasm up.
If you are unhappy with your current job but are still averse to the riskiness of a startup, don't take this opportunity but go ahead and look around for other jobs. There may still be a better place for you that doesn't have as much risk or as much of a pay cut. The economy is doing fairly well so don't be timid!
One more note. I know this is Slashdot and I also know the industry we are in, so the following advice may seem out of place. Nevertheless, here goes. Even in a job that you enjoy, try not to let it totally consume your life. There is life beyond work. I advise you to retain enough time for yourself to be able to strike up and nurture relationships with other people. If you have a family, spend time with them. If you are single, don't hesitate too long to find that special someone! The trend in our society is toward marrying and starting a family in your 30s or even later. First of all, that makes it harder to get used to each other when you do find someone. Second, it increases the risk of unhealthy children (birth defects, etc.). Third, despite the stereotypes, family life really is a lot more fun and enjoyable than the single life-- study after study claims this, and my own experience confirms it. When you look back on your life, will it matter more that you had a stellar, enjoyable career, or that you had a good family life and have relatives around you in your old age?
Again, I guess it really does boil down to what your goals are in life. They're not the same for everyone, but I do recommend sitting down and thinking honestly about your own goals and making sure they are the right ones for you-- that you aren't just following whatever everyone else is doing because you don't have your own clear path in mind.
I gave up a great programming job in 1990 that would pay me as an intern through college and then hire full time on graduation at over $35,000 entry level, not bad back in 1990. 10 years later, I passed up an opportunity to transition to an airline job that would pay in excess of $120,000/year after 3 years in the company. I married a doctor 3 years ago and if I quit my job today, she could join a private practice and make well over $350,000 per year while I kicked it doing... well, anything really.
What job has led me to make these financially retarded career moves?
I'm a USAF fighter pilot.
Woot.
I would try and change the work itself to use tools/techniques that you are interested in. Show that there is a better / cheaper / faster / more elegant way. Use code generators to knock up the code that is needed for the job in hand - in half/quarter/whatever of the time - and with the spare time learn something else.
Empower *yourself* to make *your* job more interesting. Take yourself (and the role you occupy) to the next level. Save your stonking salary in a bank account while your outgoings are low. If your current employers don't notice you and your new skills and your better ways of doing things - you've just got a lot of money in the bank and a lot of skills - the world is your oyster.
Well, sorta. There's a difference between a manager that knows the field, and one that does not. While I can not expect my boss to know all that I do, and perhaps I wouldn't really want him to, I do like my boss to know the basics of the technology so he/she can appreciate the magnitude of the work, timetables, impacts, etc.
Being an IT manager is not so different then being a project manager. Almost everything done is a project in some way or another, besides the normal daily admin tasks that don't generally fill the day. If you have an IT-illiterate boss that is capable of effectively running projects and trusting his "experts" (employees) it can work. Unfortunately, I've met very few effective project managers, so to balance it out, it helps to have a boss that knows the technology - even a little.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Well, I went a couple of rounds of pay negotiation at my present job. I gave my employer 3 alternatives:
1) Significant reduction in required hours with no cut in pay and benis or
2) A significant pay raise or
3) A moderate pay raise with an increase in vacation time.
They opted for #3. So at this time I am looking at 4 weeks annual vacation (very unusual for the US), plus holidays and some personal days. (BTW, they way I worked it out in terms of hourly pay over the year, the options worked out to be almost identical, no matter what option my employer chose).
So before bailing out, impact all your options. Maybe they can give you release time to take classes, more vacation time,working 35 hours a week etc. to keep you from being bored. A start up, speaking form experience, is a crap shoot. You could get rich. Or you could end up like me, burned out and deeply cynical, having ruined my health working insane hours for a startup and getting laid off anyway.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Bolemia? Isn't that a country?
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
I have a totally bleak outlook on work--to me, it's just an exchange of time/effort for money/benefits. But the strange thing is, I do the work. I work longer hours, more willingly, than some of those around me who claim to take "pride" in what they do, because I figure if I'm going to be a whore, at least I'll be a good whore and earn the man's money.
The only hard part is faking the orgasm, because the boss-people don't want to hear that you work there for money and benefits. So I occasionally have to act as if it was great, the best I've ever had, wow may I have another, just to appease the "love what you do!" Nazis. God how I hate them.