I don’t think most people aspire to make that kind of money for those kind of hours - I don’t. Personally, I prefer making a pretty good (not insane) income with a normal 40 hour a week schedule, give or take. But it helped my career a lot to work incredibly hard the first few years.
Was it the hours you worked, or was it the connections you made and the bullet of where you worked on your resume afterwards?
I’ve never worked at a famous company. My first job was at a very small mom & pop consulting firm.
Connections certainly mattered, as one of my superiors offered me my next job at their new company. This is how many people find new jobs. I’ve also had some jobs I applied for (and got) afterwards that were totally cold call, no connection at all, so I think the vilification of connections tends to be a bit overblown. They matter but aren’t crucial for every opportunity in life.
I was offered that second position mostly because they knew, first hand, that I could get the work done, without complaining and to a good quality, and they could drop new work on me without worrying if they’d need to babysit me (too much, I was still young). It was the type of work I got to do by being willing to work hard for low pay as an intern and then up the line through promotions. At the time the main skill I developed was subject matter oriented, writing, and public speaking.
Acid-spitting scorpions that roam the Texas wastelands don’t work 12 hour days.
Just sayin.’
RichVR
1796
I have experience from a different side of this.
When I worked as an assistant press man at a printer, we would usually do 16 hour days seven days a week in the spring and the fall. That was when we got the Estee Lauder catalogs. This payed the bills for the place.
I started as a FNG. After two seasons I was an assistant press guy, making decisions about the color of the print run and the register. The register was whether or not the various print rollers lined up. You know, BRYBk. The printer controller had little rollers that moved the images a bit to the left or right, up or down. Until the register marks lined up on the final print.
The whole web press ran at something like 3,000,000 sheets per hour. If the register was off, we threw out a ton of paper. I was good at it. In maybe 8 months I was doing everything. Putting plates on. Adding a roll of paper that literally weighed a ton to the press while it was still printing. Adding ink. Even driving a huge clamp car to get a roll of paper from a stack that could be 20 feet high.
Not easy to do, hung over. :)
Now I’m trying to figure out what my point was…
Sorry.
tbh I don’t have a lot of sympathy for finance bros or future lawyers when amazon workers and call center reps can’t get piss breaks.
Menzo
1798
Working hard is good. Taking pride in your work is good. And in many lines of work there are times when you have to crunch and work some nights or weekends or extra hard for a short amount of time.
But the idea that someone is expected to work 80-hour weeks all the time is ridiculous. That’s just a management technique to hire fewer people so execs can get paid more. Nobody should put up with that nonsense anymore.
RichVR
1799
The wife regularly works 10 or more hours a day. She starts at 8AM. She has to work until the west coast branch shuts down. At 8PM. She started, of course at an hourly wage. But she is now salaried and on call 24/7. She takes breaks, sure, but ultimately she is screwed. It’s always nice when she gets an irate call from a client at 2AM.
Alternately, simply counter productive self sustaining toxic company culture expectations, where everybody agrees half that time is spent pretending to work for no good goddamn reason.
Did they really call it that? It wasn’t CMYK?
RichVR
1802
Not in the 70s. We had blue ink, red ink, yellow ink and black ink. This wasn’t a computer time. We mixed the colors by weight.
Huh, cool. My graphic communications degree wasn’t heavy on the history. I ran some presses in college, but never in my job—I was all prepress, and that was all from 2005–2016, obviously all the prepress was digital. We did still have offset litho presses though. Cool machines.
I would be happy if my first job let me work 35 hours a week and paid better than the $500 a month I was at for 6 months. I fact, I could have worked less and made much much more money in a different industry at that point, but I didn’t see a satisfying career in it. Both workers and employers make complicated trade offs in these matters.
As for JPM, I don’t have much sympathy for people with elite educations competing for the most highly paid office jobs in the world working long hours. It should be hard to reach that level and hard to stay there.
If you want to talk about improving conditions in other roles, like Amazon warehouse workers, that’s a different conversation where we probably agree much more. Same for what the appropriate tax rate is at different levels of income or inheritance.
Menzo
1805
You’re absolutely correct. Nobody should shed tears for 22 year olds who are going to make $300k or however much it is. My diatribe is more about the idea in general.
My real problem is how people associate time spent in the office with actual productive work. Perhaps at a place like JPM all that time actually generates whatever bullshit it is they generate that people pay them for. In most places I’ve seen though there is a huge difference between time spent at work and actual productive labor. It’s the same in my current field, higher education. Our 19th century metrics equate butts in seats with education. That is, as long as students get X credit hours and attend Y percent of classes, voila, they be edumecated.
That is pretty much all horseshit. Competency based metrics have their own flaws, but at least they are a lot more logical and line up better with reality, but accreditation with anything but standard credit hour loads and four-year programs is often difficult. When I teach my classes, we normally have 75 minute periods. I keep the students exactly as long as we have reasonably productive stuff to do that day. Sometimes it runs right up to the limit. Sometimes they get out earlier. Simply making them sit there doesn’t do much, any more than simply showing up at the office does anything.
Back when I was in the defense contracting business, there were days when I got what work I was assigned done by noon, and done well, but had to twiddle my thumbs until 5pm or whatever because there was literally nothing else to do on that task, and I couldn’t do any other tasks because of the way contract billing was done. Most of us sat around doing de nada far more often than we’d like. And with the compartmented programs we worked with, you could not just go and help out others, even if they would let you bill the hours. Yet God forbid management would allow anyone to work anything other than at least a full eight or nine hours each day.
I think middle managers just want to validate themselves by having people around to boss about and harass.
You’re right, but I’m also seeing a lot of discussion that is intelligent about just that. Some people produce fine outside of the office, and we’re adjusting to figure that out. I’m a technical sales guy, so really my main job duty is to answer my phone whenever and wherever and figure the shit out right now. The office does nothing to improve that.
It’s a good thing, too, one of the weird silver linings of COVID I think. Still, we have a lot of more mainstream companies chomping at the bit to get everyone back in the office whether it makes sense or not, because (I suspect) the managers are terrified that when they have no one to strut around in front of all day their bosses will realize how useless they actually are…
I’ve been remote for a few years already, so the WFH trend in COVID19 doesn’t impact me so much - I drank the “WFH and only work the hours necessary to get it done (right)” Kool aid long ago. I am glad to see many other colleagues now wise to it and insisting on some or all days remote so they can manage their own time and be output based, not hours based. Managers are surprisingly open to it, as a way to save office space costs.
But, I’m an introvert. I thrive in this situation. Others flounder, which I’ve seen a bit of too.
Again, hard agree. I work for a tiny company now but my previous was 150,000 plus employees and the layers of utterly useless management were insane. Three layers of non-producers trying to impress other non-producers.
Please tell me this would be instantly thrown out of court. Grandparents have “no right” to grandchildren if the parents don’t want them involved, do they?
