This is a great post and so spot on. At some point in my career my 'review prep' (which was the time I spent working on my own evaluation of my year at a company) became answering the question, "Do I still want to work here?" I categorize my 'review' in four sections (which are each rated at one of five levels, needs improvement, sometimes meets expectations, meets expectations, sometimes exceeds expectations, or consistently exceeds expectations)
I start by reviewing how I'm being managed, I expect someone managing me to be clear in their expectations of my work product, provide resources when I have identified the need to complete jobs, can clearly articulate the problem I am expected to be solving, and can clearly articulate the criteria by which the solution will be evaluated.
Second I review my co-workers, using a three axis evaluation, can I trust what they say to be accurate/honest, can I count on them to meet their commitments, and are they willing to teach me when I don't understand something and conversely learn when their is something they do not know.
Third I review what level of support do I get to do my job. Am I provided with a workspace where I can get work done? Do have have the equipment I need to do what is being asked? Is my commute conducive to the hours required? And finally and most important, does this job allow me to balance work obligations and non-work obligations?
Fourth I review whether or not the company mission, ethics, and culture is still one that I wish to be a part of. Am I proud of the company's mission? Do I believe that the leadership will make ethical calls even if doing so would mean less profit margin? Can I relate to and am I compatible with the values that my co-workers espouse and the actions they take? (this is the "company culture" theme, is it still a company that fits me culturally)
A company that receives lower than a 3.0 rating I put on a 90 day "company improvement plan" (CIP). I bring issues to the leadership who are in a position to address the situations that I've found wanting and try to secure their commitment to change. If after 90 days they haven't been able to (if they choose not to they're done right away), then I "fire" the company and work to process my exit as expeditiously as possible.
I completely agree with this, but I often find that not everyone is in the same position to jump ship easily. Your attitude is often espoused by highly talented individual that could basically "work wherever".
A personal anecdote from someone I work with. "Alice" is a technical project manager at a large company. She's been with the company 8 years. While she's been in the role, expectations on her have been unclear, she's been promoted above her skill level due to bureaucratic incompetence and has been poorly mentored and led. Now she wants to leave, but how? She can't pass an interview for the other big companies in the region, and she doesn't have many growth or learning opportunities in her current position. Anywhere else is a huge pay cut. Is she happy? Nope. But digging herself out of the hole is a difficult task.
I am not disagreeing with you, but trying to communicate how the other half lives.
That is absolutely true, and in the original article there was a mention of folks trapped by US visa rules (leave your job, go back to your origin country).
To address your question though, if I were mentoring Alice I would ask which is more important to her, money or happiness? I learned long ago that it is useless to argue which is more important but it instructive to know in a person which one is key.
If she thinks happiness is more important, then the advice would be to interview elsewhere for a spot where she could be happy and ignore the salary if it is sufficient to her to live on. If she thinks money is more important, then the advice would be to focus her personal development toward being able to demand the salary that she wants to be paid.
The bottom line is that its easier to put up with poor working conditions when it is simply a stepping stone toward a different (ideally less poor) place.
I appreciate your practicality and empathy. I know I'd want to be mentored by you.
At least in her situation (Seattle) the pay difference might be drastic enough that it would be a deal breaker. There's also the issue of lifestyle creep, where you now have a mortgage you can only afford with the stressful/unhappy position you have.
To a certain point, money is happiness. Maybe the solution is checking out and fighting for reduced hours, while doing fulfilling things with the extra money you wouldn't be able to get anywhere else.
This comment is wonderful. As a company founder (and de-facto CEO), I'd love it if all of my employees did this every year (or even continuously!). I think I am going to steal this and make it part of an annual review process (once we get big enough to have those).
I did notice however that one thing that isn't your list is your salary. I'm curious if that was intentional or not?
Initially of course there was a minimum to meet my goals. My target was to be able to live somewhere, cover my cost of living, pay down my debts, and save 10% of my salary in long term savings.
Then as expenses started moving from being "in the future" to being "in the past" I was able to be more flexible on salary.
It helps that I have never equated what I was paid with how much I was "worth." It also helps that I don't have a lot of innate materialism. Although the funny story there is when I went back to Los Angeles to visit my old roommate from college I was showing him a fancy laptop that I had saved up for an bought. He had a pretty crap laptop but had recently bought a nice late model Mercedes Benz. Meanwhile, I had a 10 year old car at that point. We laughed at how the two different areas of California encouraged different status symbols.
"Is it worth being paid $X to work here?"
"What is the likelihood I'll be paid $X elsewhere"
And if they're paying a lot of money, I can tolerate the crappy working conditions -- I first heard of this a couple decades ago as "crying all the way to the bank."
A CEO that comes in to fix a company has a similar question. "It's going to be a nightmare to turn this company around, is the pay worth it?"
I went to exactly one company because of the pay. For me it was a horrible choice, when my only motivation for working somewhere is the paycheck, I don't do my best work. Since that experience I've turned down big offers from companies where I knew from talking to them that they would not score well on my evaluation.
In the long term its better for me and for them that we don't have to go through the dance of 'why aren't you giving us more?' and the ultimate resolution will always be us parting ways.
Interesting. I'm asking this question myself right now (crappy management+high stress but good pay/stock options). Of course the $ amount to satisfy 'worth it' differs for each person. Can you share your personal experience? How did you go about answering this question of 'is it worth it'?
So a large percent of people have a crappy job and work with crappy people and have crappy bosses. The last century of management still hasn't solved that issue, so it's likely going to be an issue for the next century.
I ask myself these questions:
1. Do I have a life outside of work? "Yes" is a good thing. But "No" is not a deal breaker.
2. Is my identity of myself too entwined in the corporation? If "yes" it's time to do things entirely unrelated to work. They're paying me to do work, not sit around and stew how unfair they're treating me after all the loyalty I've shown them.
3. Are the people there decent human beings that don't know how to manage, or are they back stabbing assholes?
The former is far more forgivable than the latter. Once the culture of back-stabbing starts, you're not gong to fix it ever.
4. Are the hours you're working actually making a difference? IOW have you been told to work 60 hours a week on a project that got canceled? This one is rough, because you're not getting those hours back, nor are you going to get to get a bonus for working hard on a canceled project. At what point did it become clear things weren't working?
5. What does my job enable me to do that I couldn't do without it? Expensive hobbies or travel?
6. Is work/life balance a two way street? "Yes" awesome. Again a "No" is not necessarily a deal breaker. Many people have jobs they need to be on call for or stay late for.
7. Am I growing? Am I learning how to deal with difficult people? Or is this a wasted amount of energy?
8. How long does it take me to reset from "anger" and "frustration" to calm and productive? If I can't leave in the evening and forget about work then something's wrong.
> How long does it take me to reset from "anger" and "frustration" to calm and productive? If I can't leave in the evening and forget about work then something's wrong.
I think it's worth noting that this one really has nothing at all to do with the job. Not to trivialize it at all; it's hard work to change your mind, but it's entirely within your court to learn how to recognize and work with your mental state like this. Therapy and meditation are two useful tools for that.
I use this as a metric. I like to think I'm a reasonable person in things I ask or told to do. I've worked in places where frustration was low and people were authentic and honest.
If something is wrong I ask myself if I need to reset my expectations or is what is happening very atypical?
Feelings are intuitive, and should be used that way. If something feels not right or not good, I tend not to want to bury them, but rather explore them.
It's important to keep in mind that organizations are dynamic and can change significantly in less than a year, even while keeping 95% of the same people. If there is one person making everyone's lives miserable then it may be worth sticking it out. In my own experience, people that were the most antagonistic or abusive toward their colleagues were also the closest to leaving the organization, either due to ambition, dissatisfaction, or personal illness/death.
I've seen this posed the other way.
"How much money would it take to have me quit immediately?"
On bad days, a grand or two would do it. But I guess this a combination of both love/hate for your job and any current financial commitments..
The problem is a pay bump usually only motivates you for so long. Once you are above a threshold and don't have to worry about empty pockets (so you meet a subjective minimum standard), every additional $ might motivate for a period and then the effect is weak or gone. And then you need another pay bump to motivate you.
On the other hand horrible managers, colleagues, or general work conditions will grind you every day, long after the effect of that pay bump wears off. Bad working conditions of any kind are far more effective at dragging your spirit down than money is effective at pulling it up.
If the money doesn't really matter all that much to you then I suppose some people wouldn't be willing to sacrifice their happiness once their basic needs and wants are met.
Amazing; this is just about how I approach it, except I have a bit more slack for the "CIP": 90 days is not a long time at many organizations larger than a certain size (say, about 100 people). I'm generally content as long as progress is being made to improve at a reasonable pace, and few or no regressions occur.
To be fair, the only time I saw a complete reversal of state in a short period of time was during the dot com implosion. The CEO at the company just lost it (he was under a lot of stress), and the working conditions went from meets to needs improvement remarkably quickly.
And its possible to have one aspect being wonderful to compensate for another aspect which is not so great. For example the company mission might suck but you really like your manager and your co-workers.
This is excellent. We should all try to do something like this.
The only time I've stopped an interview and told them "good luck but I'm out" is when I realised they're a hot-desking joint. I mean, sure there's is a price point at which I'll hot-desk, but strangely (since hot-desking is always about saving money no matter what other bollocks they dress it in), nobody's met it.
Is this something you've always done or only something you've done as you've gained higher level positions? I'm imagining that compensation is always at some minimum satisfactory level as well (and it must be rather high unless you're wealthy or bought a home decades ago or live in some really LCOL area?). Do you only work at places that you truly want to work at from the get go?
I can't imagine implementing this at an IC level at a startup. (Which is where I've been mostly) I could see it at some places where you could switch teams in a big company and not deal with those same people again. (thus not having to reinterview fully) I've found that people will change their ways very rarely unless your loss would ruin them. They're much happier to lose ICs than change.
Not always, when I got out of school I just went to work.
It helped that my wife was doing similar work (she was a computer programmer) and we compared notes about our jobs. Now I personally think getting married was a good choice in my life but for this conversation it was extremely valuable to have someone at a different company with whom I could be completely honest and exchange thoughts and ideas with. When my wife left Xerox for Tandem one of the books she got was called "Divorcing a Company." We both read it. I would say that book was when I stopped looking at companies being a "one way" kind of thing, either they want me or they don't.
The book's thesis was that you are in a relationship with the company you work for, it can be a good relationship, and it can be an abusive relationship. Looking at your choice to leave, and the things that keep you from leaving, as you might a divorce from a spouse, can put into perspective who is more "at fault."
I started thinking about why I was working at a company more critically at that point and then as time progressed developed a set of things that were the key factors in my job satisfaction.
To this point, "They're much happier to lose ICs than change." I agree completely. And that is why for me it was important to accept that people who won't see a reasonable request for what it is, are not worth wasting your time with. I doubt I will die thinking "I wish I had worked for an abusive boss longer" :-)
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I start by reviewing how I'm being managed, I expect someone managing me to be clear in their expectations of my work product, provide resources when I have identified the need to complete jobs, can clearly articulate the problem I am expected to be solving, and can clearly articulate the criteria by which the solution will be evaluated.
Second I review my co-workers, using a three axis evaluation, can I trust what they say to be accurate/honest, can I count on them to meet their commitments, and are they willing to teach me when I don't understand something and conversely learn when their is something they do not know.
Third I review what level of support do I get to do my job. Am I provided with a workspace where I can get work done? Do have have the equipment I need to do what is being asked? Is my commute conducive to the hours required? And finally and most important, does this job allow me to balance work obligations and non-work obligations?
Fourth I review whether or not the company mission, ethics, and culture is still one that I wish to be a part of. Am I proud of the company's mission? Do I believe that the leadership will make ethical calls even if doing so would mean less profit margin? Can I relate to and am I compatible with the values that my co-workers espouse and the actions they take? (this is the "company culture" theme, is it still a company that fits me culturally)
A company that receives lower than a 3.0 rating I put on a 90 day "company improvement plan" (CIP). I bring issues to the leadership who are in a position to address the situations that I've found wanting and try to secure their commitment to change. If after 90 days they haven't been able to (if they choose not to they're done right away), then I "fire" the company and work to process my exit as expeditiously as possible.