Category: Work

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Stamford

Physical location is a strong indicator of one’s status within an organization. When I started working for my employer, I entered the building at entrance W4, which was the furthest entrance from E2: the main entrance. Unsurprisingly, E2 was an elegant and modernized entrance, with glass panel partitions and doors, comfy chairs, the security desk, etc. W2 had a malfunctioning door hinge and crumbling concrete stairs. By the time the office was shut down in favor of full remote work, my desk was by E2. I had made it.

But it was still a satellite office. HQ was in Stamford, CT. Important people, not myself, regularly flew there for important meetings. And a select few non-important people, chosen from a pool of low-ranking hourly workers such as myself, but never myself. Fast-track programs existed for us, but I was never selected. Until after about 7 years. One of 4 chosen participants, but only one would win, and ultimately they chose not to fly me anywhere, and returned me to my menial job.

I eventually landed a salaried position. And the department was based in…Alpharetta. I got to travel, but still not to HQ.

Promoted again, COVID happened, and no travel occurred at all. Then I changed positions, and shortly thereafter everyone at my last job traveled to Stamford for a department meeting.

Finally, my current department budgeted travel, and I was sent to Stamford. After 18 years, I saw HQ.

Such is white collar life.

But I don’t write about my work. Instead, this is just an excuse to post a few pics from my Stamford trip:

Chicago!
A church! Because there’s always a church.
And scaffolding, because there’s also always scaffolding.
And downtown. There’s actually not much of a downtown. I think Dayton might have a more impressive skyline.
Sally’s is apparently the best pizza place. Connecticut is also apparently the best pizza region. I’ll let the internet fight that one out, but it was indeed damn good.
Aforementioned pizza.
Obligatory view from hotel room.
Amtrak. Because trains are cool and I’ve never ridden one.

And now, the saga is finally complete. Career bucket list item checked off.

–Simon

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Bottoming Out

As I approach 40, I’m very much aware of my physical decline. But what I didn’t expect was the Internet’s warnings that my overall happiness will apparently be taking a dive soon too. Self-reported subjective measurements make for a lousy scientific statement, so it’s more one of those correlation-only type observations. As to the actual reasoning, that’s up for debate. Common theories include:

  • Innocence lost with the realization that your achievement peak has passed and life didn’t turn out that good (insert Pink Floyd song here).
  • 40 isn’t quite the point where maximum earning potential is reached, and workload appears imbalanced with quality of life.
  • Some form of the above as a midlife crisis.

The full graph indicates happiness begins to decline at 18, bottoms out in the 40s, and steadily increases starting at 50. Something like this (this was drawn freehand, so disregard the scaling issues):

So I decided to compare this timeline with my own life, and see if this is an applicable expectation, using life events as reference:

  • 0-7: Limited frame of reference/too young to care. I remember school being okay until we moved.
  • 8-11: New school. Kids were jerks. Wasn’t allowed to leave the house. Low happiness.
  • 11-12: Junior high started and I really enjoyed the first year.
  • 13-15: Struggled with grades. Wasn’t good at extracurriculars. Bad friends. No luck with girls. Low happiness.
  • 15-17: Moved across the country. Few friends. Bad grades. No girls. Overbearing parents prevented any kind of social life. No car in a town of rich kids. Bad clothes. Bad hair. No happiness.
  • 17-19: Started college. Greater freedom. Discovered interests. Found friends. Increased happiness.
  • 19-21: Own apartment. Girlfriends. Finished college. Even more happiness.
  • 21-31: Bad grad school experience. Tired of apartments. Horrible jobs and limited opportunities. Wife, car and daughter kept some stability, but overall a period of lower happiness.
  • 31-39: Better jobs. More money. Bought a house. Reasonably happy.
  • 39-present: Even better jobs and more money. Good life prospects. Happy.

If I try to graph the above, I end up with something like this:

And if I superimpose the two:

It would appear that I’m at the complete opposite level of happiness than where I should be.

Hopefully this means I’m early to the old age happiness party, rather than late to the middle age unhappiness one. Or maybe my life has been atypical in general. Who knows? But what I do know is that right now I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.

–Simon

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Overcoming

I’ll begin with an oft-repeated nugget of bullshit wisdom: “Money doesn’t buy happiness.”

And I’ll say that’s true, except no money also can’t buy happiness. The phrase isn’t that money can’t buy happiness, but that it doesn’t necessarily. So I think that a better version would be: “Money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness, but it’s a prerequisite.”

I began tracking my annual income in relation to yearly inflation and the American median per capita income a few years back, using my historical W-2s. Alas I didn’t save them all, and employer data retention limits their own historical records, but I can go back as far as 2011, and prior to that I can infer some pretty measly wages. So, after a 16+ year career (when I began working full time), this is what I discovered:

The Median

First off, the median per capita is, by definition, the income that most people have. It is therefore the income at which point you can survive with proper budgeting, since most people do so. It is also not something that happens with entry level jobs, and requires years of experience and some promotions to achieve. In my case, it was 7 years of working full time to achieve this median.

Inflation

Failure to increase wages will return a net loss as inflation chips away at real income value, so if your annual raises do not outpace inflation, you will lose actual worth. This drags out the process.

Transition

For the next 4-5 years following this introductory period, the promotions with job changes were decent but not enough to significantly alter my station. I’ll call this the transition stage: the point at which sufficient skills are acquired to warrant higher pay, but the opportunity has to present itself. It was the most competitive period of my career.

Overcoming

The following 5-6 years have since seen me significant compensation growth, I think because at this point I have acquired a very broad skillset but with pointed areas of expertise, which are in demand. Individually I broke into the 20%er bracket during this timeframe, which was the point at which I began to notice my purchasing power had significantly changed in relation to my younger self and the world around me.

Conclusion

In the spirit of this site’s ethos, these are my observations and interpretations of being an elder Millennial, by age:

  • 0-21: No job in this age range will return a livable wage due to lack of knowledge, experience, education, and an employment system that greatly restricts job availability.
  • 21-28: Any job in this age range will be limited in both responsibilities and salary.
  • 28-33: A job in this age range will begin to see greater salary returns, probably due to experience gained while in the prior age range.
  • 33+: A job in this age range can encompass a wide range of pay scales and opportunities.

Sooooo, anything before turning 30 is a wash. It’s the period of life that requires working hard for low pay while building skills and experience needed to compete for the higher-paying jobs. This pretty closely checks out with published salary by age reports, although I can’t personally confirm the next stages. Supposedly salary caps out in the 45-54 age range, so hopefully I have that to look forward to.

I admit, it’d be kind of depressing as a young person, and appears constant across developed nations. The postwar Baby Boomer period was anomalous, with its influx of unskilled high pay industrial jobs, followed by unsustainable financial policies to unsuccessfully maintain that growth. But a generation that lacked financial burden also proved to lack compassion and character, so there’s an upside to the struggle, for those who make it that long. (Also, money.)

–Simon

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Authentication Solutions

I have accepted a new position at work:

AVP, Authentication Solutions

As with most long-term jobs, the Product Owner stint has long since lost its romance.

Product Owner

That is not to say it was a bad job. But there’s only so much one can learn, and I was feeling the growing loss of interest. It was time.

I’m still with the same company, but I’m moving out of Marketing. I’ll be under Credit, working cross-functionally to integrate authentication software. It ties into Fraud-a new business segment for me. Sounds like a good CV addition.

And the large pay increase certainly sweetens the deal.

–Simon

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Don’t Want to Work

Spring is a ways off, and that limits the amount of available content I have for a post.  And my last 3 involved vacuum cleaners, lightbulbs, and fanciful theoretical mathematical models, soooo I think I need to change direction for a bit and diversify.

So I’ll do what everyone else does to fill empty blog space: complain about something, using an inflammatory title!

Here’s what I’ve chosen: “People just don’t want to work anymore.”

We’ve all heard it.  Online, by coworkers, by disgruntled consumers.

This phrase, generally uttered in exasperation by a Baby Boomer socioeconomic superior who’s currently unable to receive a service of some kind due to limited staffing, assumes an obnoxious smug self-importance that the world has the audacity to not cater to his every whim, or at least not in a timely fashion.  And, that this current state of affairs is the result of younger people being too lazy to work hard enough to achieve the high status of becoming the served, rather than the server–that is, how the above complainer feels he has achieved said status.

Rephrased: “I suffered some bad jobs and now I have a good job and now other people need to suffer those bad jobs for my benefit.”

This term gets too much use today, namely because of a certain recent “leader”, but it applies: this is narcissistic thinking.

This present situation is, of course, a result of COVID-19’s economic impact.  The jobs in question that people don’t want to work are the jobs that suffered greatly reduced demand from quarantines.  The businesses, as businesses do, simply reduced their staff as a result to balance the books.  Once quarantines lifted, demand increased, but the former workers didn’t want to go back to those underpaid customer-facing jobs.

The reasoning is slightly more complicated than people not serving you because they’re lazy.  I figured this logic chain to be fairly obvious, but it’s apparently not.  So to appease you self-righteous wealthy Republican Boomers judgmental privileged whiners, I’ll offer you just want you want: a service.  I will explain your logical error.

Three points:

  1. People don’t want to work crappy jobs.  Workers are still eager to fill higher-paying professional positions.  No one wants to be the employee that has to deal with the above Boomer irate customer storming around complaining about staffing shortages.  (And that employee, despite doing exactly what the raging Boomer Karen customer wants (working a crappy job), will still receive the brunt of these laziness accusations that don’t even apply to him.)
  2. Impacted workers, living temporarily on emergency government assistance, suddenly had a lot of time on their hands to shore up the skill gaps keeping them out of professional careers.  Now that they’ve done so, there isn’t much desire to return to jobs beneath their new qualification levels.
  3. Of course people don’t want to work.  Who does?  People want meaningful careers, vocations, callings…whatever.  But those things don’t pay the bills, so people work jobs.  CEOs don’t stay in their positions until retirement.  They make their millions and move on.  Is that because they don’t want to work, either?

Ultimately though, the main point, and philosophy by which you should start to live, is…

It’s not all about you!

–Simon