Hello, Dear Reader! Welcome to Part V of my death march of a multipart series of posts on my experience with, and feelings about, money, and how those things and my experiences working brought me to wanting to FIRE. Here are links to Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of the series.
Boss #8
I left Employer #4 to take a job with Employer #5. My supervisor, Boss #8, was the leader of our department. In terms of my income, this was when the rubber really started hitting the road. My starting salary was significantly higher than anything that had come before. Better yet were some of the benefits that came from working for Employer #5, which included the organization contributing an amount equal to 8% of my salary towards my 401(k) and, after one year on the job, annual bonuses that’d average about 3% of my salary. Annual raises that’d average about 4% also would come. Ten years out of law school, I finally was making good money.
I also took my foot off the frugality pedal a bit more. Because of my hardwired cheapo instinct to be conservative with my spending and my sense of financial precariousness, lowish wages/salaries, and our expenses (which included now larger housing expenses, expenses for Thing One, ratcheted-up monthly student loan payments, and the soon-to-arrive Thing #2 (The Younger) and the expenses that’d attend that), I’d long been accustomed to being fiscally conservative. Even after I joined Employer #3, where I got my first healthy salary bump and started spending more than I was used to, I still was pretty frugal. Now, whether it was being weary from having been super cheap that way for so long, or the fact that we now were making decent money, or just that I wanted to start enjoying the fruits of my labor more, we inflated our lifestyle a bit. Nothing crazy—let alone to the point that we spent more than we earned—but something.
In terms of workplace relationships, my colleagues in our department were all fantastic. And Boss #8 and I got on well. I was a good employee who did good work, and Boss #8 recognized that and trusted me accordingly.
But Boss #8 and I were very different types of people who shared little in common. One main difference was that I’m sort of an introvert, married, and a father. Boss #8 was something of a party-girl, and a DINK. I generally bristle at party people, having no instinct for hard partying myself and long since abandoned any desire to pretend otherwise. I’ve also found that most of them (Boss #8 being one) can’t wrap their heads around types like me. And while parents often can understand SINKs and DINKs (having at one time been the former, and likely also the latter), the reverse, I’ve found, often isn’t true.
Certainly Boss #8 had limited understanding of what it was like to be a parent (to her credit, she never did anything to make me feel like I couldn’t always put family first). When the subject of kids came up, I could always see that just behind the surface, Boss #8 was at best uncomfortable in the situation. It seemed to me she desperately wanted the subject to change to something she could relate to more. This wasn’t specific to Boss #8. I’ve noticed the same thing with most of the SINKs and DINKs I’ve encountered.
To make a short story long, were Boss #8 and I to have met outside the workplace, there’s all but a 0% chance we’d have been friends. And from this, I took a lesson. Namely that your boss won’t always be someone you like being around. As work for a full-time worker typically takes up 40 or far more of one’s waking workweek hours, that’s a lot of time to be spending time with, and taking orders from, someone you’d just as soon not spend any time with, much less take orders from.
Anyway, I enjoyed the work I did for Employer #5, and got to explore some areas that I found interesting and fun. My hours and work demands were reasonable, too.
But there was a major problem I became aware of not long after starting the job. Namely that Boss #8 had a substance abuse problem. Boss #8 surely recognized as much, but appeared incapable of controlling it. Maybe unwilling to as well.
While Boss #8’s problem never resulted in her being mean or unfair to me or any of my coworkers, it frequently was an uncomfortable elephant in the room. No more so than at large events. The result was that Boss #8’s behavior would embarrass me and my coworkers, and massively tarnish our group’s reputation.
A few years into my time with Employer #5, Boss #8 crossed the line at a large event. In light of the incredibly generous amount of slack she was given, that was no mean feat. Truth told, Boss #8 pole-vaulted across the line.
Boss #8 was fired a few days later. On the one hand, that was welcome, regardless of the fact that under her watch my work conditions were pretty sweet. On the other hand, the events giving rise to Boss #8’s sacking tarnished our group’s reputation even more.
A lesson that I first learned under Boss #5 was reinforced: external forces can make a boss bad to work for. And whether your boss is subject to any of these external forces (or becomes so after they become your boss) is a crapshoot.
And in the end . . .
Although I spent a lot more time with Employer #5 after Boss #8 was canned and there’s a lot more to tell, I’m gonna call it a day on this blog post because to cover it all here would make for a monster read. And I can already see you nodding off, Dear Reader. Tune in next week for Part VI of this series, when I’ll cover my time working for my favorite boss I had during my whole career, which coincided with the years in which our savings really started to pick up steam. In the meantime, wake up!
I had only one employer and only five bosses over my thirty plus year career from intern to being the guy running a billion dollar company. Two of the five bosses eventually got terminated, I never did. Progress in your career has virtually nothing to do with the quality, personality or competence of your bosses. It solely rests in you and in your ability to use each individual boss as a golden opportunity to improve your value to the company. If you succeed then great, you deserve it and you earned it. If you fail, learn from it, own it and realize you deserved to fail. But never blame your failure on the people you worked with. Good or bad, you did it all by yourself. Just my opinion based on a long and successful career.
I mostly agree that the cream rises to the top. And I know that personally I ultimately was successful because I knew my job and how to do it well, actually did it well enough, and understood the organizations that I worked for and their goals. But I also know from having worked for bad bosses that sometimes that good work can go unrewarded, or, worse, be discounted (sometimes altogether) by an irrational or vengeful boss. The key for me in those situations was either that the boss got fired, or I had the good sense not only to recognize the problem but to do something about it by voting with my feet. I think a lot of people don’t have the good fortune of having the former happen. And others feel (rationally or not) that they can’t do the latter, meaning, sadly, that their success is stymied.