One of the realizations that has come with the initiation of the new job is that I have entered a period of time of declining income, not a rising one.
That probably seems like a very First World problem - after all (I hear you say), you spent last year looking for jobs not once not twice. And you yourself admitted that you were likely overpaid at your last position for longer than you should have been.
Fair points and well taken. I am simply looking at it from the trajectory of the typical career and my experience of the last 25 years.
It is fair to say over my time in the biopharmaceutical/medical device industry, I have done well. I have done very well, the sort of well that could not have been replicated except in the nascent IT industry of its day (which I was more or less contemporaneous with). From my entry into the industry, hard work and application allowed me to see my salary rise over time. Sometimes it a cost of living increase, sometimes it was a promotion, but it was always ever up. Even when I fell out from The Firm (which was a financial setback of epic proportions; in retrospect I wonder what would have happened if I had simply stayed put) or Hammerfall, I was able to effectively re-enter the industry at my previous salary (or close enough).
That changed with Hammerfall 2.0 and Hammerfall 3.0.
Hammerfall 2.0 and the resulting salary drop was a not a surprise - I was overpaid for reasons that I will never understand (but, to be fair, never questioned). Hammerfall 3.0 and New Home 2.0 continued that trend.
Does money matter? Not in terms of my ego (just as title does not matter at this point), but in terms of practical living absolutely. All here know the relentless grind of inflation; a drop in salary helps nothing there.
For fun (because when is future planning not fun?), I ran a simple analysis of my current salary and added in the potential of a cost of living increase (3%, if you are curious). It takes me four years to get to what I made prior to Hammerfall 2.0. If I extend it to 10 years from now, it is still okay (but probably effectively the same as today given inflation).
But I never touch what I made prior to 2020.
One of the assumptions that many young people have is that their salary and their careers will only ever go up. We older ones know; careers are just often lateral moves and sometimes reverses not just of position, but of finance. For those that know this, they can adjust and move on.
For those that do not and find their sum total in what they are called and what they earn, it can be a difficult adjustment indeed.
My personal income peaked in 1997. Some of the "peak" was due to working in an industry that was imploding. Some of the decline in real-income was that scrambling to increase it would have been more disruptive to my family. Life is about priorities and to gracefully accept that one cannot have it all.
ReplyDeleteERJ, my salary peaked from 2018 - 2023 -and when I saw peak, peaked beyond reason. I was shocked when, in 2020 when I changed positions, they did not lower my salary. It was indicative of the spending that eventually ruined the company.
DeleteI have to chuckle to myself - my bonus in 2020 just before everything fell apart was 50% of what my salary for the year is now. I was appreciative of it then for sure; it seems completely unreal now.
Well said Joe.
ReplyDeleteNuff said.
Michael
There are indeed things more important that money.
DeleteI can definitely relate. Dan and I always knew retirement would mean a lower income, but we thought we had a few more years to prepare for it when he had his accident. Learning to live on less is definitely more challenging than learning to live on more.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point about how our personal identity is so often wrapped up in titles and earnings. That's probably a harder adjustment to accept, because humans are generally caught up in a definition of self-esteem which requires an accumulation of material things. As ERJ states, grace and acceptance are the key.
Leigh, yours and Dan's journey has influenced my thinking a great deal, both for your general adaptability as well as the fact that it happened sooner than you had anticipated. I have every intention of remaining in the workforce for more years, but the reality is that given my age and the state of things, I am high on the list of "people that would be shuffled off", especially at the moment as I am the new person on the block.
DeleteIn terms of personal identity, age and perspective helps. 20 years ago I would not have handled this well at all. And I do wonder for all of those people that have the steady rise in positions when I see them on LinkedOut, how they might fare in similar circumstances. It is one thing to take a step down, another to realize that it is not a temporary place but a new reality.
My experiences have been pretty much the opposite of yours. For some reason, engineers in my area didn't make much to start with and I don't think I ever got a raise that remotely kept up with inflation. In fact, most times I was told that I was a stellar worked but unfortunately, they didn't have raises this year. By far, my largest pay increases were always when I changed jobs, and even then, two of those I took paycuts just to have something coming in. My only saving grace was that I saved money which I invested wisely and those investments have paid me pack many many times more than any payraises I have received. I also lucked out with my last job when I hired into an employee owned company and received stock options as part of my pay package. I could barely afford to eat with my actual pay but I had a lot of stocks in a company that was worth quite a bit of money. The catch was I had to leave in order to cash in those stocks and switch them to stocks of my choosing. It worked out in the end, but honestly, having a steady job with decent pay increases would have been less stressful.
ReplyDeleteEd, once upon a time in my industry the standing joke was that if one wanted a raise, one went to another company as the current company would never do the same (for some odd reason, companies often seem to value their internal resources less than potential external ones).
DeleteThat I can think of, there is not a lot of industry literature out there on "what to do when your career path starts heading down". The assumption is that it is always, only up. Maybe a market opportunity there.
In the broadcast engineer world, you had to move to get a pay raise. It seemed management never considered raises. There was a merry go round of engineers and others that moved from one station to another to get a more $. All the free tee shirts you could eat, but very little pecuniary reward.
ReplyDeleteOften the same in my industry, STxAR. Although given the current situation, I think it is a lot less now.
DeleteSadly, so much of the employer/employee relationship in a mid-size or large company is a game, one of which is the employer seeing how little they can get away with paying someone to keep him/her around, and the employee trying to make the employer think he/she might leave if the employer won't fork over more $$$. At my advanced age and in my current position, I have been marginalized and I'm getting the bare minimum in pay increases and incentives, which have been generous in the past. It has become obvious the current employer does not care if I leave or stay but would be fine for me to leave and pay someone less to do my job. For now, I'm not budging. I'm a fairly good game-player myself.
ReplyDeleteBob, another factor that comes into play is the fact that companies have bands that they pay in and the closer one gets to the edge of the band, the less those things become until they are miniscule if anything, as the company does not want to promote.
DeleteI am right sorry to hear of your position, although I suspect it is not uncommon in the current market. Sadly. But as you say, we have games we can play as well. Give them no cause and likely there is little they will do.
I will say that for the upcoming future, I see less than the rate of inflationary raises in my future. Which is not great, but something is better than nothing.