Ask not what you can do for the firm, but what the firm can do for you

I totally forgot I wrote this back in 2013 for Protégé Magazine (yes, with the accents). Reproducing here now. 

There is a curious trend emerging in developed economies where the professional services industry is simultaneously home to the highest salaries and some of the lowest hourly wage rates in the economy.  This is primarily because, at least for the first 10 years of your career, these industry demand exceptionally long working hours. Consider the following anecdote: a friend of mine, a senior consultant at PWC, earns c. $90000 a year with bonuses. Lots of cash; but he works 60 hours a week on average—at fifty weeks a year that’s $30 an hour. Plumbers earn more than that.

Given that long work hours make work-life balance nearly impossible and have been shown to lead to the fragmentation of personal relationships, stress, depression and a host of other mental health issues, it’s worth asking yourself, frequently, what do I want from my job; and what am I willing to sacrifice for my career?

In surveys of business school graduates, three themes emerge—money, status, success. Nothing wrong with any of those, but it’s worth being aware of the trade offs.

A graduate salary for business oriented degrees pays close to the average Australian household’s disposable income. Salaries for accountants at grammar schools, a job available to university graduates (albeit with no career progression) hover around $90000 p.a.—placing you close to the top ten per cent of income earners in one of the world’s most affluent countries. So you’ve pretty much made it straight out the gate.

Maybe that kind of money isn’t enough. You want Porshes, Zegna and the harbour foreshore. Fair enough, but consider two things. First, those kinds of things cost a lot of money. The kind of cash where maybe you’re going to need to make partner. Maybe you’re good enough, but the likelihood is very low, and in the meantime your firm is going to be flogging you.

In a fantastic paper from 1996, ‘Rat Race Redux: Adverse selection in the determination of work hours in law firms’, Landers et al found that only 10 per cent of employees at major firms ever made partner. However, they also noted that firms were aware of behavioural science studies showing that humans are inclined to continuously overestimate their ability. They would use this knowledge to design their incentive systems, advertising that they only hire the best and that only the best make partner. Now anyone interested in status wants to be ‘the best’, so everyone works like a dog and a rat race emerges.

A rat race is both a popular culture term for a mad dash for something of limited worth and a particular kind of game. Put simply, a rat race is where someone’s outcome depends on their ranking in a group, and that ranking is predominantly determined by hours of effort. There is an incentive to always work a little bit harder until everyone is working at their maximum. Anyone who takes their foot off the accelerator instantly falls to the bottom of the rankings. That’s what you’re up against in your quest for the foreshore.

But maybe all those hours at low hourly rates are worth it in the long run. You can think of them as an investment that pays off later. In the long run you will be partner with a sensible hourly wage and have your Maserati, your Chanel and your mansion.  Here’s where the second consideration comes in: chances are you’ll still be unhappy.

Research by psychologist Tim Kasser and colleagues suggests that individuals with materialistic values are significantly (in both the colloquial and statistical sense) more likely to report feelings of stress, anxiety and depression, more likely to display antisocial behaviours and less likely to report high levels of subjective well being relative to those who don’t have such values.

If money, status and things aren’t going to make you happy, what’s the point? Maybe you follow the philosophy of Chinese Weibo star Ma Nuo who said “I would rather cry in the back of a BMW than be happy on the back of a bike”. Good luck to you then. But otherwise, maybe have a think about what else you can get out of your career—interesting work, colleagues you actually want to spend time with, work-life balance (money and time to spend it), a sense of success and the big one: a meaningful job. Those things can all be acquired without sacrificing your work-life balance.

Once you know what you want, choose employers based on which one fits your criteria rather than which one is the highest profile. A career with a boutique firm may yield higher wages rapidly and leave room for work-life balance, but the tasks may grow stale owing to the lack of career advancement. Conversely, a career with any of the world’s major firms is likely to be dynamic and wide ranging, but won’t leave much room for work-life balance. The public service will see you solidly middle class and provide quite interesting work, but you might find the bureaucratic pace crushingly slow.

Be assiduous when investigating prospective employers. Through a range of anecdotes, Madeleine Bunting explains in ‘Willing Slaves: how the overwork culture is ruling our lives’ how firms are hip to all these existential requirements nowadays and are using it to get more out of people for less. Tellers at Tesco aren’t paid more but they are encouraged to ‘live the values of the firm’. Microsoft is only hiring people who are ‘passionate about the brand’. Everyone is encouraged to be emotionally invested in their work and draw spiritual sustenance from it. For those who just want to make some bucks and go home to their actual life, this is rather annoying because the firm expects unpaid hours from you on the grounds that your work should be your life. But for those who don’t have many hobbies, this new focus in management theory presents an opportunity to feel like your work is part of a bigger project and to feel like your work is, in its own small way, changing the world.

How to navigate the insidious marketing and management know-how of the modern world? Perhaps the best idea is just to maintain a big picture view of what ‘success’ is. Certainly being respected is part of success, but by who? If your mother in law doesn’t respect you but she’s a bitch, then it doesn’t really matter does it? Certainly financial security is a part of success, but how much money offers security? Live where the public schools are good and you’ll make the cost of the house back on foregone private school tuition. Then consider other things that might be more mundane but are arguably much more fundamental to be a ‘success’. Things like being a likeable person, a good person, a happy person.        

This article was originally published in Protégé Magazine 2013, an annual publication of the Australian National University Actuarial, Finance, Economics and Commerce Society.