Corporate Burnout & Golden Handcuffs

One of the reasons I started this blog back up after a very long hiatus was the fact that I had a growing sense of corporate burn out. I’ve written about my college days where I worked at pizza places doing a variety of crappy jobs but today I’m going to write about the other end of the spectrum, corporate jobs.

Let me be honest and upfront, working corporate (white collar) jobs is literally 1000x better than manual labor jobs (blue collar), at least for me, but there are major drawbacks too.

Pros of White Collar Jobs

What are the top things I have enjoyed about my corporate jobs?

1. Power – Once I entered the corporate world, I mostly worked for the HQ corporate office. This means that whatever decisions were made at HQ would trickle down to the entire company. I usually worked in close proximity to the CEO and related executives and it was fun being in this world even though few get to experience it. For many years I usually had a corner office in a high rise tower in some city I worked but that all stopped when most corporate people started working from home.
2. Travel – A perk of working in HQ is traveling to your company’s offices all over the world as needed. There is also travel to conferences, workshops, strategy sessions, etc. It’s fun to not only travel to places all over the world but rack up points on airlines and hotels to earn free travel for vacations. Over the years I have traveled to every continent except Antarctica but I hope to do that when I retire.
3. Money – I list this as #3 because I never took jobs for money, I took them for opportunity. As I succeeded more and more from firm to firm, my pay kept getting higher and higher and it’s a great side effect of simply being able to do what I loved.

Cons of White Collar Jobs

1. Stress – Blue collar jobs are often physically demanding on the body. I know I experienced physical stress in my college days being on my feet 10 to 12 hours at a time on long shifts but white collar jobs have mentally demanding stress. Despite the perception that executives are “pencil pushers” or “sit around doing nothing” that’s not really true. Decisions that impact thousands or tens of thousands of people have to be made every single day and it’s not always possible to make everyone happy.
2. Office Politics – In order to survive the corporate world, you have to be part Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Hobbes, Hume, Hegel, Locke, Machiavelli, Plato, and Oprah. I could write entire books on the cliques, conspirators, saboteurs of all the corporations I’ve worked for but I doubt I will ever tell these tales.
3. Travel – Travel is great and when the kids were younger, my wife and kids would join me on travel but once they started school, I had to leave them behind which was always difficult. The biggest downside is that you have to travel when the company wants you to travel not when you do.

But my main gripe with modern white collar jobs is the ever growing list of things I am now responsible for beyond the regular job. This is often called “shadow work” because it’s rarely listed on any job description. Here is my current list of training and “shadow work” responsibilities:

1. Ethics & Compliance Training – I have to police everyone from scamming the corporation.
2. Anti-Bribery & Corruption Training – I have to police bribes and corruption across the organization.
3. Anti-Human Trafficking & Modern Day Slavery – I need to make sure there are no slaves anywhere in the business ecosystem.
4. Anti-Money Laundering Training – I need to make sure no one is laundering money.
5. Conflicts of Interest Training – I am responsible for policing other people’s activities to ensure they are not in conflicts of interest.
6. Diversity & Inclusion Training – I need to make sure the organization is perfectly diversified and I understand everyone’s customs and culture and magically not be in conflict with any of it.
7. Cyber-security Training – I need to protect against phishing, hacking, theft, etc.
8. Health, Safety, Environmental Training – I am responsible for ensuring no one gets hurt anywhere at all times even when dumb people do dumb things.
9. Leadership & Mentoring Training – I am responsible for developing new leadership within the organization because eventually we all retire.

Most of the items on the list above are “regulatory” related then there are a whole bunch of corporate policies, procedures, and protocols that need to be followed for every corporate function like Finance, Accounting, Human Resources, Information Technology, Procurement, Business Operations, and whatever industry related stuff applies in addition to this list.

Corporate Burn Out

A wise person I worked with very early in my career gave me some advice during some particularly difficult times at the office. The person said, “You need to keep a mental ledger of all the good days vs bad days and always be sure you’re ending the week, month, year on the positive side of the ledger. If you have more bad days than good days, it’s time to get out.”

I’m still on the positive side of the ledger but if things keep going the way they have been going this past year it’s going to be easy to end up on the negative side of the ledger. I am a point in life where I care far more about people (family, friends, community) than corporate profits so I’m not sure if I will be any good for the corporate world anymore. Ironically, most of the firms I’ve worked seem to have a policy that boots people out of the company around age 55. Yes, it’s illegal to do this but these firms always offer generous packages that most people take the money and run. I think by that age most people are ready to call it quits and corporations, at least the smart ones, know this so that’s why it happens this way.

Unfortunately for corporations, there is a huge baby boomer brain drain that has started back in 2011 that will continue thru 2030 when all baby boomers will be over the age of 65. This will leave a huge labor gap and no one knows how it will be filled or what the outcome will be.

Golden Handcuffs

So am I prepared to jump ship as soon as the ledger goes negative? Well, there’s one small problem called “golden handcuffs” that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. Ultimately, I’ll make a decision that is right for me even if it means walking away from money but I do wonder what will happen when millions of other people walk out the door too. I’m not the only one feeling the burn out these days. It seems almost everyone I talk to is unhappy and would rather be doing something else somewhere else.

Share The Wealth

Are you suffering from job burnout? If so let me know what you plan on doing in the comments below.