Balancing Life with Climbing the Corporate Ladder | MHFI 339

Mile High FI Podcast

The hosts discuss a career dilemma faced by a listener named April, who must decide between remaining an individual contributor or moving in

Key takeaways

• Moving into management can facilitate 'coasting' through delegation, but often introduces significant meeting fatigue.
• Government roles provide unique benefits for early retirement, including stability, pensions, and easier remote work integration.

Main topics

• Manager vs. Individual Contributor trade-offs
• Government employment benefits and pensions

Notable quotes

I would definitely be wary of just pursuing a little bit more money if it was going to make your lifestyle significantly worse.

Conclusion

The episode concludes that career advancement should be measured by it

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:03) Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the Mile High Five podcast. I'm Doug Cunnington and Rusty is back in the studio. How's it going today? Great, Doug. How are you? I am doing really well. We have another email question and this is kind of a follow-up from our Quiet Quitting episode. Speaker 1 (0:22) So... Yeah. As a result of us telling people that we got fired, now people are reaching out to us for career advice. So irony of ironies. It's great. And you haven't worked in how many years? Almost six. Yeah. A few weeks away from my six year anniversary. And Speaker 2 (0:38) I haven't had a corporate job in over 10 years. So we're perhaps not the best people to get not advice. This is not advice. It's never legal or any kind of advice. Speaker 2 (0:52) We have some points that we'll go back and forth and it's super interesting. Again, it's around quiet quitting. The details are like, what are good ways to do less work? And for me, you know, getting stuck in middle management was like a, just a classic spot for me to be in. I excelled at shuffling papers and, you know, delegating and stuff like that. Speaker 2 (1:19) We'll read the email today, but before we get into it, any other overall thoughts just to Speaker 1 (1:24) set this up? Well, it's kind of, I mean, it's so weird to me to anytime I receive an email based on something I said on the show, because it really feels to me like I'm just talking to you in your basement. And I'm obviously aware that this goes out and is published and other people hear it. You know, I don't, I'm not like really much of a content creator other than what I've done here with you. So, the idea that people reach out to me, like real people are listening to this and, you know, reaching out, emailing me, it's still a little bit like surprising. And this one that we're going to read today, you know, she even mentions that she listened to our outsourcing episode and decided to get a cleaner. And I'm just like, oh, I've just... For me, that experience was laughing with you and Carl in the basement of your house. The idea that someone else's experience was like, I'm going to make a change in my life based on what you said. That's like a little surprising to me. Speaker 2 (2:24) We're changing lives out there. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I know that people listen to it, but it is interesting. Like it does have an impact and people are like, it was really whatever. I changed decisions based on like shit that we said, which is, uh, Speaker 1 (2:44) like maybe I should be taking this a tiny bit more seriously because, because I'm like, I like kind of approach these with like 50 % entertainment, 50 % informational. And, but maybe I should be, you know, doing months of research before each episode, but no, that would stop being fun. And I want to do it. So. Speaker 2 (3:00) Yeah, yeah. Well, with your new promotion to, what's your title? Senior internist. Speaker 1 (3:08) Senior internist. Speaker 2 (3:09) I like that. Speaker 1 (3:10) Field attorney intern is what I was, but then I guess maybe co-host. I'm going to talk to Carl about what the pay is. We'll have to see. I'll have to negotiate that. Speaker 2 (3:20) One of the co-hosts. Yep, you'll get your packet from HR and there's some light orientation that you'll have to go to. There's, it's like a. A Speaker 1 (3:29) few people get together and Speaker 2 (3:31) they'll show you what to do. I Speaker 1 (3:32) can just see the business cards now. Rusty Sitz Pinkler, co-host of Mile High Five. Okay. Speaker 2 (3:39) Do Speaker 1 (3:40) you want to read the email? Yeah. So, this came in from a woman we'll call April, after April Ludgate from Parks and Rec. And that'll become clear from the context. She's a government employee. So, on our backing up on our... Previous episode about quiet quitting, we had kind of talked about like the later career stage quiet quitting, what that looked like. And she kind of wanted our thoughts for someone who was farther out from the Phi date. And so, yeah, she titled her email, Rusty is awesome. So, hence why I wanted to talk about it on the show. I think we could just do probably the rest of the episode about that topic. I did think that was such a contrast from like the emails I would get as an attorney where they're like, you're a fucking asshole and I hope you die. So, needless to say, this unpaid gig with Mile High Fi is way more enjoyable. But yeah, so she had a couple of questions, or like several questions. Speaker 1 (4:47) The first one is kind of she's at the career juncture where she kind of needs to decide whether or not she's going to stick as an individual contributor or move up to management. And she asked if we had any different strategies for quiet quitting before we managed teams and if we found it easier to be lazy as a manager versus an individual contributor. And then she wants to know if we could go back in time, would we still go for the management position or stay in previous positions? And then her second set of questions are grouped around the winding down phase. And so she says, when in our careers did we start to wind down? It sounds like we both had worked a bit harder early on, but really got more lazy towards the end. And then she wants to know, like, how do you recommend doing this when balancing the desire to advance and make more money to retire faster? Is it better to stay in a position that allows you autonomy, even if it's paid a bit less? And she kind of talks, I'll kind of summarize, but she talks a little bit about her specific situation. So she considers herself an individual contributor. She's in a government role. Um, that's where I came up with the April Ludgate Parks and Rec, uh, name for her. But, um, sounds like she has a little bit of the Leslie Knope energy in terms of a little bit of the tenacity, um, and, uh, maybe a little over productivity that, uh, that Leslie Knope would, would have more exhibited. But she considers herself a subject matter expert in state government. She's been working for about 10 years. She's moved jobs six times already. And she calculates that she has about 10 to 13 years remaining until retirement slash pension eligibility. She says her current job is 100 % remote. She feels like she's trusted and respected by her leadership, although doesn't. like necessarily everyone that she works with. And she, her job kind of oscillates between super high intensity periods and then like chill lulls where she gets to, where she gets to kind of do more of her, you know, tend to her personal life during the work day. And she's 100 % work from home. So that really allows her, she feels like that really allows her to take advantage of those slower periods to attend to her personal life. She's also kind of burned out from having moved jobs a lot and she hasn't liked a lot of her recent jobs and she really likes this job. So, she is concerned that if she were to walk away from this job, she might go back into a job that she doesn't like. So, that kind of lays out the big picture dilemma that she's facing. Speaker 2 (7:51) So, one thing we could think about while we're talking about this is, is it impactful enough to trim off one to two years of roughly a 12 year fire timeline? Is that worth like making her life a little more stressful potentially by taking on this management role? So we're going to weigh the pros and the cons of that. And we'll talk about like the manager versus the individual contributor and which is easier to coast and be lazy. She also talked about the workaholic sort of tendencies that she has. I mean, like you said, she's a Leslie Knope type and she's trying to just like chill out and like be a little more content and have energy for other stuff. And we'll get into, you know, I guess the idea of like government fi and maybe the fact that it's a little bit lower. stress, not always, but potentially a lower stress depending on, you know, what kind of government office you're working in. And a little bit about that job hopping, it seems like she moved around quite a bit, which, I mean, that would be very tiring to do all the interviews and that kind of thing. And then you're constantly like, you know, going through orientation, which you're going to be going through Speaker 1 (9:12) in a few weeks here. Is it Speaker 2 (9:16) pretty Speaker 1 (9:16) intense? Speaker 2 (9:17) Yeah, yeah. You'll have to create it first. Okay. Yeah. So I think this will be a fun one. And I... I don't know, like my initial thoughts here are, because she asked a couple specific questions, so I'll just like jump right into it. So one, as far as like being a manager and being able to like do less work, like for me, it was essential. And I think it could be pretty tough as an individual contributor to slack off because there's no, there's less waste in the system to hide behind, basically. Speaker 1 (9:57) Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think this is a right kind of trade-off question to be asking. I think, you know, part of it is like the manager position. We didn't even say it explicitly in the emails, but I mean, presumably it comes with a pay raise. I think my initial thought is like, I would definitely be wary of just pursuing a little bit more money if it was going to make your lifestyle significantly worse. I think that's one of the big trade-offs between. manager and individual contributor. And I guess backing way up, like, you know, our previous conversation, we were talking about how there were advantages to being a manager to at the very end stages where we could, you know, delegate out a lot of stuff and make our lives very, our work lives very not stressful. So that was an advantage, but I don't think either one of us meant to imply by that, like you should definitely pursue a manager position because you get to have that one advantage at the end. That's one advantage of being a manager at the end of the career is being able to delegate things. But yeah, this is a bigger discussion and decision point. And I do think, yeah, just going to move up to the manager position because you'll get to FI a couple years. earlier, I initially would be very skeptical of making that move because you don't want to make your life miserable just to get to Phi a little bit faster. And it sounds like she's had some rough years too. I mean, it sounds like the job hopping, one was based off of like a move, she changed geographies. And then one was based off, and then one was based off, she really didn't like a job. So, she just tried to get out there, get out of it as fast as possible, went to another job that she didn't anticipate being a long-term thing. But I think part of that is like she's not had a super enjoyable career up to this point. She's at a very, she's in a very good spot at the moment. And she kind of wants permission, I think, to camp out there, even though it doesn't put her on the path to retiring as early as possible. Speaker 2 (12:02) Yeah. And I think, yeah, perfect point. I mean, depending on where you work, the management role might not pay enough. to make up for the headaches. I know most of my raises were not that great, except when I switched jobs. So it was whatever. I'm just making it up, but like 50 % more stress and work for like an 8 % raise, which obviously doesn't make up for the difference at all. And I don't give a shit about a title, right? I mean, right. Early in my career, maybe they convinced me that like, oh yeah, you really want to have a bigger title, but I don't give a shit. It doesn't make a difference to me. But I know it was important to you. That's why you've been promoting to co-host. And then the other part is around the quiet quitting timeline. And I had to think about this. Obviously, it's been a while, but once I got... I only worked at two companies, but once I got sort of fed up at either company, then I started to check out and not try as hard basically. And I would say it was after about 60 % of my time there. So one company that I worked at, I think I was there for like two and a half years or so. So, I mean, off and on, I would slack off. It's another trick too. You could do bad for a little while and then do a little bit better. So it's like, they can't quite figure out like, oh, is this person bad or they're just having a bad week or whatever. And then the other place, yeah. Speaker 1 (13:40) It's like you read my thoughts when I listened to the podcast. No, Speaker 2 (13:43) I'm totally kidding. Speaker 1 (13:47) The, Speaker 2 (13:47) it does make, not all the episodes could be bangers, right? I mean, some of them are. You've Speaker 1 (13:52) been Speaker 2 (13:52) doing. Really, you have a very good streak going right Speaker 1 (13:55) now. I feel like you're kind of hitting your stride here with Mal Hi-Fi. Speaker 2 (13:58) 300 Speaker 1 (13:58) some episodes in. Finally Speaker 2 (14:01) kind of figured it out. In the other, yeah, the other place I worked for several years, but essentially like after four or five, I started to kind of check out. So, and again, it was cyclical. You know, if you get on a good team or something is clicking, like, That makes sense to me. But a lot of times I was just like, ah, I'm more interested in other stuff. Speaker 1 (14:26) Yeah. I feel like that's maybe, and maybe it's a point that's worth making explicit because we didn't make this on the other episodes, but we were, you know, we had overachiever tendencies and we were pretty driven in our careers. So my timeline for quite quitting is basically like. if you look at my life up to age 34, it was like balls to the wall trying to achieve as much as possible for that whole time. And then get to age 34 and be like, fuck, like, fuck all this, essentially. So, that was, I mean, that was my timeline. So, like, in terms of the, like, you know, going to one of our other questions, like, what would we have done differently early in our career? I think I would have done what I know you did and what, you know, April describes doing now, which is when I had a calm period, I could have just calmed the fuck down and, and chilled out a little bit. Cause I'd be like, okay, I don't have any, like, I don't have any assignments to do today or whatever. So like, what am I going to do? I'll write a journal article for like a legal journal. It's like, that's work. And it, and that stuff never actually like got me ahead, advanced my career. But I thought that said I had to be doing, if I had like a free moment from nine to five, Monday through Friday, I wrote a chapter in a book for a legal book. I wrote like, or I would go like do like stupid networking events, just like general networking events. And then it like on my downtime on the weekends, I was like, Oh, I got to use this time productively too. I'll go like volunteer, but I'll be doing it in a way that will be like building my network. Not just like, because I want to be doing. the actual volunteer work. And yeah, if I could tell my younger self anything, I'd be like, none of that stuff actually matters. Do it if you actually truly want to do it. And it's okay during a down period where you're not that busy with work to go travel, see your friends, or just even like relax, whatever, go for a walk, like do, do whatever you want to do. So I don't know that I have like, yeah i don't know that that's like uh i don't have experience having done that so i can't tell you how it all like plays out but that would at least be my advice to my younger super driven version of myself yeah and Speaker 2 (16:53) it felt Well, let me phrase it as a question. All that stuff probably felt really, really important. Like you had to do it or something like that. Like all the whatever. Speaker 1 (17:07) Not necessarily that I had to do it, but I felt like this was a strategic use of my