Posted on 08/08/2010 5:22:13 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Filing one mind-numbing risk report after another? Tired of never getting to implement that deal you're modeling? It's easy to unwittingly become mired in the drudgery of less-than-glamorous accounting and finance busy work, professionals in the field say -- especially considering the much less palatable alternative of ending up unemployed.
But how much is too much? The Wall Street Journal recently put together their own list of ten signs it's time to leave your job. We bring you a handy list of tell-tale signs it's time to cash your last bonus check at your current gig and look for something better.
1. You've been spending so much time at work, it's starting to show in the pictures your kids draw of you.
Elissa Ashwood, a former financial consultant at McKinsey & Co. who averaged more than 80 hours a week at work was aghast when she came back home one day to find the pictures her daughter, 11, and her son, 4, had drawn of her. "In the pictures, Daddy was swimming and playing videogames with them," Ashwood says. "They drew me alone, with a computer and BlackBerry. It broke my heart."
Investment bankers are particularly resigned to long hours, says Ashwood, also a former vice president of finance and accounting at Citibank.
"Much of the high premiums that finance jobs offer are because of long hours and high stakes," said Robert Hohman, CEO and founder of Glassdoor.com, an online career resource portal. "That adds up to a work-life balance that isn't always optimal."
Glassdoor is an online career community where users anonymously post reviews of companies they work or have worked for. Nearly 10% of the companies reviewed are finance firms, with over more than 6,400 of them listed on the site.
But gruelling hours need not necessarily mean it's time to leave finance altogether, but maybe to try something different. "Tired of the hours of M&A?" says Ashwood. "Try modeling a new product. Generally it's much better to leave when you can say what you do want -- to work fewer hours and focus on product development -- instead of just being able to say what you don't want."
2. You've been holding back from voicing your grievances.
Afraid of being seen as uncooperative? Or is Human Resources simply not responding to your complaints? It's time to take action, says Dr. Linnda Durre, business consultant and author of "Surviving the Toxic Workplace: Protect Yourself Against The Co-workers, Bosses and Work Environments That Poison Your Day."
"Is HR minimizing your problems? Are they blaming you for it?" says Durre. "Patience is ok, but you need to set a deadline, or you're just being the long-suffering doormat."
But Hohman has some reassurance to offer "long-suffering doormats," that they're not alone. "It's more than likely you're not the only one that feels that way," he says. "You need to make sure you company is the kind of place that would encourage feedback. Goldman Sachs is a good example of a company that has an open environment."
The investment bank ranked 8th among 6,477 finance firms reviewed on the site by its users. "They really welcome feeback and you get the opportunity to work with the kind of people you did at business school," Hohman said.
3. You have no clue where the company is headed.
There is often a tendency to view the power differential between an employer and an employee purely as a function of authority. But it is a difference in knowledge of a company's trajectory that really tilts the relationship in the employer's favor, experts say.
"The relationship is skewed not only in terms of authority but also information," says Hohman. "Senior management often has access to much more information than employees. Especially in a recession -- people should demand visibility into the long-term direction of the company. If there are going to be layoffs, they shouldn't be blindsided by it."
4. You're starting to get stomach cramps, among other psychosomatic afflictions.
Andy Hayes, a former process specialist at ABN AMRO, knew his work was literally hurting him when he began to experience headaches, stomach cramps and fatigue. Hayes attributes a lot of his work tension to micromanagement -- what he calls "being treated like a child," -- and pressures that arose from the RBS acquisition of ABN AMRO.
"Life is too short to go into your office and be treated like a child," Hayes says. "When I found out that the department I had been moved into at RBS had an astronomically high level of complaints, yet rarely any action on those complaints, that should have been a red flag."
5. You start to believe you can't do better.
This is a common pitfall of performing routine tasks such as those involved in financial accounting positions, professionals say. "Say you're always doing the monthly close and everyone accepts that you're going to take care of problems that come up -- they assume you'll take care of it and don't appreciate it," says Ashwood. "But people usually withstand this because part of them thinks that maybe they're not good enough to take on a better role. Your self-confidence becomes undermined or you simply forget that you don't have to keep doing the same job forever."
6. Your friends and loved ones gently propose that you switch fields altogether.
"Normally a spouse or friend will make a comment in passing that's meant to be helpful," says Hayes. "But instead of taking it as helpful, you take it the wrong way. I've seen this happen a couple of times to myself and others." It didn't happen to him for too long though -- Hayes left his former life as a finance professional to set up his own travel-oriented media company in Scotland, Hayes Media Company.
7. You're putting up with it just for the cash.
"Finance companies are invariably big companies," says Hayes. "When these companies roll in billions of dollars in revenue in the good times, there's no real need for anybody to stick their neck out or cause a fuss. If you keep things just floating along nicely, you'll be fine and hopefully you'll get that bonus you were waiting for."
Former Goldman Sachs banker Antonio Garcia-Martinez makes an eloquent argument for why you shouldn't work just for the big January bonus check.
8. Your hobbies and interests are a faint memory.
Has your idea of a good weekend become all about catching up with sleep? It's time to take back the reins on your personal interests.
"Finance and accounting people are control freaks at heart," says Ashwood. "I knew mild-mannered accounting analysts who raced Ferarris on the weekends and built vacation houses. Your job will never satisfy everything you want in life but it should make it possible to do all those other things."
9. You're nowhere close to doing the things you got into the job for in the first place.
Let's not kid ourselves: The allure of perks and hefty bonuses is often a big incentive that attracts professionals to the field. But for some, it may be something else, like a passion to efficiently plan and save a company money.
"But sometimes your boss may not really care that that's what you want, might not let you talk to product development professionals to allow you to do that," says Ashwood. "But don't get let yourself get beaten down. There are many finance and accounting roles so if you don't love the one you're in, sample others at your same employer."
10. You're creating work that no one is using.
We're looking at you, risk manager whose reports go overlooked. "One of the biggest dissatisfiers is when you know the work you're doing doesn't matter," says Ashwood. Unread reports are often the result of a client asking for a certain piece of information once, Ashwood says, and which the finance and accounting group decides it should generate it periodically. "These take time to create. And if nobody's using them, either they should be canceled or someone should find a use for them."
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Regardless of your reason for leaving your work, it's important to remember that the grass often looks greener in faraway pastures. Sometimes the job you had, as bad as it might have been, seems pretty good once you've moved on.
“...It’s Time to Leave Your Job...”
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and go . . . where?
Was this written by somebody who was hoping to fill one of the vacancies? Or maybe who has a kid looking for a job in finance?
Ooooobama welfarrre or ifnfinitum UNemployment!
I want to leave mindless job of endless, payless interviews and get paid to do mind numbing tasks!
1. Your keycard no longer works.
2. Your corporate email is not working.
3. Your nameplate is missing from your office.
4. The receptionist immediately picks up of the phone when you arrive to work and talks in hush tones.
5. Your coworkers keep asking “Are you still here, I heard a rumor that-”
When I worked for one bad boss, I got sick quite a bit. The relief was leaving him for a different position. If vacation time was approved, the approval never came until a couple of days before and no earlier ! A year after I left him, I took three weeks to New Zealand. The last month working for him got very bad where if I left my desk for more than several minutes, I had to let him know where I going and doing !
> 4. You’re starting to get stomach cramps, among other psychosomatic afflictions.
>Hayes attributes a lot of his work tension to micromanagement — what he calls “being treated like a child,”
If you're young, working finance is just the thing to get you a nice nest-egg for what you'll do next.
“Your coworkers keep asking “Are you still here, I heard a rumor that-”
LOL! That was how I found out I got laid off! I went into my manager’s office and asked him if it was true. (Yes). And why didn’t he tell me himself instead of me hearing it from the grapevine.
That was 15 years ago, and even then realized it was one of the better days of my life! (Now have my own business.)
Since I retired 18 mos ago my health is awesome.
I sleep like a baby, blood pressure is down, stiff neck I always had is gone.
I think a lot of business leaders who make a fortune off of the capitalist, free-market system are closet-socialists.
When there is a boom, they play it, take on extra workers, pump their numbers to get the stock investments. When the bubble bursts, they use that to get rid of workers, pile up the work that needs to be done on those that they don’t get rid of, and profit off of that.
When the government so effs up an economy as is currently happening from Pres. Bush’s socialism-lite and Obammie the Commie’s communist strategy for destroying the US dollar and the US economy, I don’t think they mind. They cut their workforce back to a skeleton crew and tell their workers, “Look at the unemployment rate. If you don’t do what we demand of you, there are ten waiting in line to take your spot.”
The latest economic reports showed how high productivity has remained even though unemployment is climbing. That means only one thing: squeezing more blood from the stone.
The bad news is that even war-time productivity increases can only last for a few years. Eventually people burn out from working in overdrive all the time and the sense of sacrifice for the bad times wears off.
They are doing everything they can to make the economy look good up to the midterms.
Next year is when all of the major $hit is going to hit the fan.
“Former Goldman Sachs banker Antonio Garcia-Martinez makes an eloquent argument for why you shouldn’t work just for the big January bonus check.”
“Yeah,” Antonio said, “If you hang in there long enough, and if the government whose takeover you helped to finance considers you Too Big To Fail, you may get a REALLY HUGE bonus, COMPLIMENTS OF THE US TAXPAYER.”
Honest to G*d. You can’t make up the arrogance of these greedy bastards.
You arrive at work on Monday morning and your office is gone.
You arrive at work and find the site padlocked.
The lawyers have been waiting for you to arrive. And you weren’t expecting them.
Bobo will see your 10 and raise you 100 -- I think when we got as near as you're ever going to get to full employment (late Bubba-barely early Bush although the tech bubble had burst by the latter ... employment lags, you get what I mean) ie, you're 'pushing a string' at that point to get the unwilling to take the jobs available (and who couldn't get a job in 2000?).
There was a de facto collusion by the multinationals at that point to never allow that scenario to happen again. Because multinationals hate American labor. Multinationals love Chinese labor (or they did -- and a Dragon's peripheral vision ain't so great).
Who paid for Bobo's $740.6 million campaign?
***Since I retired 18 mos ago my health is awesome.
I sleep like a baby, blood pressure is down, stiff neck I always had is gone.****
Same here! Thirty one years of working rotating shifts!Real killers! Only three people retired at my plant. The others had to take permanent medical leave or fell over dead on the job.
I was one of those three who retired. It took me six months to catch up on thirty one years of lost sleep!
The secretary, er - the administrative assistant, you have been hitting on is threatening to file an harassment complaint.
Your new boss is gay.
The office betting pool is run by a shark.
The company bowling team sucks.
Office parties are held at a church.
Just a few truly legitimate reasons to be looking elsewhere.
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