The higher up you go the less work you do and the more stress you take on. You’re essentially trading your peace of mind for more money.
When you work a simple manual labor job you clock in and clock out and then go home and live your life. Work stays at the office.
When you’re an executive or a business owner you’re working 100% of the time. Something happens, you need to respond. Sometimes you need to make hard decisions where you’re fucked either way but you need to minimize damage.
You need to find solutions to problems and that keeps you up at night. Don’t have enough money for payroll next week? How you gonna do it? Not pay vendors this week? Take out another line of credit at ridiculous rates? Skip a payment on your rent? Equipment financing?
You have to do something- you stop paying your employees and the company falls apart very quickly. Could start a chain reaction of good people leaving, making the situation worse. The buck pretty much stops with you, you can’t pass off the problem to someone else.
It’s not easy to be in charge. Lot of blame rests on your shoulders if things go wrong.
Of course that doesn’t mean they deserve 10,000x the salary of a regular job. I think CEO pay should be capped to some multiple of regular employee pay. Whatever that scalar value should be 2, 5, or 10 I think is debatable. But it should be capped.
Moving from being a Product Owner, working on my own projects, to being a Product Manager who works with Product Owners on their projects/hands over projects to them, it is far more stressful. I end up being on the hook for everything, with an expectation that I know everything about a dozen projects, despite being far less actively involved in the underlying work of any of them.
You don’t simply clock in clock out. You walk into a space where everything you do is monitored and critiqued. You are constantly pressured to take on more work, other people’s work, you name it, all while you get paid the same… There’s a lot more flexibility and autonomy as you move up. The stress higher up is peanuts compared to the stress of the working class.
I’ve been at the bottom doing manual labor all the way to the top and everything in between. When I was in manual labor at 19, I thought that it was stressful. Truly. I thought I was swamped with work and was always running around with my head off like a chicken.
But now that I’m older I realize the job was dead simple. I know that because I have more experience with both life and work. If I were put in that same position today, it would feel like a vacation.
Imagine a waitress. Their job can be stressful, sure. But imagine they really fuck up and fall and break a few wine bottles. What’s the potential damages? $100? $200? Let’s say $1,000.
A CEO of even a small company can fuck up and lose millions. The problems are on a whole different scale. You will see as you move up. People think it’s easy to be the boss because they only see from the outside. There’s a price you pay in sanity.
The higher up you go the less work you do and the more stress you take on. You’re essentially trading your peace of mind for more money.
When you work a simple manual labor job you clock in and clock out and then go home and live your life. Work stays at the office.
When you’re an executive or a business owner you’re working 100% of the time. Something happens, you need to respond. Sometimes you need to make hard decisions where you’re fucked either way but you need to minimize damage.
You need to find solutions to problems and that keeps you up at night. Don’t have enough money for payroll next week? How you gonna do it? Not pay vendors this week? Take out another line of credit at ridiculous rates? Skip a payment on your rent? Equipment financing?
You have to do something- you stop paying your employees and the company falls apart very quickly. Could start a chain reaction of good people leaving, making the situation worse. The buck pretty much stops with you, you can’t pass off the problem to someone else.
It’s not easy to be in charge. Lot of blame rests on your shoulders if things go wrong.
Of course that doesn’t mean they deserve 10,000x the salary of a regular job. I think CEO pay should be capped to some multiple of regular employee pay. Whatever that scalar value should be 2, 5, or 10 I think is debatable. But it should be capped.
Moving from being a Product Owner, working on my own projects, to being a Product Manager who works with Product Owners on their projects/hands over projects to them, it is far more stressful. I end up being on the hook for everything, with an expectation that I know everything about a dozen projects, despite being far less actively involved in the underlying work of any of them.
Am an executive… agree with you on all fronts
You don’t simply clock in clock out. You walk into a space where everything you do is monitored and critiqued. You are constantly pressured to take on more work, other people’s work, you name it, all while you get paid the same… There’s a lot more flexibility and autonomy as you move up. The stress higher up is peanuts compared to the stress of the working class.
I’ve been at the bottom doing manual labor all the way to the top and everything in between. When I was in manual labor at 19, I thought that it was stressful. Truly. I thought I was swamped with work and was always running around with my head off like a chicken.
But now that I’m older I realize the job was dead simple. I know that because I have more experience with both life and work. If I were put in that same position today, it would feel like a vacation.
Imagine a waitress. Their job can be stressful, sure. But imagine they really fuck up and fall and break a few wine bottles. What’s the potential damages? $100? $200? Let’s say $1,000.
A CEO of even a small company can fuck up and lose millions. The problems are on a whole different scale. You will see as you move up. People think it’s easy to be the boss because they only see from the outside. There’s a price you pay in sanity.