Heart says jack it in, head says stick it out

[HangTime]

Bit of a random post after a few drinks, no set question more of a general musing.

So I currently work in IT, Data specialism, have built up my career over the past 15 years or so. My head wants to give myself a jolly good slap - I earn more in a week than most do a month, it's not *that* horrendous like having to clean toilets with your tongue or something. Just keep plugging away and bringing home the bacon, maybe get to a position where you retire by 60 or whatever.

My heart on the other hand, frequently says to me, WTF are you doing here, you have more enjoyment writing posts on OcUK, Discord, writing about sports, gaming, tech, whatever. At times I'm told I'm too verbose, I have a hundred things to say but people only want to hear 10 in a work environment. I do my work and the majority I am indifferent to or dislike. I'm much happier just at home with my kids, writing stuff on the internet or whatever.

So where this leaves me is a crossroads; do I throw away a 15 year career and go for a reset? Take some naff job where I have an opportunity to write prose. Maybe take a huge punt and try to create a youtube channel or something. Either way I'm going to take probably an 80% pay cut.

I'm sure others must have hit this position at some point. Maybe it's a mid-life crisis now I'm in my 40s. Maybe the pandemic has accelerated this sort of reflective thinking. It feels very very strange, because in prior years I've always said to people just follow the money, rake in the cash and then you have more options, earn the dough up front then you can choose what you want to do after. But now I'm in their shoes it feels different, I sit here thinking, do I want to spent another 10 years wasting my life away, health going downhill doing stuff that doesn't motivate me? Shouldn't I just go all-in, try and force my way into doing something else with all the opportunities the internet opens up, try and get to a position where I can earn 20% money but actually enjoy what I'm doing? And if it doesn't work out, nobody is interested, just fall back on the career experience and go back with my tail between my legs?

Hmmmm.

 

[HangTime]

Side hustle to test the waters makes sense but I'm not sure I've got the time/energy to do it "all in" alongside work, looking after kids etc. Kind of feels like I'd never really know if I failed because it was the wrong choice or because I didn't dedicate enough time to it. That said, there's probably little harm in trying.

You can't just say you're in your 40s. There's usually a big difference to someone who's early 40s vs late 40s.

Whether you're mortgaged or not will have a big sway on decisions. Are your kids in private school? Do you have enough savings put away to continue a comfortable lifestyle.

I appreciate these are all personal questions and that you probably don't want to answer these online. But if you're taking a significant drop in salary, you probably only want to do so once you're in a financial position with no debts/big fees etc.

Early 40s, no mortgage, no private school, enough savings to live comfortably for 5-10 years but certainly not retire on (especially as my pension pot is very low compared to most people in my financial position). Plus you never know when you might need/want to spend a sizeable wedge on something (family illness or whatever), I like to have some put aside for a rainy day. I guess you could say I'm in an awkward middle ground of having enough wealth to not worry about money on a day-to-day / monthly basis, but not enough money to just ignore it in the long term.

Speaking from experience, listen to your head, not your heart.

I did this for the best of reasons and it turned out very poorly indeed. I ended up on benefits. Don't make the mistake I did.

Sorry to hear that. I normally listen to my head and have traditionally been risk averse, but I think the pandemic-enforced WFH period has sort of brought into focus the difference between how I feel about time spent at my desk doing work versus time spent at my desk doing things I enjoy (because I'm sat at the same desk for both, not having that physical transition between work and home). It will be stuff like, I'll feel a dopamine hit from discussing something of interest to me in a personal setting, and then have the comedown of some annoying situation at work.

 

[HangTime]

Reducing hours isn't easy to do, I think it would drastically reduce job opportunities as in my line of work you rarely see part time work advertised, it only really comes about where you have a perm at at organisation for a while and they agree new terms (e.g. coming back off maternity leave etc).

Entry level prose writing jobs in marketing or journalism pay peanuts compared to what you get. Also at your age there may not be many people or organisations that actually want to hear what you have to offer, a brutal truth I'm in a similar position to if I were to change career and follow a writing dream.

You earn enough to take time off and write something in your spare time, unless it's truly great work or that fits a current trend often leading towards youth and modern trends, you may not even have a willing audience, let alone a publisher.

This is what has stopped me taking the plunge in the past, basically to work in journalism you used to have to have earned your stripes writing for the uni rag, local paper etc and the pay is low. With online publishing now however it's easier to get things out there but even less option to monetise it. A friend of mine left an IT career about 10 years ago to take up freelance writing and I know she earned very little from it, she moved overseas and basically just rented a cheap room and could just about make ends meet.

I also know that the audience might be pretty limited (a lot of the things I'm knowledgeable about are either too niche with a small audience, or too saturated with content creators already), and I'm actually OK with that (I get enjoyment from writing not just the reaction to what I've written), but it does mean it's not really marketable.

Probably, what I need to look for is a middle ground, try to identify roles related in some way to my work experience but that I will find more rewarding. But still risky, because e.g. say I take job with a 50% pay cut, it would be disappointing if I found I still wasn't happy in that, a halfway house that just pays less money but still doesn't actually get me working on things I enjoy.

When I was a teenager in careers class, saying I didn't know what I wanted to do when I grew up, they said not to worry about it and it would come with time. But 20 years after graduation, you kinda feel like you should have some some sort of plan aligned to what you want, rather than my career path that has essentially just been about naturally progressing based on what things I've got exposure to by chance. Don't get me wrong, I've sort of naturally gravitated towards things that at least partially suit me, e.g. I didn't study anything around IT at school/uni but ended up working in IT because I was interested in that outside of work.

 

[HangTime]

I'm not sure reducing your hours is feasible for you given the level of seniority, and a firm's likely objections to have to employ two people at your level to cover the workload if you drop your hours.

Does the field of IT in which you operate lend itself well to contracting? I realise that contracting isn't as lucrative as it used to be now that IR35 is a thing, but it still comes with a healthy premium over perm roles. I was thinking you could do things in shift, work a 3-6 month contract, take a few months to pursue your interests, bounce back to contracting etc.

Then if your side gigs to end up turning into something tangible you can give up the contracting all together, but you'll always have it as something to fall back on as long as you don't spend too much time out of your industry.

I'm contracting at the moment, there are a lot of roles available at a less senior level than when I was perm but they pay well so I figured I may as well do that for a bit. To be honest, I struggle to justify what a lot of IT contractors get paid, less stress and responsibility than perm yet you get paid a lot more, job security doesn't seem to matter because you get extended or just walk into another contract. Worse case scenario you are out of work for a couple of months yet still earn more over the year. In a perverse sort of way I'd quite look forward to having a break between contracts if it transpired that way. And that's having already missed the boat on the glory years of contractors having lower taxes, bigger dividends, outside IR35 etc etc. I still don't really understand why firms have so many contractors for years on end, there is an obsession with keeping a lid on headcount but if you weren't paying a fortune to contractors you could sustain more heads!

I do worry a little that moving back into more junior roles will block me a little in terms of any future aspirations to take a senior perm role but there's an element of challenging myself on whether that's really what I want in any case.

 

[HangTime]

Part time doesn't appeal to me because most other people will be working to a different cadence. It's like when you take a couple of days holiday, the amount of work you need to do doesn't reduce by two days. Working 3 days a week I reckon I'd be expected to produce at least 80% output for 60% pay.

To use an analogy, if you work in a coffee shop and take two days off work, you don't come back to a queue of people out the door and a backlog of coffees to make, but that's kind of what it's like in some IT jobs.

My last place, there was a lady on 3.5 days a week but aside from obvious things like meetings not being on days she wasn't working, there wasn't really an accommodation for the fact she was part time, if a deadline was given to a group of people including her it wouldn't be extended for her on the basis she was part time.

 

[HangTime]

I've decided to stick at it a while longer; on balance having low job satisfaction is OK against a backdrop of remote [currently] working, medium stress levels and decent pay compared to a couple of years ago where I had slightly more job satisfaction but a long commute, high stress and worse pay.

I do still get frustrated at the need for brevity in the workplace though, I don't really understand because the time to e.g. read an email is very low. I don't see how an email that takes 2 minutes to read instead of 1 minute is any worse than twiddling your thumbs waiting for people to join a meeting. If you write a short email, people often come back with questions on the bits you haven't covered, so the whole thing is less efficient for others than pre-empting questions and providing more detail up front (with an appropriate TL;DR summary at the top).

 

[HangTime]

Presentations aren't too bad because you can talk around it, I deliberately dumb-down powerpoint decks and don't mind doing it because I can verbally expand on the important points (admittedly this doesn't help with pre-reading). With emails, you don't get that opportunity, people jump to conclusions or come back with questions, even challenges on the missing details that you wanted to include (I'm particularly fond of pre-emptively addressing challenges to proposals i.e. highlighting the downsides up front and how they can be mitigated, but others consider it too much detail).