Fire Your Boss (20 page)

Opportunities for advancement.
This is the factor employers love to tout to young people as an inducement to accept a job that offers a low salary. It’s ironic that they use the most outdated rationalization to sway the youngest candidates. But that’s because students don’t yet know how the real world works. They move up each year simply by doing satisfactory work, and they think the real world works like education. A job that offered “room to move up” was indeed a good thing…back when people actually moved up in an organization. But for more than two decades the people who have stepped into those higher spots have come from outside the organization. As I noted earlier in the book, the average thirty - two - year - old American has already worked for nine different firms. That’s because there is no upward movement from within anymore. It’s a catch-22: stick around long enough to be a candidate for upward mobility and you’re marked as being somehow deficient…for sticking around that long. Today, opportunities for advancement are actually just opportunities to learn how to please new bosses. I warn my more experienced clients who occasionally hear this pitch not to think they’ve stumbled onto the one company in America that still believes in promoting from within. It’s a lie. To move up you must move out.

Stability.
In times of economic upheaval many people think the perceived stability of a potential employer is an important factor in weighing job offers. Actually, I think it’s a mistake to attach any significance to a company’s stability. Whenever a client cites stability as being important, I ask her to give me an example of a stable company. Then I give her a quick homework assignment, asking her to do an online search combining the name of that company and the word “layoffs.” Of course, a host of articles and links will appear showing how many thousands, or tens of thousands, the company has let go in the past few years. That’s because there’s really no such thing as a stable company anymore. Large firms are trying to act small. Small firms are trying to look large. And every firm seems obsessed with its value, as expressed by its share price, rather than its profits. The quickest and surest way to boost the value of your shares is to lay people off. Giant conglomerates change their names repeatedly to reflect the relative share values of their merged components. Relying on the perceived stability of a potential employer is counting on lottery winnings to serve as your retirement plan. Sure, it’s remotely possible, but the odds are against you. Yes, the “stable” company may still exist in ten years, but its entire staff may have turned over five times in that period.

Status.
Let me go back and again ask an important question from earlier in this book: why are you working? If you’re working to impress other people, to please your parents, or to prove something to someone, then status is an important factor in weighing job offers. But if you’re working to provide for yourself and your family, as I believe you should be, status on its own is meaningless. Status alone won’t put food on the table or pay for your daughter’s college tuition. Status will make a difference only with people shallow enough to believe you are what you do and your value as a human being is primarily determined by your work. Another important point to consider is that high-status jobs often require larger - than - average time commitments. High-status people often think of themselves as being “too important” to go home at five, or to take two weeks’ vacation. They have to stay late and take working vacations. High - status people don’t have the time to go to their son’s Little League game or their daughter’s dance recital. Even if they don’t think of themselves that way, many others do, and the expectation becomes a reality.

Title.
Don’t let meaningless labels influence your choice of jobs. Some companies continue to try to entice people into taking less money in exchange for a more exalted-sounding title. The son of a client of mine was offered a job as “editor in chief” of a small-town weekly newspaper. Of course, the job included everything from writing all the stories to delivering the paper door to door. While that’s an extreme example, it’s indicative of the kind of title inflation that’s taken place in the past few years. There are no more secretaries … they’re all administrative assistants. There are no more sales clerks…they’re all customer service representatives. Even while all this title inflation is taking place there are other cutting-edge companies that are coming up with either stylistic titles — “manger of creative destruction” is one of my favorites — or removing titles altogether, pursing some kind of classless vision of a workplace filled with “comrades.” Because the practical value of titles in determining exactly what you do has diminished, even the most traditional recruiter ignores them in reviewing a résumé. Job descriptions are what matter today, not titles. That’s why I had you draft your own job description back in chapter 2. The titles that matter most today are husband, wife, life partner, father, mother, and friend.

There are a handful of job-offer characteristics that may or may not be important to consider, depending on their specifics and/or your current life circumstances.

Disability insurance.
I’m a big believer in the importance of disability insurance. That’s because when I was forty-eight years old I contracted tuberculosis and lost my job as a vice president at a major bank. Until I recovered and launched a new career as an attorney and life coach, I relied on my disability-insurance benefits to help keep food on my family’s table and a roof over our heads.
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While Social Security does indeed have a disability-insurance element, it is very difficult to qualify for benefits, and the payouts are quite low. If you don’t have a disability-insurance policy of your own, receiving one as a benefit is definitely an important factor in weighing a job offer. It’s also an important factor if you would for some reason have a hard time obtaining an affordable disability policy on your own. Since employers purchase insurance coverages as group plans, one individual employee’s health shouldn’t have an impact on coverage or cost. If you already have disability coverage of your own, this isn’t an important factor in judging a job offer.

11. My illness and subsequent recovery had, as you might imagine, a profound effect on my attitudes toward life and work. Those are outlined and explored in my book
Second Acts
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Health insurance.
You don’t need me to explain how important health insurance is today. If you don’t have it from another source, it’s a definite plus in any job compensation package. But if you are already, or can be, covered by someone else’s health plan, it need not be a factor in choosing one job offer over another. Don’t get me wrong. Having secondary coverage isn’t worthless. It might pick up some of the out-of-pocket costs not covered by the primary coverage. So if all else is equal between two offers, you might as well take the one that provides health insurance.

Life insurance.
While I’m a big proponent of disability insurance, I’m not a big fan of life insurance. I think people usually carry far too much life coverage and it’s usually of the wrong kind. I tell my clients they should have only as much life insurance as necessary for their family to maintain their lifestyle for three years — that’s enough time to make adjustments — and to take care of any outstanding obligations — the remaining contributions to a child’s college savings plan, for example. And I think the only type of insurance that’s worth buying is pure term that has the same premium for either a five- or a fifteen - year period. I don’t believe insurance is ever really a good investment vehicle.
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So why don’t I list life insurance as an unimportant factor? One reason only. If you cannot obtain affordable life insurance on your own, say because of a medical condition, you will probably be able to get it through an employer’s group plan. Therefore, if this is the only way you can get life insurance coverage, it’s an important factor to consider.

12. The exception to my term-only rule is when a senior citizen needs a policy to cover burial expenses. Term policies actually cost more than whole-life policies when the insured is over a certain age.

Retirement plan.
I’m lumping together all employer-sponsored investment plans in this category. These are important factors only if the employer funds the plan, in whole or in part. If there’s no employer financial contribution involved, and you’ll be funding the plan entirely on your own, it really doesn’t matter which company offers what plan. You can always save more money on your own to compensate. But if you’re considering two jobs, one that offers a 401(k) plan in which the employer matches employee contributions dollar for dollar, and one that doesn’t offer this type of matching program, it would be an important factor to consider. After all, those contributions are, or at least will be, a definite boost to your income. Alternatively, if one potential employer offers a defined-benefit pension plan — the amount of your payout is guaranteed — and the other offers a defined-contribution pension plan — the amount of its deposit is the only thing that’s certain — the former may be a real advantage, worth weighing heavily when making your choice.

Tuition reimbursement.
Tuition reimbursement is an important factor only if your own long-term plans mesh with the restrictions and limitations placed on the reimbursement plan. For instance, some firms will only reimburse tuition for certain courses of study that, in theory, will have a direct short-term impact on your job performance. That would be a positive factor only if those specific courses of study fit into your long-term plan. Let’s say you’re working for an engineering firm that will reimburse tuition for courses leading to a master’s in engineering. Your long-term plan involves moving into a management role rather than staying with engineering. In that case the reimbursement offer really isn’t an important factor to consider in weighing the offer. Another way to look at it is, if you’d be paying for the education on your own anyway, this is an important factor; otherwise, it’s not.

So what are the important factors when weighing job offers today? I believe there are five issues on which you need to focus. This time I’ll address them in order of importance.

Income.
Nearly everyone says he wants to make more money. Then why is it so few of us make it a priority in our work life? I think for both psychological and cultural reasons we believe money is crass, venal, and dirty. Yet money in and of itself can do nothing. Its value is entirely extrinsic. Money is simply a means of exchange, a tool. And a tool is neither good nor evil. It can be powerful, however. Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can buy things that make you happy, and its absence can make you unhappy. Money may not be able to buy you health — since you can’t purchase new genes — but it can sure buy you preventive care and better medical treatment if you do get ill. Money can’t buy you the spiritual love of another human being. But it can buy you physical love — prostitution was probably one of the first uses for money — and it can buy you a form of spiritual love, albeit from pets rather than from human beings.

There’s nothing wrong with making money the priority in choosing which job offer you accept. As I’ve said earlier, work is the only aspect of life that has the potential to provide you with money. You can get spiritual, psychological, and emotional fulfillment from your personal life. In fact, you’re more likely to get that kind of fulfillment from your personal life than from your work life. If you want more money, make it the priority in your work life. That’s really the unspoken secret in the American workplace. The way to make more money is to make it your priority. Those who earn a great deal of money do so because they spend a lot of time and energy in the effort to make money. They stress the importance of money in all their work and business actions. They make it their number one priority. So should you. In fact, you should make every effort possible to trade any of the compensation benefits I’ve listed as unimportant factors for additional money. (See the box on page 169: Trading Benefits for Dollars or Time Off.)

As I’ve said before: do it for the money and the love will follow. To the extent that you maximize the amount of money you earn through work, you maximize your chances to satisfy your other needs outside of work. More money from work provides you with the tools to do more with the rest of your life. Money from work provides you with the means to travel, to help the poor, to provide for your children, to paint watercolors of the Southwest, to buy books, to go to museums and films and concerts, to take classes, to do whatever it is you love, whatever makes you happiest.

Of course, you also need the time to do all those things you love, and that’s why I believe you also need to give priority to the next three factors.

Proximity.
I’m always amazed how little people take their proximity to the workplace into account when choosing one job over another. Some people spend more time going to and from work during the course of a week than they spend interacting one - on - one with their children, and that’s a shame. Let’s take the stereotypical couple with children who have moved from an urban environment to a suburban one in order to provide a better quality of life for their children. Say it takes, door to door, ninety minutes for the husband to get from home to his workplace, and sixty minutes, door to door, for the wife to get from home to her workplace. That’s three hours a day and fifteen hours a week for the husband, spent traveling to and from work. For the wife it’s two hours a day and ten hours a week. Added together that’s more than a day that this hypothetical couple spends traveling to and from work. That’s twenty-five hours spent neither earning money nor spending time on the things that fulfill you personally — other than possibly reading if the trip is on mass transit, or listening to music if it’s in a personal car. If they each took a job that was just thirty minutes closer, they could conceivably have breakfast with their kids in the morning, or get home early enough to play before dinner. And of course this applies to things other than spending time with the family. The added time could be spent going to a museum after work, or going to a movie during the week, since they wouldn’t have to wake up as early.