F Minus by Tony Carrillo for September 07, 2020

How would like no work and no money.

A truly smart man with good judgement. Promote him.

I was once told my work performance was rated Excellent, but with a little more work, I could be rated Outstanding and get the highest annual raise. I was just putting in an honest 40 hour work week, but the Outstanding workers were putting in 60 or more. I deemed the extra amount of work to be not a little, and accepted the Excellent raises.

My most recent job change was essentially a promotion, 2 nights a week I’m the person in charge and get paid a little bit more

Funny thing is that I had even more responsibility every day at my old position without any extra pay for it

Millennial work ethic.

But that goes entirely against the Peter Principle.

I have a buddy who used to teach ages 4-5. The school board kept wanting him to be the principal, but he said he enjoyed teaching too much to change to an administrative job.

I found that after getting a job with ridiculously high pay that I had been happier doing more work for less money.

I can’t bank the “satisfaction” of increased workload for inadequate reward.

I enjoy engineering, and am very good at it. I’d be a crappy manager*, so it’s win-win for me stay in engineering for less pay.

*I’d likely micro-manage the engineers under me, because they would be doing the work that I wanted to do.

You’re on the cusp of the Peter Principle. Instead of asking for a demotion, learn how to adjust to being incompetent. Do only the critical stuff that is visible. Thatway you’re working a lot less while making a little bit more.

This was actually the lesson of “The Peter Principle”. It claimed the world was so screwed up because good people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetency. Of course, that was before the MBA craze and now incompetents are hired as managers with no qualifying experience. A “bit less work for a bit less money” sounds like a better reward than promotion to incompetency.

At one point in my career, I could have applied to become the supervisor of my lab, but I decided not to apply. Supervisors I’ve worked with do get more money, but they get much more responsibility and many more headaches!

I worked over 30 years for an Israeli company in an American city that had a good pension plan, a 401-K plan with 50% matching up to 6%, five weeks vacation and a number of Jewish holidays off for everyone. Plus a holiday party with good kosher and non-kosher food! I retired with a nice income and nest egg.

During my Army tour of duty, I somehow got ‘chosen’ to be the jeep driver for the Division Intelligence Officer. No increase in pay although I had to decipher Japanese traffic cop signals. On the plus side though I didn’t get fired when I pissed off a general I had to drive around.