No worries, I know what I'm capable of and my experience speaks for itself. I will have to see what comes of my meeting with the principal later this week. My long term goal isn't actually to be self employed full time, it's to work in an engineering job full time with a decent work schedule and a regular salary, where I can make use of my qualifications and complete work for my own business on a part time basis in the evenings and at weekends. It will take me another couple of years to make it to that stage. I have lots of reasons for not wanting to leave my current job. If it comes down to it, the decision to leave or stay will be made based on those weighed against why I want to or should take the other job.
Average pay in the UK is £27,000, but that's hugely inflated when you consider that just over 50% of the population earn only NMW. As a general rule of thumb I tend to find jobs in Central London to be paid 10k more than their equivalents in the rest of the country. I've always worked on the assumption that those outside of London should aim to earn a minimum of "1k per year of age", so at 27 I'd expect you to earn at least 27k outside London or 37k inside. I'm 28 and I earn £30k in Norfolk (about right then!) - but then I absolutely love my work-life balance and wouldn't consider a job in London for less than double my current pay! In fact I wouldn't consider leaving my current place of work for anything less than a very significant pay rise. I think it's easy to get fixated on wages, your lifestyle is more important! Take my own brother as an example, he also lives in Norfolk, he earns £60-70k in a sales role which is mega bucks out here; but he works 7 days a week, looks shattered, lives on his phone, and always complains about work. I often say to him that I think it would be better to work less and take a 10k hit to his earnings, he'd be happier, he works largely on a commission basis so he could literally do just that, but he doesn't think in that way....the money is there to be earnt and so he will.
A lot to chomp through there Uni and I don't have time to type it all out, maybe we should have a phone call next week, as I've been through a lot of what you're worried about. But my 2 pennies: - Stop worrying about what happens at that school if you leave. Right now. Forget it. Budget BLAH. It doesn't matter - there is literally no justification to work more than your contracted hours unless there is a realistic probability of you getting something from it. As soon as your hours were cut the first time, that probability shrunk to nearly zero. Once cut, they DO NOT come back. Especially if there is a good chance they know you'll try and do the work in the allotted time anyway. I absolutely fail to understand why you would try and do 30 hours work within 25 just because you were asked. If it were possible, you wouldn't have been contracted at 30 hours originally would you? Seriously, stop being a nice guy, it doesn't help you. It only helps them. Hours will keep getting cut until they feel the pinch. At the moment, there is no risk to them as they know you'll try and keep things together no matter what. They have no idea what will happen when things start falling apart. My advice - let them. Work to a decent level, don't take the piss, but when the bell goes, go home. Leave it. As for the other job - well that's a tougher call. If you do get it, I would move on and at least recover financially for a year and try and do a bit with the business on the side. I really cannot see any value to hanging on at that place, in the last 12 months, they've done nothing for you. Screw 'em and look after number 1. As for being 26 and getting business customers being a problem? **** that. I worked for a 1 mil turnover and had their entire IT on my shoulders at 21. If you start believing that kind of thing is a problem, then it'll become a problem. I know you don't seem worried about it but I just wanted to re-iterate what a load of ******** that is.
Commission based jobs don't work like that, because once you hit the targets necessary to receive commission you simply teach the business that the targets are too low and need to be raised, it is just a never ending circle of increasing expectations you have to meet until you are broken, then the next guy who gets the job has the expectations that finished you off as the basic minimum at the start.
This isn't necessarily the norm unless we're talking about cold-selling throwaway products or services as it simply isn't good for the business or employee. Setting eminently achievable goals and tiered accelerators for >100% is far more motivating than setting ridiculous targets in the first place, and it encourages more long term business development and generally happier people, and as the saying goes, people buy from people.
I make mid £40k between all my sources of income (day job + contracting + occasional bits in family business). Really under performed to be honest, I've been in this industry for 7 years and by now I should have moved up the ladder. Unfortunately I've been made redundant twice in the last 12 months and it's meant that I'm effectively doing the same job from 4 years ago with slight bumps in pay. Honestly as I approach my 30s I find myself less invested in climbing the career ladder.
I'm a business analyst and take £375 a day, working full time. Like Hiren, now I've hit my 30's, the hunger for a big career has got smaller and smaller. Now I just want a family.
What does a business analyst do? I mean I know what a business analyst is, just what do you specifically do yourself? Julian, I might take you up on that phone call sometime in or before early September. My situation isn't likely to change before then at the moment.
Me. Well, I'm basically spending my days going over execution of test data and telling them whether what they have run is essentially correct, or whether they need to go back to the chalk board. It really depends on what company has hired me to do. I work mostly for banks and mostly dealing in payments, or Lean ethics.
No offence to anyone, but some of the numbers being thrown around in this thread - especially in the last few pages - are extremely depressing. £375 per day is almost 4x my wage; £27k at 22 yrs old would have avoided a lot of debt problems I got myself into; I'm already in my early 30s and I don't earn anywhere near £40k. I'm 32, I work as an MI Developer not far from Cardiff and I earn about £24.5k in salary; my actual earnings are a little higher than that, as I get private medical cover, 4% of my annual salary in benefits and I'm in line for a ~10% bonus each year. I don't count my benefits as part of my salary, but the bonus definitely does count - that makes it a hair under £27k. In terms of my friends and peers that's a pretty good wage. I consider it poor however, as it extremely under-values my skills. My problem with moving elsewhere is that the little bits of paper you use to prove your ability to prospective employers are extremely expensive. My CV rarely gets a reply when I enquire about roles I see advertised, even if it's "easier" than the work I do now. I recently went on a week-long ASP.NET introductory course which was paid for by my employer, and the whole thing cost around £3000: the course was £2500 and my travel and hotel expenses were around £500. That was for an introductory course, let alone any kind of certification. I had to fight tooth and nail to get that, and I know for a fact that there's nothing like that on the cards any time soon. I can't afford to pay for a £3000 course off my own back... I should probably explain what an MI developer is. I build reports, dashboards, data warehouses and analytics for operational data. Basically it means lots of T-SQL (though less of the DBA stuff), Visual Basic for Applications (aka VB6) and some pretty advanced Excel stuff. We're also moving into some web-based stuff using ASP & VB.NET (hence the aforementioned course), but I can't really say I've got any really marketable experience with .NET - implementing object oriented programming concepts still makes my brain melt. Of course there's also the more intangible "soft skills" such as figuring out what people want when they never actually tell you what they want, or catering to the whims of a senior manager/director who likes to make changes to something at the very last minute and expects you to re-write in two days something which you've been working on for two months. Average wages across the industry for T-SQL, VB6 and .NET developers are far higher than what I'm earning now, but I really can't back up what I say in an interview with any concrete certifications or qualifications. I really don't know what kind of point I'm trying to make here; this has sort of turned into a bit of a venting rant, rather than trying to make any specific point. I've already decided that my future does not lie with the company I've spent nearly 11 years at, because there really is no future here for a developer (although of more immediate concern however are the crippling technology restrictions and bureaucracies that I am forced to accept). Yet my chances of securing a job quite as "cushy" as this elsewhere are extremely slim, and that's a huge risk for me to take. Money doesn't compensate for a poor working environment but if it comes down to a choice between struggling to make ends meet but having a blast at work, or being stressed for ~8 hours every 5 out of 7 days but having a comfortable wage then it won't be a difficult choice. I didn't really respond to these points. Leaving aside the deposit for a moment, I am still yet to be convinced that owning my own property is a worthy goal. Why should this be seen as a mark of success? At the moment the financial obligation for me to keep a roof over my head is a monthly one: I'm currently on a rolling tenancy agreement, which means that if I want to move then I only have to give one months notice. If I want to move house, I move house - I don't have a loan which will be with me for another 20-30 years, and I don't have to worry about negative equity or rising/falling house prices if I want to move. Actually the latter is a factor because property prices will affect the rental market, but that's a little different to having to worry about my house being worth less than when I took out the mortgage. As for having to make sacrifices, do you really think I'm that naïve? This might not have been the intention, but both of those replies certainly come across as mansplaining - probably why I didn't reply. My point is, why should I sacrifice the things I enjoy and voluntarily cause myself a great deal of stress in order to pursue a goal which I don't even think is a worthwhile one? EDIT: The last part was a little more incendiary than I intended; apologies...
Buying a house may not be a worthwhile goal (renting certainly has it's benefits), but to say you'd rather be stressed for 5 days of the week, to live the life you think you should is crazy! I've been in the position of being stressed at work every week, and it nearly ruined my home life. Trying to not have a stressful job effect you outside of work is much harder than you think. I am now technically on the lowest wage I've ever been on, but running my own business does provide its own 'perks' and I have more money in my pocket at the end of the year, but I still live as I did, the end goal being to pay the mortgage off in 5 years.
A long time ago I learned a hard lesson in taking one's work home and having to work far more hours than required. I started off working in a computer shop from 10am to 6pm; that soon changed to 10am to 8pm to cover store opening hours. Then we'd have a busy spell and I'd have to come in at 9am to get a head start. Then the busy spell would get busier and I'd be coming in at 8am - suddenly I'm working a 12 hour day all the time. Then Christmas would come along and I'd regularly be working until 11pm just to get the orders out in time. That was not a pleasant experience. These days as soon as it turns 4pm I'm out the door and my work, for the most part, stays in the office (I do occasionally come up with a solution for a problem I've had all day when it's late in the evening). I rarely stay in the office longer than I need to; I don't mind putting in extra effort when we're under the cosh, but only as long as it's not required regularly. When I start having to work extra hours for more than three weeks or so it becomes a problem and I will refuse to work longer than the hours I'm paid for. I'm quite open with this and my management - at least my immediate managers - don't have a problem with this. Sure work sucks and there are a lot of frustrations, but I try very hard to leave that in the office. It's probably impossible to truly let it slide and not let it affect me, but I do try not to get wound up about it at home all the time. Even though I might hate my job and the company I work for, I'm still in a relatively "safe" position. I'm pretty safe from redundancy (at least until the end of 2016 when our redundancy policy changes), so I'm more or less guaranteed to at least have a job here for the forseeable future. If I went to work elsewhere it'd be totally out of my comfort zone and it's a risky proposition in terms of job stability and security. I might have to slog through a pile of sh*te, but at least it's a familiar pile of sh*te and I know I'll have a job next month. I already know I want to leave - I emphatically do not want to work for this company any more - but it's a huge step, and there's a very good chance I'm going to have to accept less money. Speaking of redundancy, if I was offered redundancy where I work now then I'd be jumping for joy. I'd be straight back out looking for another job, but the payout I'd get after 11 years service would be pretty sweet indeed; it would easily wipe out all my debt, all my partner's debt and pay our bills for the next 6-8 months. That's why they don't offer redundancies and would rather re-deploy people!
All this talk of not being comfortable or happy working 12 hours a day is making me wonder what on earth is wrong with me. Don't get me wrong, a 9-5, Mon-Fri job doing what I do now and earning what I earn now in and from both jobs would be fantastic, but it's not out there at the moment. Believe me, I'm looking, but it's not. But then again my goals, experience and motivation are all different from other people's, so maybe this is how it's meant to be for me, for now at least.
Is there really such thing as a 9-5 job anymore? I mean there are people who leave at 5, but that doesn't mean the job necessarily done. The times I've looked over at people who disappear like Ninjas a 5 and I think to myself that there is no way they're finished for the day.
Generally these days "office opening hours" are 9-5, but since we're all internet connected on just about everything we own, work emails keep rolling in and there's just a general expectation that people are online from dawn 'til dusk. In my office at least it's rare to see anyone leave at 5, and most of the team are still here at half past. It's not uncommon for people to hang around until 6:30, but not old Shirtles
True, but I never did quite understand that whole email coming in from one of your work colleagues at 01:00 situation. I mean, yes, I'll sometimes stay in the office until crazy o'clock, but once I'm out of here, that's it. Done.
If you are only paid to work from 9-5, unless you really enjoy your job, why do any more than that? The average person will spend a third of their waking life working. I think that is more than enough.
I totally relate to that and it makes total sense, but there are so many variable to account for. For example; I'm a contractor. I get paid X amount per day for working 35 hours per week. The problem is, is that the work I'm paid for is good paid work and for that, my employer demands a level of work to match that salary. If I did 9-5 every day, the work wouldn't get complete and I'd ultimately be asked to leave when my contract is up for renewing. It's an unspoken role in big business and banking that you're expected to go above and beyond your hours. It sucks, but that's how it works.....
Doesn't work like that sometimes I get servers blow up at 5pm, the expectation is that the next day the business will be able to carry on working, so this guy has to stay there until there is at least some resolution. That's just the way it is though. I make sure I get paid for all my overtime though, and as long as that happens, you can have me 24/7 if you like
