I agree that nothing is black and white and there is a lot of give and take.
What I was responding to is the idea that you must put the rest of your life on hold for a few years in order to be successful. And I would say - not necessarily. Life balance is a must for some of us in order to be happy and tomorrow is no guarantee.
I decided a few decades ago that my life wasn’t going to be put on hold so that I could be really “successful”. I have a good career but I am “nobody important” except at my place of work.
Why did I make this decision? I rode and competed during grad school. I received a lot of negative feedback for not being fully invested in my career. I was always “less than”. Once, a fellow grad student was giving me a hard time about it and I asked why don’t you want to make time for a hobby. He honestly answered that there would be plenty of time for that later.
He never graduated from grad school. He died about a year after our conversation.
Life is short; don’t sacrifice everything for an imagined future unless that is your choice
When you figure it out, let the rest of us know. Been trying to do this for 30 years.
Start by not planning such an ambitious schedule because life will happen - family obligations, unexpected bills, illness, work obligations (can you say out of town travel the week before an event?) the desire to have a simple weekend vacation and that’s before horse and truck karma.
Also don’t forget to fully fund your 401k so that you can afford to have horses in your life as an old lady. If you can’t do this first, then don’t event for a while, do lessons and clinics then knock it out of the park when you do compete.
I had a national sales manager who thought that also until I started calling him at 2 or 3 AM before heading out to meet with a client to ask if he had any one else in that area than needed a visit
But I still stand by my point in the vast majority of cases. A well-run company knows you always need a Plan B. Even in a production-driven industry people get sick. Things should be set up knowing that people will get sick or injured or have family emergencies or you’ll hire someone with a wedding already scheduled in the middle of your busy season or any number of things. As I said above, there are plenty of poorly-run companies out there but that doesn’t make it a good idea.
Are you suggesting this is a good practice? Presumably your meeting was put on the calendar at some point before 2AM, there’s no reason you couldn’t have reached out to him earlier instead of waking him up in the middle of the night. There are good reasons to be on call 24/7, and I’ve been on the receiving end of those calls before, but someone else’s poor planning is not a legitimate reason in my book.
I worked for a company where I had ZERO PTO for an entire year due to “business needs.” They simply could not afford to give me an entire day off or even half a day off. Same company was like “we don’t know why we have so many call ins and people quitting.”
I think that was the point. If the boss won’t respect my time, why would I respect theirs? Funny how the unreasonable demands stop when suddenly Boss is getting them too
We would all love to work for reasonable people with good work life balance. But sometimes you have to play hardball right back to draw some boundaries, because “good” companies and bosses are almost mythical.
Do you really believe that the way “things should be set up” is the common lot, and everyone in this thread who is saying that it doesn’t work that way is just stupid? I’m not getting what point you are trying to make by your insistence on the ideal.
A one-off bridesmaid situation is not the issue. That they will manage.
What you are missing is that your idealized version is not the usual situation. Your lean into it shows your lack of general experience in different workplaces that are the common employee situation.
You can point out the better management practices all day long. So what. Companies keep going without them. Just because it is outside your experience doesn’t mean that it isn’t the case.
Something I experienced on my first job after graduation, at a big corporation, was that no, this old, successful company does not have it figured out. They are in no way a role model for how to run a company.
Over the years this first-year realization comes as a shock to every new college grad hire, one after another. The disillusionment is part of the first year of career. This thought transition of “how do they not just fall apart, given the disorganization and mess ???” Until they figure out how it works.
The answer is what a more senior employee told me in my second year and that I found to be very, very true. The lower ranks keep the company going because of their focus on the grind, just getting things done, every day. They work out the problems caused by inept management and do what needs to be done to keep the company running. They pass on what they know to the next group of newcomers.
Management can be a huge burden that the lower ranks must carry to keep everything moving. But thanks to the dedication of the steady core, it all gets done.
Truly ambitious, extra-talented, creative people who hire on at graduate entry level, into those foot soldier ranks, usually do not stay more than two to five years. Unless they have an incentive that most employees do not. For the most part, a few years in and they are gone.
Those that are left create the mass of reliable foot soldiers who stay for many years and just work around the stupidity of the officers, whatever that takes.
How does manaegment manage non-preventable absences due to circumstances beyond an employee’s control? Badly! Plus it is the workers who figure out how to muddle ahead. Often the situation means many extra hours for other employees, a lot of phone calls to the absent employee (who yes may be in a hospital bed), while the employee who was ill or whatever coming back to a huge stack of undone work, and even a mess that has to be cleaned up gradually over weeks or months. The bridesmaid may make the wedding, but there will be an aftermath, even if she isn’t dinged for it in her evaluation.
And honestly people plan their own weddings, and even time expected childbirth, around their work demands. That’s pretty common in any business.
The foot soldiers stay because it is a good living. That’s why they bend their lives around the company. They cannot earn at nearly the same level, or have the same benefits, elsewhere. The company PAYS their people to cover the ineptitude. This is American corporate structure.
In fact, some feel trapped by the compensation. They make the decision to stay, and from there they make the compromises and learn how to work their personal lives around the company demands.
It’s a Dilbert world. That’s why the comic has been so successful for decades.
That’s reality. For many millions of workers. If you’ve got a better job situation that pays comparably, hang on to it.
The employee handles whatever non-respect is coming their way because the pay and benefits is better than what they can earn elsewhere.
That’s why. That’s the bottom line.
If the employee can do better, they will leave.
That’s what happened during the pandemic and the shift in work structure and housing prices (they could sell their city residence for a premium, and move to a cheaper cost-of-living location). A lot of people made an employment change they had been wanting to make for years.
It’s all starting to settle in again. The larger companies are gradually re-gaining the upper hand on employee control, as the economy continues to shift.
Most companies are not ‘well run’. Many of them make money anyway, even though they are understaffed at the bottom and bleeding money from poor management.
High cash-flow / high profit-margin businesses will look good on paper, anyway. Companies that are running on good margins and cash inflow, and/or running on investor money waiting for a buyout, can carry on indefinitely that way. They figure out how to make just enough adjustment to market and societal changes to keep going. It never catches up to them because the numbers are there.
There are any number of entire industries running this way, some with mediocre-ly managed, even badly managed, companies that are over a century old. As well as many start-ups and relatively new industries.
Very few people are actually good at management. They get management roles anyway, because someone has to fill those slots. Their employees just work around them.
This response is a little excessive. I never said all companies are well-run, I’ve worked in several offices that aren’t, and my advice to OP was to play it safe for a while in case she winds up in one because the experience might be more valuable than work-life balance for now. But there’s a huge range between ideal management and complete incompetence that you’re skipping right over. Most places fall somewhere in the middle, and there are plenty of jobs out there that are managed at least marginally well-enough so employees can take time off unexpectedly without causing any serious problems. For most people the stakes at work just aren’t that high.
Plenty of jobs don’t call employees in the hospital (mine did, but just to see if I was ok and let me know that I should take as much time as I needed and they’d figure things out at the office in the meantime). Most women don’t time childbirth to best suit their employers’ needs, and it’s insane to suggest that’s common practice. This stuff does happen, I never said it didn’t, but it’s definitely not the universal truth you’re making it out to be.
This thread has gotten way off track, but I hope anyone else out there considering a similar situation can see from the variety of experiences on this thread that there are plenty of ways to make a good living and support a horse habit without completely giving up control of your life. There are also times when it makes sense to put work ahead of other things in life. Everyone has to decide for themselves what’s important to them and what compromises they’re willing to make.
