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I Never Once Had the Time and the Money at the Same Time

I Never Once Had the Time and the Money at the Same Time

There's a version of this post that's just a list. Which of my six companies had the worst overtime, which had the best. That version exists somewhere in my head and it isn't very interesting.

The actual pattern is stranger than a ranking, and I only noticed it by putting two very different jobs next to each other.

Staying late because the room stayed late

Early on — this would have been the early 2000s, at the start of all this — a good amount of the overtime I did wasn't really about workload. It was about the room. If your team was still at their desks, you were still at your desk, whether or not there was anything left on yours to actually do. Nobody wrote that rule down. Everyone followed it anyway.

That thinned out over the years, and by the time I was further into my career the picture had mostly separated into two honest categories: places where the hours were long because there was genuinely a lot of work, and places where there mostly wasn't.

LG: money, no time to spend it

LG sat firmly in the first category. The hours were long — genuinely long, not performed for the room — and the pay reflected it. Better salary than anywhere else on my resume, by a real margin.

And I almost never used it. I wasn't taking overseas holidays during those years. Not because the money wasn't there — it was, sitting in an account, more of it than I'd had before — but because there was no time attached to it that was actually mine. You can't book a real trip around hours you don't control. The salary kept climbing and the calendar stayed exactly as full as it had been the year before.

The food company: time, no money to spend it

Then, years later, at another company — the one I spent about ten years at, making soy sauce and fermented pastes — it flipped completely.

Overtime there was rare. Evenings were actually evenings. If I'd wanted to plan something — a proper trip, somewhere far, the kind of holiday I hadn't had time to take at LG — the calendar would have said yes without much argument.

The budget said something else. The pay was noticeably lower than LG's had been, and a real overseas trip, planned properly, wasn't something I could just decide to do. I had the hours. I didn't have what the hours would have cost to fill.

The two years compared

Put those side by side and the shape of it is almost too neat to be believable, except that it's exactly what happened. At LG: money in the account, no free evening to spend it in. At the food company: a free evening most nights, and not quite enough in the account to do anything with it.

I've thought about this a fair amount, in the years since, and I don't think it's really a coincidence specific to me. I think it's closer to how the trade actually works, most places. A company that pays well is usually buying a larger share of your calendar to go with it. A company that leaves your calendar alone is usually not paying for the part it isn't taking.

No clean answer, again

I wrote a couple of posts back about never having found a way to make the "better fit" side of a decision cancel out the "better pay" side. This is the same problem from a different angle. I don't think there's a version of a career where you get both the free time and the money to fill it, not for very long, not at the same company anyway.

Do I regret either stretch? Not exactly. I regret, a little, that I never quite managed to have both handed to me in the same year. But I'm not sure that's a regret so much as just an honest description of how the trade works. You get one. Occasionally, if you're lucky, you get a few good months where both are sitting there together. Mostly you don't, and you learn to spend whichever one you actually have.

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