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What stress did your old job have that your new one does not?

• taway7878 6y ago
  My last job received over $50B USD of government bailout funds between 2008 and 2009. There were accusations of accounting impropriety and two senior executives were prosecuted and imprisoned a year earlier. I worked in the quant/pricing/accounting group in technology and product. We also finalized figures for financial reporting for this public company. There were dozens of people pointing fingers at each other trying to shift blame on who was responsible. There were leaks to the press, leaks to authors, accusations, memos, the works. In one case, a person found a major accounting issue where prices were faked and suddenly found himself facing sexual harassment claims from the very department that was responsible for the fake prices. In 2009 and 2010 people were desperately clinging to jobs and that meant stabbing anyone else that could be stabbed to get the spotlight away. This is mostly in Quant/IT/Ops at mid-senior'ish levels (below Managing Director.) Every single decision was memo'd with signatures. Worse, we weren't in the group of people making millions, so if we got in trouble it wasn't as if we had millions of dollars worth of defense attorney costs saved up. One lesson learned is that if the money is good, there are probably some shadow liabilities. I mean, $300k/yr (mind you, this is 12+yrs ago) is great, but not great enough to be worth this stress. I took a job in tech paying the same in annual TC. There is some delivery stress, but not huge. No investigations. No financial reporting improprieties. No depositions. No memos. No execs in prison. NO MORE PSORIASIS! YAY! Mostly stress over getting some random Linux driver working, pretty nice!