Pay for Stress

In my career as a manager in a high technology company, I have learned a few simples rules that I tried to teach my most promising employees. This one is BY FAR the most important, and all you young aspiring Rock Stars out there would do well to understand it… nay… ABSORB IT INTO YOUR SOUL. I call it the PS Rule:

The PS Rule: Companies Pay for Stress

Note that in this context, I mean Stress in the Corporate white-collar sense. You know – artery-busting deadlines, ridiculous hours, too much to do, endless travel, no personal life, no family life, failure = unemployment, screaming customers, irrational management, problems that can’t be solved, a million things that make your life miserable that you have no control over. Mental stress. Emotional stress. Ethical stress. Pressure on your very Soul. That sort of stuff.

When you enter the Technology workforce from University, especially Grad School, in most cases, life if good. Cool research – with decent equipment, all (well, most) of the needed resources, and focused team effort towards a real goal – typically a product or service that hopefully people will like so much they’ll actually pay for it. You’re in the lab, working on the Future. Its exciting, its fun, and you get paid Good Money.

Or do you?

You don’t. And that is as it should be. You are inexperienced, unproven, and while you may be an expert in your specialty, you are also tied to that specialty and presumably enjoy the work. You might even do it (or if a former post-doc, actually DID) for what amounts to bread and water. If the job is FUN, you’ll do it even if the pay sucks. And even if you won’t – someone else will. And let’s be honest – your impact on the Bottom Line is, well, tenuous at best. So you chug along, and if you are ambitious, eventually you start thinking “my contributions are significant, I want advancement, I want more money”. And so you start to agitate for a promotion, more responsibility, more money. You tell your boss “I’m smart, I contribute, and I want more money”. Maybe you add in for completeness “And if I don’t get it here I’ll get it somewhere else”.

Ever heard the expression: “Careful what you wish for, you might get it?”

Assuming, for argument’s sake, that you boss doesn’t simply shrug and say “Good luck, don’t use me as a reference”, (boy, you simply wouldn’t believe how many folks walk right into that one!) you now need to evaluate the consequences of The PS Rule. Companies Pay for Stress) You have a (relatively) low-paying job – but it’s in the lab doing sciencey-stuff all day long. It’s low stress – whether you think so or not. You want more pay – the PS Rule says your stress level will go up in proportion to you increased compensation.

Every increment brings you closer to the Bottom Line. Simply because your compensation is larger you now have a bigger impact on the bottom line – you have to produce that much more to justify the added expense. The tasks you get are more important: deadlines are shorter, the consequences of success greater, of failure more severe. You have more responsibility… at some point you can no longer blame problems on your boss, on the Facilities guys, on the weather – its YOUR project, its YOUR success, YOUR failure. The Company prospers/suffers, profit sharing grows/shrinks, your colleagues judge you shit-hot/putz. But this is how you succeed, how you grow. Take on the hard problems and fix them, build your reputation, fatten your resume, collect your reward. It works, but this is a zero-sum game, and it comes at a cost.

The cost is stress. Sometimes LOTS of it. How you adapt to it basically determines how successful your career will be (assuming for purposes of this discussion that you are actually successful. The PS Rule breaks down when applied to genuinely incompetent individuals). If you digest stress easily, adapting to ever higher levels of it without suffering adverse effects, you will prosper. If you do it right – every new high in stress will make anything less stressful seem easy. If you do it wrong, well, you have basically two choices: drop back down to an acceptable stress level and accept the corresponding compensation and prospects (which is fine – at some point everyone has to take this step), or die. Literally.

Stress, REAL stress, kills people. Depression, migraines, heart attacks, cancer; a thousand ills real and imagined. Bad habits: excessive drinking, drug use, aggression, violence, gambling, crime. How you react to stress determines in a very real sense the quality of your career and life . And of course, knowledge is power. Understanding what is happening is the first step towards dealing with it.

As my first boss told me: “money is how companies keep score”. But it's still an accounting: for every dollar the Company gives you, they expect something back. And no matter what it is that you give, at the heart of it what you give them is a piece of yourself. Every piece you remove can generate wealth (however you define it) or pain (however you define it). Learn the game you are playing; define your criteria for success, and play to win. But you can’t win if you don’t understand the rules. And Rule #1 is: they Pay for Stress.

Now get out there and show them what you are made of!