Coworkers are less ambitious; bosses adjust to the new order
My wife works a decent white-collar job at a giant company and negotiated a 20% pay decrease to go down to 4 days a week. She&#x27;s never been happier, she doesn&#x27;t even feel like she needs to take vacations very often as that simple switch is life altering. She&#x27;s the only one she knows that will say No to overtime. If she wasn&#x27;t so valuable, she wouldn&#x27;t have been approved at a company like that, and even now it still seems unheard of to do such a thing, but people are finally starting to try.<p>Her boss is asking her quarterly about her goals with the company and more specifically about taking over his director level job, to which she says &quot;no way&quot; every time. She can see how shittily bosses are treated at the company, they are forced to work insane overtime without pay, deal with personnel issues, eat shit from above constantly, deal with all issues, can&#x27;t fire the dead weight (which is everywhere), are expected to work over lunch every day and be available to work on vacation, which they usually can&#x27;t take. Yet they don&#x27;t seem to grasp that anybody with a brain can see this is an awful trade off for like 10-30% more pay, which just gets taxed away anyway and which you never have time to spend.<p>You can see it in the faces of these folks, they look prematurely aged. You know how you see a picture of someone&#x27;s face and say &quot;they look like they had a hard life&quot;? Yeah, go on facebook and see which of your colleagues took the management job and go back 5 years and be blown away at how they aged. It&#x27;s both sad and shocking.<p>Misery loves company, why wouldn&#x27;t young employees want to be as &quot;successful&quot; as us?