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Careers

What’s an intellectual worker’s real overhead?

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Over at The Copyeditor’s Desk, TM opines that a freelance editor working from home does business with a very low overhead: a computer, an Internet connection, appropriate software, some inexpensive paper, a few pens or pencils, maybe babysitting or day-care costs.

On a superficial level, I’d agree with that. But I’d like to argue that there’s a lot more cost behind editing, writing, graphic design, programming, and similar pursuits than just hardware, software, and some office supplies. The truth is, none of us can do our jobs without one very expensive piece of overhead: education. By and large, the more education the intellectual worker has, the more his or her skills are worth . . . but the higher the person’s overhead.

Consider what a good education costs. An undergraduate degree at an in-state public school can easily run you $15,000 to $20,000 a year. We paid $40,000 a year for M’hijito’s four-year degree at a private liberal arts college.

Two years of graduate school will take you to the M.A. (assuming you’re trotting right along): add another $30,000 to $80,000. A professional degree will set you back even more: the Great Desert University, which bills its law school as “among the lowest of all American Bar Association accredited law schools,” presents in-state students with a tab of $35,041 and bills out-of-state students $47,606. At GDU, a Ph.D. in a less marketable subject, such as English, runs from $7,052 a year for in-state students to $19,606 a year for out-of-state students (not counting books, housing, food, transportation, and personal costs); attaining a doctorate can take six to eight years.

So… A bright mind, a bachelor’s degree, and a few years of on-the-job experience probably will put you in a position to freelance as an editor, a writer, a graphic artist, or a computer programmer. Let’s figure the start-up costs:

Computer: $1,000
Printer/FAX/Scanner: $300
Internet connection: $360/year
Software:$300 (e.g., indexing program, etc.; assumes MS Office comes with computer)
Student loan: $8,724/year (approx: $60,000 repaid over 10 years at 8% interest)
Office supplies: $200
Desk: $300 (Ikea or other knock-down furniture)
Chair: $100 (Ikea or other cheap furniture)
Total: $11,984

Assuming you could bill 30 hours a week (a generous estimate, indeed!) and you needed a pre-tax income of $40,000 to live on, you would have to gross $51,984 a year to get by. Giving yourself two weeks of vacation time, you would have 1,560 hours in which to earn that amount, meaning you would have to gross $33.32 an hour: consistently and steadily.

This doesn’t count items that would be in your house anyway, such as a telephone connection, air conditioning and heating, water, and access to a bathroom and kitchen. And the biggie: it doesn’t include health insurance!

If you had a low-end master’s degree that you managed to complete in only two years, you’d add $30,000 to the cost of your training (assuming you count books, living expenses, & the like). What the heck: let’s pay that back in 20 years instead of a mere 10; at 8% that would run you $426 a month, or $5,112 a year. This actually brings your annual overhead down to a mere $7,672; to get that 40 grand of pre-tax income, you’d need to earn $47,672, or $30.59 an hour over fifty thirty-hour weeks.

Hm. What if you had a Ph.D.? Let’s say eight years of graduate school at $14,000 a year, since research assistantships and fellowships usually cover most of your living expenses. Again, you pay it back at 8% over 20 years: $936.81 a month, or $11,244 a year! This puts your annual overhead at $13,804. Now you need to pull in $53,804 to end up with a pre-tax, pre-health insurance take of 40 grand: $34.49 an hour.

In any of these scenarios, you’re having to earn $30 to $35 an hour and bill 30 hours a week consistently for 50 weeks a year. That’s to bring in an amount that’s just enough to call a living wage. Sort of.

Best jobs, worst jobs

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J.D. Roth’s Labor Day post at Get Rich Slowly, in which he recites all the jobs he’s ever held and asks readers to describe their best and worst gigs, got me thinking about my checkered career. For a person who’s on the verge of retirement, I haven’t held all that many jobs, especially if you don’t count the twenty years as a generously supported lawyer’s wife, mother, and society matron—less than a dozen, some of which were part-time.

Which were the best jobs and which the worst? And did my hypereducation do anything to help land the best ones? What, if anything, would I do differently, given a chance to start over?

At GRS, I left a comment opining that my most hated job was as a secretary for a demented market researcher. The guy was truly paranoid: convinced he had Enemies (no joke!) who spent every evening sifting through the trash behind the office building, looking for corporate intelligence with which to do his business in. He insisted that every, single piece of trash be snipped up into confetti—this predated inexpensive shredders—before it went in the trash. The job also predated word processors, and since I was not a great typist I threw out a lot of botched letters and memos; these also had to be snipped up, even if only a few words appeared on the page. My employer was given to insane rages and casual insults, an altogether obnoxious gentleman.

But really, what made that a bad job was the wacko boss, not the job itself. I enjoyed working as a receptionist and probably would have enjoyed secretarial or clerical work in any office environment where the boss was blessed with normal mental health.

The real worst job I’ve ever done is teaching freshman composition. After I finished the Ph.D. and several years of TAing, during which I taught many sections of both regular and advanced composition, I swore I’d go on welfare before I ever did that again. Years later, I landed a full-time lecturership, which paid as much as an associate professorship, teaching writing and editing to university juniors and seniors. For a long time, this was a fine job. Then after I’d been there about eight years, the university decided to turn that satellite campus into a four-year institution. Everyone was expected to teach freshman comp, whether they had degrees in English or not.

Ugh. I was right the first time around. If I’d wanted to teach high-school kids, I would have gotten a teaching certificate. At least if you teach high school, you can live wherever you choose, not wherever you can get work. In fact, in my desperation I looked into taking a postgraduate teaching certificate: to get it, I would have been required to take the very upper-division courses I was teaching (!), and I would have started at $24,000, a $19,000 cut in pay!

My favorite jobs—because they were the most fun—were editorial positions at Phoenix and Arizona Highways magazines. Journalists don’t earn much, but they have a good time going hungry. I enjoyed every moment, even the overnighters (which came once a month at Phoenix Magazine), loved writing features, loved editing copy, loved working with artists and photographers, and liked all my bosses and colleagues.

And no doubt the best job I’ve had is the one I hold right now, directing a university’s editorial office, where our staff of five does preproduction work for scholarly journals. The workload is almost nil, because I can delegate most of it to my associate editor and three graduate assistants. Pay is not great, but it’s more than I’ve ever made before. And I don’t waste too much of my time sitting around the office.

So…what effect did hypereducation—I have a B.A. in French and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English—have on this mottled career?

The hateful secretarial job required no higher education at all—the previous incumbent had been my cousin, who didn’t yet have an A.A. (she later became a registered nurse). Neither did the nice little receptionist’s job; however, the B.A. did get me the highest starting salary any receptionist had every earned at that firm, a munificent $300 a month.

The teaching assistantships were associated with graduate school: you TAed because you were in the program. The editorial jobs required a B.A. in journalism or English. Again, at Arizona Highways I was paid a premium for the advanced degrees, and in fact I landed the job because the editor was looking for someone with above-average competence.

I fell into the lecturership because I was assuredly the only English Ph.D. in the state with 15 years of real-world writing and editorial experience. At the same time I was hired, the department hired as my opposite number a man with a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford: presumably an M.A. from Stanford = a Ph.D. from Arizona State University, which oughta tell you something. I earned more than he did, though: approximately six dollars a year more.

The doctorate was not de rigueur for the job I’ve got now, but it certainly thrilled the hiring committee. It also got me a starting salary about $30,000 higher than the university had planned to pay the successful applicant.

So yes, the higher ed helped with the jobs I did get. If I’d started in journalism when I finished the B.A., though, by now I’d probably own Phoenix Magazine and be retired on its proceeds.

If I had it to do over, what would I do differently?

Well, if I knew when I was 22 what I know now, I would still get advanced degrees, but you can be sure they wouldn’t be in the humanities. I probably would combine an M.B.A. and an LL.D. in an attempt to develop a heavy-hitting corporate career. Or I would get a Ph.D. in business management, which opens the door to far better-paying academic jobs than you can get with the same degree in the humanities.

There’s no question that higher education, even in the liberal arts, sets you up for better-paying jobs. And there’s also no question that certain degrees, even some that won’t kill you with difficult coursework, will do better for you than others.

So…what are your best and worst jobs? And what would you do differently if you could start from scratch?

Bartleby, the late, great scrivener

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Deus ex machina, my stress-manufacturing personnel problem has resolved itself, because the Problem quit.

For almost four years, I’ve had to deal with my own Bartleby. It’s been four years of hassle, grief, and resurgent annoyance that peaked, for me, about a year ago with a stress attack that landed me in a hospital for 12 hours of poking and prodding while ER doctors tried to figure out whether I was having a heart attack or merely taking a long dive off the deep end.

During those four years, I’ve learned from Bartleby. Bartleby taught me a lot about stress and a lot about management.

First, I believe I’m right in saying the “time is money” metaphor is off-kilter. In fact, stress has more in common with money than does time. Stress is like interest and principal on a debt. The more stress you pay down on a problem up front, the less you will have to pay over time. The less you invest up front, the more stress you’re going to owe over the long run.

Like the narrator in Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, I felt a lot of empathy for my Bartleby, an older person who had been alone for several decades. As an older mind, I know how difficult it is to keep up with the fluid changes in computer technology, that failing eyesight and slipping memory create daily challenges—more and more of them with the passing days. As a single person who also lives alone, I know the odd twists and eccentricities we develop as solitary beings.

But a manager’s job is not to be empathetic. A manager’s job is to keep an operation running and see to it that everyone in that operation can and does function productively. That is not to say a manager should not try to be kind; only that a manager can not let kindness get in the way of the job.

By the time I fully appreciated that my Bartleby was wrong in the nonexempt job for which I had hired her, the six-month probationary was almost over. My request that she be dismissed hit HR exactly one day after her probationary period ended.

To fire a nonexempt state employee, a manager has to go through the tortures of the damned. The process involves a series of disciplinary reports, each of which must be reviewed in detail and approved by an HR representative, followed by a series of committee hearings. Some employees will quit in the face of the onslaught this involves. However, if the employee is smart and knows how to work the system, she or he will recognize that there is no reason to quit. So, the process can stretch out over a year or more. Much more.

With all the back-and-forth between me and HR, it took six months to prepare the first disciplinary memo. Writing this document was agonizingly stressful. It required me to articulate frustrating and difficult matters and then to rehearse them, over and over, through revision after revision. Meanwhile, I did feel empathetic and indeed I often felt sorry for my Bartleby. These feelings added to the stress of working up a disciplinary statement, because they added a load of ambiguity and guilt. As time passed, the stress built.

Did my Bartleby resign when faced with several pages of complaints and demands about performance? No. Bartleby preferred not.

My Bartleby evaded dismissal by correcting everything described in the disciplinary memo. But the problem was, for every correction a new eccentricity or incompetence developed. When it became clear that six months of anguish had come to naught, I made the a decision to try to accommodate Bartleby’s oddities. She was, after all, laboring under a disability: she clearly had mental problems, some of them evidently cognitive issues related to age. Did I not have a duty to accommodate her disabilities?

Well, no. That was a mistake.

What I actually was doing was avoiding stress that I should have confronted, accepted, and taken on in a timely way. Had I “invested” the stress required to demand competent performance and to report and discipline incompetence, I would have saved myself and everyone around me—Bartleby included—a great deal of grief.

Bartleby’s incompetence increased everybody’s workloads. Admins in other parts of the unit quietly took on her responsibilities, because in her inability to do routine tasks she created more work for others. It was easier to simply do the tasks than to try to tutor her through them and make her undo the fiascos she created. I found myself spending evenings and weekends redoing assignments I had given her and undoing messes she had made.

About eighteen months ago, after she infuriated one of our client journal’s authors with an episode of screaming incompetence that involved habits she had repeatedly been warned about, stupidity and arrogance of monumental proportions, and astonishing absence of common sense, I removed her from all functional tasks and started assigning her busywork. This kept her out of everyone’s hair except mine; I took on the function of firewall between Bartleby and the rest of the world.

At the request of my boss, who correctly observed that my annual reviews of Bartleby’s performance were altogether too mellow (not to say “cowardly”), I decided to use the busywork as a training device and a well from which to draw support for a 2008 annual review that would honestly describe the incompetence with which we had been dealing for some time. I would review each of her make-work projects and explain, in writing, every error she had made and what she needed to do to correct it. This resulted in my repeating myself over and over and over—but now I had a year-long record of the fruitless repetitions. It also doubled my workload, because I had to reread documents I had edited months before, many of which had already gone to press; I had try to figure out what Bartleby was doing and articulate every single error, every incident of stubborn disobedience, and every misapprehension. Meanwhile, of course, I had to keep up with the new work that flowed across my desk every day.

A year of negative memos full of examples of errors and bêtises, each one repeating the same instructions over and over (mostly “learn Chicago style” and “learn how to use Word”) must have convinced Bartleby that I intended to fire her. Rather than accept that, she decided to resign.

Melville’s solicitor, the real Bartleby’s employer, never did get around to demanding adequate performance, but continued—as I was doing—to accommodate the eccentric employee’s bizarre behavior out of empathy, guilt, confusion, and downright flummoxing. The disaster that ensued was and was not the solicitor’s doing.

In the case of my Bartleby, however, the long-drawn-out ordeal was entirely my fault. I made two enormous mistakes:

1. I felt sorry for my Bartleby and I allowed that feeling to influence me; and

2. I tried to evade the stress I should have accepted at the outset, the stress that would have been entailed in cracking down on my Bartleby from the beginning.

By deferring stress, I only bought more stress for myself and all my coworkers.

I suggest to you that there is a metaphor here, one that works: stress is like interest payable. The longer you put it off, the more you pay.

It’s a money metaphor that applies in any situation where you could make things better over the long run by “paying” to address problems up front. It applies to parents who indulge their children and teenagers instead of insisting on civil behavior. If you don’t help a child to learn what is responsible—how to earn your way in life—you will end up with a young adult who will bring vast quantities of grief home to Mom and Dad. It applies to the predicament we get ourselves into when we run up debt to indulge our wants and then find ourselves over our heads—if we’d “invested” some stress early on to get our spending under control, we would not have to expend so much effort and grief later to get ourselves out of debt.

Stress is money, my friends. Soylent Green is people. To Serve Humanity is a cookbook.

Ah, Bartleby. Ah, humanity. Indeed.