In the Club (Part 2) - Pay Your Dues

So I had a choice to make. Now if this type of engineering gave me fulfillment in my life, I would have a tough decision. The engineering I did with this company was actually fascinating and The other engineer that I mentioned above that got to work a few minutes before the boss, loved his job and was single. So he played the game and it was worth it to him. As mentioned in “Part 1”, I was mainly doing a career to make money to do other things. Part of what I wanted was to have a family, so I thought these people were complete idiots. Your wives left you both because you were married to your job and not them AND you require the same of me? Fuck that. After several months, I found another job and quit.

Another lesson to this story is to stick it out for a while when you decide to quit a job. That gives you time to look at several jobs over several months and find one that suits you better. Quit on your own terms. Now on the other side, there is great satisfaction and shock value to tell them how stupid they are and walk out, but at the time I did not have the strength to do that nor the savings to support the family while I looked for another job. I remember at some point in my life I met a guy who said, “I always have $10,000 in the bank in case I have to tell my boss to fuck off!”. I always thought that was cool, but if you are not prepared for the consequences of sudden loss of income and burning a bridge (as word gets around), you will be in a world of hurt.

Clean and Simple.

At the first company I worked for, the projects I worked on were primarily landfill projects with a few mining projects. After I quit that company, I went to work for an off-shore engineering company that performed soil and foundation engineering for oil and gas exploration structures in the Gulf of Mexico. I wanted to be a manager and they put me on that track. This was still geotechnical engineering, but a very different application, so I had a significant learning curve before I could manage. The company hired me at a senior engineer level where I could learn the specific engineering and also go out into the field (offshore) to learn the specific drilling, sampling, and testing used in this branch of geotechnical engineering. Once I learned the specific engineering and the field work, I could then become a manager.

Sounds good in theory, but in practice the requirements for being a manager ended up being very different. In this company you had to pay your dues. The term “paying your dues” comes from the real situation where you join a club, like a country club, by physically paying money to the club. Once you pay your dues, you are admitted inside and are able to take part in their activities. This was the actual case I encountered with my first company that I discussed in “In the Club (Part 1)”. You gave them enough money to be an associate or principal and they let you in the club of management. Otherwise, you stayed a worker bee and just did what they told you to.

However, with this offshore engineering company, there was another level to paying your dues. I found this out at my first performance review. The hierarchy of this company was that there was the manager of engineering who was in charge of the entire department which consisted of about 15 engineers. The entire department was then broken down into smaller groups of 3 to 4 engineers and each smaller group had a manager. Both the manager of engineering and my group manager were present at my review. It was entirely negative. There were three issues.

The first criticism was that I sometimes left work to go home before the manager of engineering did. I had noticed that every day around 6:00 PM or 6:30 PM, the manager of engineering would walk up and down the hall. Often he would stop in my office and make a little pleasant small talk for a minute or two and then leave. In my review, the manager of engineer said, “You be here when I get here in the morning and you be here when I leave at night.” When I occasionally left at 5:30 PM or 5:55 PM, this was duly noted. This was not communicated upon hiring, so firstly, it was a test to see if I would do it naturally, and secondly, it was a set up for this ambush to establish dominance. Talking to another engineer about this, he said, “Yes the manager of engineering gets here by 7:45 AM every morning. So I get here at 7:30. I leave the hallway light off and my office light on with the door open so that he can see that I am here.” It should be noted that the quality and quantity of work I did was secondary to the requirements of submission.

The second criticism was that, since I was learning a new application of engineering, I should be taking study materials home and doing all that learning on my own time. The company should not have to pay me to learn the engineering. I thought that as long as all my work assignments were completed accurately and on time, that I could use gaps in work time to continue studying and learning. Wrong. That is not how this club operates. Again, this wasn’t communicated up front, but used as a test.

The third criticism was the doozy. They said that based on the first two criticisms, so far I was not management material. For me to be a manager at this company, I would have to work longer hours than they do, take work home, behave like they do, and treat other people the same way once I became a manager. Here’s the kicker. The manager of engineering said to me, “To be a manager here, you have to act like us, and”, as he said this he pointed back and forth to the other manager and himself, “we know the cost this can have.” What he was referring to was that both their wives had recently left them. Additionally, the manager of engineering has become estranged from his daughter. Both men were in their 50’s. In very direct terms, they told me that what they were requiring from me could likely cost me my marriage and even relationships with my children. They understood this, but required it anyway.

So they let me know the dues I would have to pay to be in their club. Once you’re a manager, you get more money and don’t have to go offshore much at all which are the rewards for paying your dues.