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Wednesday, July 23, 2025
My professional career
In over 20 years of blogging I barely talked about my day job. Probably generally a good idea to keep your private hobbies and your professional activity apart, especially on social media. But as I am officially retired now and it isn't as if I could get in trouble for posting about my job anymore, I feel less restricted in that respect. And a recent question by mbp on retirement prompted me to look back at my professional career.
You could divide my professional career into three phases: Study, Job, Retirement. You can say that about many professional careers that require years of study. Mine is a statistical outlier in as far as my study phase took a whopping 10 years. This is mostly due to me having developed a passion for chemistry rather early in life, and then deciding to go for the pinnacle of that profession, a Ph.D. in chemistry. All Ph.D. degrees take longer than master degrees or bachelor degrees, but Ph.D. in "hard" sciences take even longer. At the time I started (in the 80's in Germany), the absolute minimum requirement was 8 years from entering the university at 18 or 19 to a Ph.D. degree, and my 10 years were actually an average length. Note that there is a potential trap there, where it is in the financial interest of a professor and a university to keep people at the end of their Ph.D. degree or beyond working, e.g. in a postdoc position, because you basically get a highly qualified person for a fraction of his market value. I'm happy I avoided at least the postdoc trap.
A long study phase comes with the obvious drawback that for all that time you don't earn much money. I actually was technically living below the poverty line, because my university wasn't well financed, and had to divide teaching assistant salaries between several people. I lived for some years on a third of the salary of a teaching assistant, which later "improved" to half a salary. I had no car, and no place of my own. I was either living in apartments shared with other students, or in furnished rooms. But basically that was the financial deal of studying for a high academic degree: Once I had finished the Ph.D. and managed to get a job in line with my new qualification, my day one starting salary was already higher than the median salary in the country. And it tripled over the next 30 years until I retired, which means that it grew faster than inflation.
This used to be the general rule worldwide for graduate level jobs: You defer earning for the time of your studies, but earn more later, and end up ultimately making more money over your lifetime. This probably still works in most European countries, where tuition fees are still low (albeit already higher than my non-existing ones, I paid only a hundred bucks a year to the university in fees). In the USA the cost of tuition has risen dramatically over the time period of my career, and colleges and universities are basically now demanding a larger share of your expected future higher earnings. So if you add the years of lower earnings, the tuition fees, and the interest cost of student loans, and look at the oversupply of graduate level employees in the US labor force, it is now completely possible in the USA to get a college degree that actually leads to lower lifetime earnings than if you had gone into a trade. The current drop in entry level graduate jobs due to AI is only adding to that problem.
For me it still worked out, financially. 10 years of study, nearly 30 years of work, and then still a relatively early retirement. With the middle 30 years being enough to make up for the lower earnings during study, and leaving enough money for a comfortable retirement. However, it also means that if I think of work / life balance, that only exists for me in the balance of the three phases. During the study phase I was studying and working, but also had an enormous degree of freedom to pursue various interests. I regained much of that freedom in retirement. In the middle 30 years, my work / life balance wasn't great. I worked at least 50 hours every week, and I was traveling a lot, sometimes even weekends. Fortunately Europeans get much longer holidays than Americans, and I did obviously find time to play games and blog about them. But generally I would say that I worked pretty hard. Luxuries like working from home only appeared at the very end of my career, and only due to the pandemic.
There is a meritocratic aspect to this. I fully understand people who demand a better work / life balance. But if you look how large companies are organized, and how things like promotions and pay rises are distributed, even if none of those systems are perfect, performance still does play a role. I didn't have a meteoric career, but I worked my way up the ranks over three decades to a good level. And I watched as some people who had started in the company at the same entry level and the same qualification worked less hard and had less of a career. It isn't popular to say so anymore, but there is still a link between how hard you work, and how much money you make.
The last decade of my career was great! My company had decided to invest heavily into the research of carbon dioxide and climate change, and I was lucky enough to have already some qualification in that domain, having worked previously on other carbochemistry subjects. So I ended up as a team leader and senior scientist in one section of the huge carbon dioxide research project. I led research programs internally and at various universities, held talks and discussed climate change at scientific conferences, for example with people from the IPCC, worked with the World Economic Forum in Geneva, and flew all around the world, visiting places like Qatar or California for various high-profile research collaborations on carbon dioxide. I felt I was doing something important and useful. And that is beyond my basic belief in capitalism which makes me believe that if my company was paying me a certain salary, my work to them must have been worth at least that much.
If my job had continued like that, I probably wouldn't have retired early. But the early retirement offer was part of a larger reorganization of the company, with a goal to rejuvenate. I couldn't have stayed doing the same job, they needed my job for somebody younger. Being pushed aside as a dinosaur came at the same time as a generous offer for early retirement. Thus my mixed feelings about my retirement. Financially it was a good offer, and with regards to my family life it enabled me to leave for retirement at the same time as my wife, which was great. But emotionally it wasn't easy, there was a real sense of loss of purpose involved. I still believe that companies, especially larger companies, don't manage age well. People get booted out early, there isn't enough done to transfer knowhow between generations inside the company. So we end up with companies pushing people into early retirement while simultaneously complaining about the lack of skilled workers. We don't pass on torches, we are told to just drop them, and later somebody else has to pick the damn thing up from the mud and try to get it burning again. That can't be the most efficient way.
On a personal level, my career has worked out rather well for me, especially financially. Yes, sometimes my wife and me look back at our time at work and think that we should have worked a bit less, and enjoyed life a bit more. But financially speaking, one has to remark that the work / life balance also has financial consequences. The work part earns money the more you concentrate on it, and the life part spends money the more you concentrate on it. An imbalance towards work ends you up with more savings. Right now we are in a very good part of our retirement, where our health is still good, and we also have the financial freedom to do what we like. We moved out of the city that was getting on our nerves with the traffic problems and the like. We built our dream house (we have modest dreams, it isn't a McMansion) in the country, without even needing a mortgage. While transitioning from a 9-to-5 job into retirement is a cultural shock, weirdly enough the pandemic helped with the transition, because we weren't working 9-to-5, 5 days per week in the office anymore anyway at the end of our careers, and my traveling part of the job had stopped. Over the last two years we have found new things to do, new purposes, new activities. And while I would have wished for a smoother and more dignified exit, I don't regret having left my work life behind.
I don't know if there are any life lessons in this post. People my age tend to look back, see how "get a degree, work hard, retire comfortably" has worked out well for them, and think they should recommend that to younger generations. But economic conditions have changed over the last 40 years. I still believe that there is a link between working hard and earning well, but there certainly isn't a guarantee. And at least in the US, the value of getting a degree is increasingly questionable, at the very least for some of the degrees that don't translate well into a high labor market value. Demographic decline threatens pension systems world wide, although I need to point out that this is a design fault, where the current working population is paying for the current retiree population; the boomers paid a lot of money into the system, and politicians then took the surplus and wasted it for other stuff instead of saving it for the retirement of that large generation. I could live to a hundred and not get as much money back from the pension system as I paid into it. If there is any life advice I can give, it would probably be: "take decisions while considering the consequences, then assume those consequences". It's okay to work less hard, if you are okay with less money. It's okay to work harder, if money is more important to you. Just don't believe that life owes you anything, that belief will only end up depressing you.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:25 AM Permanent Link
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I love this post sir! Although I am only 43, I followed the same overall pathway and will likely end with the same level of success. My earning now is about 5-6x of what I earned first year out of uni, and if I can keep this up for even 6 more years then retirement will look pretty good.
We have taken a decision to put further career growth on hold until kids finish high school, which was hard for me psychologically, but the right thing to do.
How do you spend all your hours? And how have you made and maintained your network of friends during that busy work life? I worry that although I may be able to retire on my own terms, there might not be many people to enjoy that time with….
We have taken a decision to put further career growth on hold until kids finish high school, which was hard for me psychologically, but the right thing to do.
How do you spend all your hours? And how have you made and maintained your network of friends during that busy work life? I worry that although I may be able to retire on my own terms, there might not be many people to enjoy that time with….
# posted by 
: 23/7/25 10:57
: 23/7/25 10:57
Great question, and admittedly not a huge success on my part. The sad truth is that major life changes, like going into retirement, or moving elsewhere, tends to lead to a loss of friends, as you and your former friends can grow “out of sync” with each other. A classic example is a group of friends at university, where some of them decide to children, and some not. It is more likely that those friends that made the same decision will remain closer to each other, while those that made different decision grow apart.
On the positive side, I made a lot of new friends.
On the positive side, I made a lot of new friends.
Wow, I had you pegged as a finance/economics guy. I totally missed that one.
# posted by : 23/7/25 18:30
: 23/7/25 18:30
I too enjoyed reading this post. I'm in a similar stage in life, at 52, but took a very different path, in the US.
I went straight from grade school into college, then dropped out after a year due to lack of interest/direction. I worked labor for a couple years, then realized that wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. So I re-enrolled at a community college, and graduated with an undergraduate degree in Graphic Design. This all took around seven years time.
That degree secured me a slightly above minimum-wage job, which eventually led into management. After that, I moved to an agency where I was back on the bottom, but making and learning more. After about five years there, I went out on my own and started my own design business. That's carried me for the past 20 years, and hopefully about 8 years more where I can retire a little early at 60.
I say all that to draw a comparison to your path, in that I didn't start earning a wage greater than entry-level until a good ten years into my adult life. I'm fortunate enough now to be around the 3x mark though, but I attribute that largely to hard work and long hours resulting in a similarly poor work/life balance. I've been able to remedy that situation, and now work 'less' than I use to, but it's on the back of the hard work that got me here.
Watching my eldest child get her Masters though was a real eye opener. While she wanted to go for her Ph.D., the money offered to begin her career made it almost nonsensical at the time. She's beginning her career where I'm at now, late in mine. She's also going in with a clear focus on work/life balance, and going back to finish the Ph.D. a little later in life, if she so chooses. Hoping to watch her have more success with it all than I ever dreamed.
Appreciate your posts Tobold, they're just good reads. I've been reading since your early WoW days, and it's the only one I read on a regular basis (if not daily) basis. Our interests have remained close over all these years, so it's an enjoyable read. Enjoy your retirement, you've earned it.
I went straight from grade school into college, then dropped out after a year due to lack of interest/direction. I worked labor for a couple years, then realized that wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. So I re-enrolled at a community college, and graduated with an undergraduate degree in Graphic Design. This all took around seven years time.
That degree secured me a slightly above minimum-wage job, which eventually led into management. After that, I moved to an agency where I was back on the bottom, but making and learning more. After about five years there, I went out on my own and started my own design business. That's carried me for the past 20 years, and hopefully about 8 years more where I can retire a little early at 60.
I say all that to draw a comparison to your path, in that I didn't start earning a wage greater than entry-level until a good ten years into my adult life. I'm fortunate enough now to be around the 3x mark though, but I attribute that largely to hard work and long hours resulting in a similarly poor work/life balance. I've been able to remedy that situation, and now work 'less' than I use to, but it's on the back of the hard work that got me here.
Watching my eldest child get her Masters though was a real eye opener. While she wanted to go for her Ph.D., the money offered to begin her career made it almost nonsensical at the time. She's beginning her career where I'm at now, late in mine. She's also going in with a clear focus on work/life balance, and going back to finish the Ph.D. a little later in life, if she so chooses. Hoping to watch her have more success with it all than I ever dreamed.
Appreciate your posts Tobold, they're just good reads. I've been reading since your early WoW days, and it's the only one I read on a regular basis (if not daily) basis. Our interests have remained close over all these years, so it's an enjoyable read. Enjoy your retirement, you've earned it.
# posted by : 23/7/25 18:33
: 23/7/25 18:33
It's interesting to hear about your struggles in retirement. I want to retire so badly, but I don't have enough money to do so without using my retirement fund and I'm too young to use my retirement fund without penalty. My identify and worth was never tied to my career (which has worked out very well until now). My self-image and worth has always been an intrinsic part of me.
I enjoyed the beginning and middle of my carer, but I loath the end of it. For example, I have to constantly prove myself to new people in my carer as I change clients. I find it hard to do that as I get closer to retirement - I just don't want to be bothered with constantly proving myself to new people, yet I must do it (and I do). There are lots of small issues like this that have just built up over time that significantly decrease my work happiness.
I can't wait until I spend my life exactly how I want to instead of being tied to needing to earn an income. For example, I wanted to go out driving today but I couldn't due to have work meetings that I had to attend and I have deliverables due soon that I need to work on. That's very frustrating when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. If things continue to go to plan then I have four more years before retiring. With all that said, I am happy that I have a carer even if I don't want to need one. Some people want one and don't have one.
However, I can understand how some people view their lives through their work. I guess I'm lucky that I don't.
I enjoyed the beginning and middle of my carer, but I loath the end of it. For example, I have to constantly prove myself to new people in my carer as I change clients. I find it hard to do that as I get closer to retirement - I just don't want to be bothered with constantly proving myself to new people, yet I must do it (and I do). There are lots of small issues like this that have just built up over time that significantly decrease my work happiness.
I can't wait until I spend my life exactly how I want to instead of being tied to needing to earn an income. For example, I wanted to go out driving today but I couldn't due to have work meetings that I had to attend and I have deliverables due soon that I need to work on. That's very frustrating when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. If things continue to go to plan then I have four more years before retiring. With all that said, I am happy that I have a carer even if I don't want to need one. Some people want one and don't have one.
However, I can understand how some people view their lives through their work. I guess I'm lucky that I don't.
I realize I misspelled career multiple times. Slowly losing my cognitive abilities is no joy either...
Wow, great reveal post. Did you ever hint at being a chemist before? I long ago thought that I'd be a chemist and follow your path but ended up getting sidetracked and wound up an anesthesiologist. It suited me better than bench research (I'd done some synthetic organic work as an undergrad) but I still vaguely regret not having pursued a more academic life. I've always liked your blog and am wondering if some of that was warm feeling towards a chemist, if you ever hinted at that before. Silly, I guess.
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# posted by : 26/7/25 05:32
: 26/7/25 05:32<< Home
