Has your career been that bad?

So the consensus answer to the original question seems to be that no, most people's careers haven't been that bad ... so far.
Unfortunately, it's the future of those careers that don't look so hot.

 

My nearly 15-year career hasn't been that bad. It's put a roof over my head and food in my stomach and, until about a year ago, I enjoyed it. I love working with sports, and I've enjoyed working with almost all of my co-workers, with a couple of exceptions.

Now, my job has changed, with a lot more grunt work (which, as a copy editor, I was already doing). My hours have changed, which have given me considerably less time to spend with my family. And, no matter what I do, there's no hope for any tangible reward. No raise (heck, I may get a paycut). Furloughs (although I don't mind the time off), and zero security (we've had several job cuts).

So, no, it hasn't been a bad career. But, especially considering how profitable my industry was for so many years, it should have been better.

 

I've been cooking up a proper response to this question in my head, but I realize anything I say will be clouded by the fact I've just put in an 11.5-hour day in my work-17-of-19 day stretch. And I don't get overtime.

I have gotten a lot out of my career, without a doubt. Done and seen things I would have never thought possible, and landed myself in a pretty good situation. I enjoy 90 percent of the work that I do, which I think is pretty damn good, and I can't imagine doing anything else with the same passion.

But I will never get out of it as much as I have put into it. The time, money, emotion, relationships, opportunity cost, etc. that I have sacrificed for my career will never even out. Work was a value instilled in me from an early age, and while I am grateful for that work ethic I wish I would have learned how to define myself in other ways.

 

As much as it pains me to say this, getting into journalism was the biggest mistake I have ever made. It set me back at least five or six years. I made nowhere near enough money to live comfortably, I was in fear of when I would lose my job from the time I hit six months at my paper, none of the bosses at the paper respected me (or anyone with less than 20 years in the business) in the slightest.

When I finally got chopped from the paper it was like someone took a huge weight off my shoulders. I got to leave the shitty little town I lived in, I got a job nowhere near the industry and got a 30 percent pay increase and I no longer get sick to my stomach walking into work on a daily basis wondering which boss is going to shit on me today.

 

I can say events in my 18-year career were mostly positive. I saw the writing on the wall in the months leading up to my layoff and was conducting the job search when the bad news came along in April.

I can truly say I was doing something I loved and at the end I was making a good living at it. I was lucky to find a new job on the media relations front, without having to relocate, within three weeks of the pink slip. But it's a significant cut in pay. Basically, my combined take home pay with my wife is what we were making in 2003. But, hey, it's a job and I'm in a different discipline, so I can't really complain about that. We'll survive.

I'm just angry that some very, very stupid business decisions at my family owned paper is what cost me my former job, and the knuckleheads who made those choices are still pulling in their fat paychecks.

Anyway, back to the career and the highlights and lowlights:

The good:
Covering four Indy 500s and watching Sam Hornish's sprint past Marco Andretti in '06.
Covering the NHRA for seven years and meeting lots of fun personalities. (It's also what helped me find my new job.)
Covering some memorable Pennsylvania state football championships, especially the '05 AAA title game when several thousand braved a heavy snowstorm to watch Pottsville and Franklin Regional.
Actually, covering high school football in Pennsylvania as a whole.
Covering college hoops at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Covering 10 Colonial Athletic Association hoops tournaments.
Covering Michael Vick's senior season at Virginia Tech and his final game at the Gator Bowl. (And the writers' night out at Outback Steakhouse at the beach, and the hangover I had during Frank Beamer's presser the next morning.)
Covering David Garrard at East Carolina and the Pirates' trip to the Mobile Bowl in '99.
And watching countless prep athletes from high schools such as Gar-Field, C.B. Aycock, Dan River, Southern Columbia, Manassas Park, Tamaqua, Gretna, Schuylkill Valley, Eastern Wayne, Wyomissing, etc., etc.,etc.

The bad:
The number of bonehead MEs who ran the newsroom and had no clue about how sports worked. My last one, especially. Cut out five sports positions, but only one news reporter and one news copy editor.
Corporate owners who picked publishers out of the ranks of the advertising department.
The beancounters that cut out travel for essential beats, but still allowed an NFL pick 'em contest where each week's winner got a trip for two to Hawaii to see the Pro Bowl, and was escorted by the head of the paper's marketing department, who had an annual "working" vacation. Found out it cost the paper an extra $35K a year to do this.
A certain ego-driven reporter who nearly wrecked my career over a decade ago because he didn't like to way I edited his copy.
The number of hours I wasted chasing down and typing in Little League and other rec sports results that only a few people cared about.

When you put the two lists together, the positives out-weighed the negatives.

 

I am glad I got to experience many of my boyhood dreams and glad I got out at the right time. There's a sense of fulfillment and self-satisfaction that I have been missing like someone whose brain is being deprived of a drug it craves/needs. All that said, if I had it all to do over again ... I would change just about everything.

 

Yeah, I've been very careful, I hope, about never being smug about my situation and realizing I'm lucky.

 

Definitely a downside if the ad guy never has worked in the newsroom, because they only see one side and believe people read a newspaper for ads.

I wouldn't mind having a publisher who has worked in advertising, as long as he-she also has worked in the newsroom as a reporter and manager. Be well-rounded and chances are you'll understand things better.

As for the $35,000 "working vacation" football contest with the marketing fuckup as the company rep, that sounds familiar.

 

I'm delighted with the actual job I have and the work I do. It's what I always wanted, and it happened sooner than I expected.

But the position I hold compensates me a lot less (especially since the pay cut) than I ever imagined, and it seems to be headed in the wrong direction. I'm assuming it's just a matter of weeks or months until we don't get health benefits anymore, and there's no way anybody's getting a raise in the foreseeable future.

So, yeah, it's gone well so far, but I'm pessimistic about the future.

 

Yes.

 

My career has been pretty good so far, but it was so short that maybe it shouldn't count. And maybe, I shouldn't be writing this. In five years of sports reporting, I've covered some big-time college sporting events and gotten a taste of some pro stuff as well. I've met people that the 12-year-old me would flip out about. But given that, it's not worth it. It's not worth the poor hours and it's not worth the poor pay. It's not worth wondering whether or not I could truly be the type of dad I want to be some day, when I'm spending nights toiling around the office while my kids/family are out enjoying life. So I'm out. It's been a decent run and I'm a little sad it's ending, but I think my new career will be more rewarding. Best of luck to all of you though, I'm glad to hear so many positive stories on this thread. It's good stuff.

 

My career hit a bump in the road just a few years after it started. I started out at a trucking magazine. From blank pages to print, it was developed each month by a small but great group of people. I didn't originally take the position as a writer. I took an advertising coordinator position, because I was going to school for business management and marketing. In almost no time, I wrote a cover story. There were many more cover stories and feature articles that followed. I also took on writing five sections of the monthly issues.

A column I wrote each month led me to freelancing for other outlets. It was great! I was doing something I loved and had a blast.

I ended up getting laid off from the magazine, because they needed someone who could do advertising coordination and accounting. They needed someone with years of experience in accounting, something I didn't have.

Life and a job I took to make ends meet made it impossible for me to still do the freelancing. I was devastated. I felt like I had at least got a toe in the door, if not a whole foot, to something I was going to chase for years to come. I ended up pretty depressed and unmotivated to push further, because it seemed there were just no jobs.

I'm through with feeling that way and plan to be career bound again, but I'm not sure which direction I want to take. Do I want to continue trying to write? Sure. Do I want to go for my original goal of marketing? I want that too. I could talk for hours about ideas I have for any given product or service.

My career hasn't been that bad. I've always made it a point to have fun doing what ever I was doing. I can even make my crappy third shift job fun. I don't see it as it's been bad, just the previous track hit a bump. Things will change when the right thing comes along, I'm sure of that.