If you earn more than £30k how much responsibility / pressure do you have on your shoulders?

[1person100names]

If you have a lot of responsibility/ pressure do you think it is worth the wage? Would you prefer to take a pay cut and have less stress on your shoulders?

Pondering and following a discussion with my sister this evening!

To be fair I will provide my own experience!

I dont live in London and earn £40k, I would consider this to be a good earning outside of L but I am aware there are many higher earners on here!

To answer my own question, I have a considerable amount of responsibility, I'm in a public health role and I have to make decisions that can affect peoples welfare/ lives (with assistance from my team). I report to very senior members in the organisation. I work unsociable hours, including weekends and night shifts. I enjoy my job but its exhausting, I know i am capable of a lot and as cheesey as it sounds I am proud of the work that I do. Some days I consider stepping down but I know in reality I would miss the work I do. I am sure to some my wage isnt that high for the responsibility and hours I work! I guess its not just the wage, but I would say the combination of the satisfaction I obtain from my job makes it worth it!

Pondering really... sorry if this is a ramble, hope this post hasn't come across as a massive stealth boast, it wasn't meant that way I promise!

Just over 30k. NHS. Lots of stress and working outside my contracted hours. But I love my job!

Teacher on highest point of main pay scale - £35. Not a deputy or head, but senior in my small primary; am English lead, mentor all NQTs and students and am trained DSL. Whenever the head and deputy are out at the same time I am default in charge of the school.

Am generally at school 7.30-5.30, then work around 7-10pm every night after the toddler is in bed. Usually can avoid too much weekend work unless it’s report/assessment season three times a year. In the shorter holidays I cram all my work into once a week toddler nursery days, and over the summer I normally have 4-5 days in school on top of this.

I have friends who earn considerably more and work more of an 8-5, BUT they don’t all have the job satisfaction that I do, and the flexibility to manage their work in the holidays so that they can spend time with their children.

In the ‘old days’ I would have received a few thousand extra a year for my additional responsibilities, and I would have been moved onto the upper pay scale, but Government cuts have put paid to that in smaller schools.

I think it's fair to say that lots of (smart and highly skilled) work in IT for well over 40k and we have nurses for example keeping people alive in hospitals for much less.
So no- wages are often not an indicator of responsibility.

£45k, middle management in an organisation doing everything it can to cash in on Covid-19.

The stress is overwhelming - id happily take a paycut for less stress and pressure, but i'm a single parent so I have to provide.

The toll on my MH is quite something

Senior lecturer.

Quite a bit of responsibility. So obviously the actual teaching but I’m also heavily involved in day to day admin of the course so time tabling, currently a stressful week with admissions. A lot of curriculum development stuff. I really care about the students and they seem quite a needy bunch (which I think is normal for my course compared to some other courses), Quite a few of them now have my personal mobile number as wfh and we don’t have work mobiles. I’ll find I’m getting texts in the evenings and weekend and answering them which I know I need to put a stop to.

I do love my job but sometimes I think I need to stop working so many evenings.

But nobody dies if something gets missed, no huge sums of money are lost. So not pressure in that way.

A little over £50k, in London (civil servant). I really like my job, but I wish I could afford to do it part time (lone parent, two kids in childcare, mortgaged and credit card debt to my eyeballs etc etc).

It feels like a relatively high level of responsibility as my advice informs decisions about govt spending in the hundreds of £millions. But at the same time, I am definitely one cog in a large machine, and ultimately the decisions are for the govt and not us. I take it seriously, but it’s not the same sort of heavy personal responsibility that I imagine teachers or nurses feel.

I routinely work around 15% over my contracted hours (in spite of being mostly ruthlessly efficient, I have known plenty of ‘long hours in the office, interspersed with many chatty coffee breaks’ people and this is not what I mean!), this is kind of middling amongst my peers. And I’m about to work through a week’s holiday. So at the minute I feel keenly aware of the responsibilities that earning my salary imposes - I wouldn’t dream of asking my direct report (who is on about £35k) to work through his holiday.

Uni professional services middle management. It’s hugely variable but generally the staff in my area on the £40-50k brackets work 50 hours pw as a minimum. Over lockdown (when I have also been juggling young children and thus working all sorts of hours) I’ve had conversations and email trains with people from 6.30 in the morning til 11 at night. Responsible for many staff, external decisions, student stuff. During Covid it’s been horrendous but tbh it’s not great in normal times.

It’s frankly unsustainable and ridiculous for the money but am struggling to think of what else I could do and I do get used to the money.

Uni lecturer, started on 33k a few years ago, now 45k as I was promoted to Senior Lecturer. I work 37 hours a week.

On the whole, I don't find it stressful. There are some odd pressures in academia - you set your own goals and I'm often doing work that won't be completed for years. You are judged very personally on your work (not just in the organisation - nationally and internationally) and there's a pressure to be brilliant around a lot of brilliant people.

I love the teaching aspect, and find that much more instantly rewarding than research.

There are busy times, but I wouldn't say it's a stressful job. I don't go over 40 hours a week.

I should say - I'm lucky to work in a supportive department that doesn't valorise overwork! I know other academics are in very different situations.

Before I had ds, £72k for a global marketing job. No life & death decisions but a lot of pressure every quarter to bring in the contacts that the sales people turned into business that paid all our mortgages.

travelling around Europe and the US every 10 days, meant less time for relationships at home, and truly exhausting, with constant jet lag.

150k + bonuses. Not in London. Senior management. I dictate my own hours, which are distinctly fewer now than in my 20s/30s/pre children. I probably clock up 35ish....have a great team who share the burden of responsibility.

Most of my role is managing people, which as I get older I seem to be less and less tolerant of. I've been here since I was a graduate so taken a long time to climb the ladder but can't argue that I'm not well rewarded.

@Trixiebelden77 Your comments re health managers show a real lack of empathy for your colleagues. They have a different role to you (and probably earn less than half of what you do), with different responsibilities for managing people and resources and, yes, that can be very stressful. Staff and line management is a very different thing from managing patients or customers - I can imagine that your assumption that all health managers are incompetent and over-promoted doesn't make your management colleagues' jobs any easier either.

Definitely not me but my DP. He earns £36k and has absolutely no responsibility. His job is slightly
Pressured as he has deadlines but he doesn’t ever bring work home/do over time/work weekends. He finishes early on a Friday as the whole company finishes at 12.

Just to add he doesn’t find the job stressful or challenging at all, it’s more his colleagues/the company but I think he’s really lucky to be well paid with low stress