To ask what high earners do all day?

[WearyCat]

I genuinely don’t know what CEOs, that type of role, people earning over 150K pa actually do. How do they spend their time?

Not whether they are worth the salary. But what do those jobs involve on a day to day basis? All I have is an idea based on films and guesswork. Is it golf? Lunches? Meetings? What sort of decisions are they making? What pressures are they facing?

I’m interested, curious, and I don’t see how I would ever find out in real life because I don’t move in circles where people have that sort of job.

a public company CEO in the UK who earns millions a year will have to assimilate a lot of complex information coming from multiple geo political, social, consumer and economic sources and make time-limited decisions where there is a huge amount at stake including their own reputation and that of others (their stakeholders,) intense public scrutiny, the financial welfare and profit of diverse groups of people and whole systems of trade and finance and goods. On top of that, especially if they are involved in any resource security business (for eg oil and gas) they will have to face off against despotic world leaders and nominated representatives of jurisdictions - eg Putin, the DRC about deeply sensitive and complex subjects for which it’s hard to find a win-win. Usually this is all on a timeline that is dictated by something external to them.

days are full of work, managing energy, risk calculation, employing coping strategies for stress and dealing with 10,000 or so employees.

My boss is a very, very high earner. He owns the business & his day is giving advice to clients, creating complex strategies & solving problems, which he then passes to us to implement. It's his knowledge & experience they pay for. He works ridiculously long hours, has a lot of pressure, and is legally responsible for anything we do. Even when on holidays we know when he has internet access as everyone has 100 emails with tasks to do. It's huge.

His DW, who gets the same high income through smart tax strategies, works there but comes & goes as she pleases, picks & chooses her work, refuses to manage anyone or speak to clients. Won't work a minute overtime & takes about 12 weeks holiday a year.

It just depends on your situation.

from what I have seen working in city law firms the really high earners work round the clock and sacrifice their whole life to work until they retire at about 50 never having seen their wife or children

Meetings including scheduled calls 8am to 6pm. Lunch on the fly.
Emails from 6am to 8am and 6pm to 8pm
Some evenings not emails because you have a VIP dinner with some politician or visiting dignitary/ambassador
Bed around 12am. Up from 3-4am for phone calls and emails with other side of globe. Nap or exercise and then day starts again at 6am.

See, this, I think is absolutely worth the high salary potential. Other jobs also risk life and limb but not so immediately and catastrophically - if you’re a bus driver there is a fair chance that most passengers would survive. Plane, not so much. Plus as you say you also have to deal with time zones, geopolitics and very difficult people.

I’d also say many other jobs that have huge consequences are worth it: medicine, investing millions in people’s future security, etc.

The 3 people I know on a lot of money…:

-one has a safety critical role and spends most of their day ensuring work is legal, safe and done well. If it went wrong it would be lethal.
-one does not make day to day decisions affecting safety but is responsible for a large research programme whereby oversights or sloppy work could put people at risk. And they also need to periodically fire people or make them redundant. International travel about 3 times a year, really hard work
-the last one is my boss’s boss and they have it properly cushy. No-one will die if something goes wrong, some minor embarrassment maybe but it isn’t going to be catastrophic. Their money is justified organisationally by them supposedly making big, largely unpopular, but basically fairly banal, decisions.

My direct boss (not a mega earner but slightly
more than me), I have more understanding of the salary- there is a huge amount of work managing people and having really difficult interpersonal conversations. While maintaining a tight ship and also coming up with whizzy innovations.

Most office based employees who earn a lot spend a high proportion of their time in meetings. I can see the diaries of everyone in my organisation, and once you get to head of department level there is barely a spare slot in their diary.

Of course, people like entertainers and sports stars earn rather more, and spend more time doing their role, or preparing for it.

Yes, it's easy until it goes wrong! That's where your skills are. I think the way you are trained is amazing...... dealing with the emergencies like it's second nature. Planes thrill me. My brother is a performance engineer so keeps my interest up.

Responsibility. The buck stops with them
if things go wrong by which I mean serious financial loss, data breaches, accidents, even loss of life.

people on those salaries are not paid based on how many hours tjey are standing up, or how many steps they do a dsy. They are paid based on what would happen if things go wrong.

Very simple minded of you to think golf and lunches. Do you think a CEO swans around? Firstly there are CEO’s in different industries so your question about what do they do will be very different in each. I can’t believe you’re a teacher asking these types of questions op.

@WearyCat quite honestly the fact you started your “question” with the assumption that high earners do golf and lunch tells me that you have zero intention of understanding the responsibilities that people in these roles have.

Quite honestly it’s downright patronising and smacks of violins that no one could possibly work harder than [fill space with job] so it’s terribly unfair that they’re paid so much.

The reason they’re paid so much is that there is so much resting on the decisions they make. Not just money, but jobs. You forget many of these people are running firms that employ hundreds and thousands of people. Each of whom is trusting the boss and higher earners to ensure the business remains profitable so that they can keep their pay and jobs.

This 100%

I haven’t read all the responses but I’m also curious about this to an extent. I know quite a few high earning lawyers and very senior doctors who work privately as well as in the nhs. In their cases I understand the pressure, absolutely.

But when people talk about the extreme pressure of being a c-suite exec, I don’t really understand it that well! Don’t most of us have roles that involve a degree of responsibility, management, budgets etc? Yes it’s on a higher level and you are being paid for your expertise, but is the work so much harder than it is a salary bracket or two down the ladder, if that makes sense?

Honestly I think your post is a bit goady

If self-employed one AVOIDS unnecessary, time-wasting meetings (which is most of them.)
With success comes the ability to say no. It is hugely empowering.
It gets respect and, interestingly, does not reduce the amount of fee-earning work put one’s way.
The most non-renewable resource is time. I refuse to waste it.
But there is stress - the more you have, the more you worry about losing it. A lifetime of 16 hour days gone. One can never switch off. Always thinking about the next deal. Despite already owning at least two of everything you’ve ever wanted. It’s a mad personality defect I see time and again in successful, entrepreneurial people. I’m not entirely convinced it correlates with happiness. Do not envy us.

Dealing with problems. Making decisions, constantly. Dealing with difficult people. Meetings. Budgets. Stress. Politics. After a while, you disassociate, having seen and dealt with it all, But each day, something new creeps in.

My husband is a high earner and all he does all day is sit in meetings discussing everything that's going wrong and who needs to do what.

yes this if hearing DH drone on all day is anything to go by. He spends his time managing multi billions of £ to be fair. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes!

My husband isn’t a super high earner but does ok £200k plus. What he does is extremely technical and difficult and very pressured. People don’t realise that in order for planes to fly or buildings to be built, there are loads of people behind the scenes making it all happen. He hasn’t golfed for over ten years as he doesn’t have the time. He earns every penny and has nearly sacrificed his mental health trying to achieve more in his profession. Pls don’t diminish people’s contribution because you haven’t worked hard enough to achieve a top level career. I know I didn’t have what it took to do it.

The ceo of the company I work for earns around 200k, he wfh, and does longer hours then the rest of us, we all work flexi hours but he is online roughly 8-6:30 but then available pretty much anytime if someone contacts him, no golf or boozy lunches, just a very normal job set up with meetings, external and internal, but he’s responsible for basically keeping us all employed and the business afloat. Really incredibly nice guy but I would not want the pressure or stress or always feeling on call.

its going to massively vary from industry to industry there’s no one size fits all for that wage, I was treated by a doctor who partially owned the private practice who I would guess makes more than that, as his bank account was coutts and his job will be different to my ceos.

I'm a lawyer. Lunches etc don't happen often for me. I spend my day dealing with many client emails, supervising multiple junior lawyers, and managing competing priorities/demands on my attention. It is mostly very stressful, and the work never ends. Imagine constantly answering tricky exam questions, all of which require research time (but I am constantly interrupted when trying to do it). If I'm particularly unlucky something also happens from an external source (e.g. new guidance issued or enforcement action launched) and my day is entirely derailed by that.

I don't have a typical day, but will try to give you a gist. I work in government in finance. Annual budget close to 1B, and will exceed that if we have successful funding requests in the near future.

The rest of the organisation sees my teams as the keepers of all financial knowledge. We have to remember every nuance of every funding allocation, every funding extension, ensure all required reporting to government on that funding is done in the required timeframe. We're expected to answer those questions with minimal turnaround and I'm expected to answer them if my team member is away - so I need to know everything not just one twentieth of what my team do. Sometimes that's just knowing who to ask, others it's physically locating information eg funding decisions as it can't wait until the person responsible for that work is back from leave.

Yes I have a team to do the day to day work. My role is to help them be as effective as possible. Whether that means being unpopular and telling our head honcho that xyz is not possible to be done tomorrow, asking team to put in additional hours when I know they're already exhausted or pushing back on unreasonable treasury requests and getting extensions before even giving work to the team. My #1 job is to protect them and keep them well.

Anything my team produces is on me if it is wrong. I need to make sure it is all correct before going out to senior executives, ministers, parliament, newspapers etc The opposition always want to catch ministers out, so we have to be perfect and precise and never have a mistake in our information.

I make the decisions. Even if I am not the subject matter expert, I listen to what is proposed and then have to work out the best way forward. That decision is on me if it's wrong. I need to challenge the subject matter expert if I'm not convinced their recommended course of action is the best.

Typical day I'll have my emails cleared before I've gone home the day before but will come into 30+ new emails, all of which need action, some by me directly, some by the team. Overall I get around 120-150 emails a day which need me to do something, then there's the requests via teams and phone calls, plus meeting action items.

I have work planned for the day - eg reviewing a suite of online training modules to ensure content is correct, doing detailed costings for a potential realignment of functions, reviewing funding submissions and costings and making changes to improve the likelihood of those requests being successful, working with the authors to see what happens if not successful or to get them to reduce the request as it's unreasonable, or to ask them to redraft as it's not consistent with what our minister or department head wants.

That usually has to be done after hours as my day is spent going to meetings. Content includes working with areas to adjust their budgets to their funding - that takes a lot if preparation as you need to consider the past expenditure and adjust that for funding that has ceased, funding that's started and know how much and how long that funding is available plus how it has been approved to be spent, what the submitted budget was and what, if anything, was not approved; working with treasury and legal to draft program funding agreements with sound financial protection for the department (typically we are brought in at the last minute and have to think on our feet to find a quality solution in less than 24hrs); meetings with treasury regarding funding requests - what the program is, why the money is needed, what will happen if we don’t get it, what can I do to increase chances of a positive outcome for the department; working with business units on contract extensions to be approved by the department head - again come to us at the last minute; presentations to various executive groups on our financial performance, key financial messages, upcoming finance related bodies of work; resolving conflicts between what my team require areas to do and what the areas want to do. Anything out of the ordinary comes to me. Some is delegated to the team but a lot falls on me to complete.

This is on top of my regular deliverables of large programs of work, regular internal and external reporting, regular minister and treasury briefings and preparation of the multitude of documents that build the governments annual budget.

My brother is a CFO he doesn’t even have time for his wife and children let alone golf and lunches

They work !

As I see it it’s similar to the law…
people who are guilty of large scale financial crime get relatively bigger sentences than people who have committed crime against an individual, even violent crime.

workers responsible for the long term viability and profitability of a business or organisation get paid more than those delivering the service (whether that’s keeping a person alive in a hospital or driving a bus safely).

lots of workers have a lot of responsibility but it’s those who’s responsibilities lie with financial outcomes who are remunerated more than those with real world responsibilities like the emergency services.

i say this as a someone with a medical background but for a pay rise I need to move into management.. Doing a skilled job and doing it well is the minimum my company require, I’m failing if I can’t also grow profits.