Job becoming toxic

Recently posted about an FP&A analyst job for Amazon at their HQ in Seattle, but in the very beginning of talks with them. However, current job is becoming a toxic environment. Wondering if it would be alright to take a job as a “Quant Risk Analyst” for a well known reputable and very large insurance company that pays almost double what I am making now and around the same as the Amazon job, just to get out of here.

OR

Will it look bad that I left my job, just started a new one, but want to keep talking with Amazon to see what’s up by year end, for instance. Any advice would be great!

Define toxic.

They offer an OT dinner reimbursement for anyone who works 10 hours plus in a day and/or on a special project since our clients are credit value hedge funds and us analysts are hourly.

Well, I ordered food late last week, left the office around 8 pm but the receipt for my food said 8:23 PM. After I submitted the receipt on Monday, I was pulled into HR office since she approved it initially and was told, “This reimbursement for food is for meals eaten WHILE still working not for when you get off work and pick it up on the way home”. I maintained that for one, this is listed no where in our company policy, and two, why should it matter? I didn’t eat dinner until 8:30 at night…

Today got an e-mail from accounting saying the reimbursement was going to be denied to which I replied that: It was the first time I have had issues with the red tape regarding the policy and that I think it is poorly designed, vague in it’s intent, and causes me to unnecessarily waste my time and energy trying to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not under the policy.

I also added that I will clearly not be trying to utilize this benefit going forward. It’s just BS things like that which happen to often, I have been here over two years and just need to move on I think. However, don’t want to pigeon hole myself by not waiting until the perfect opportunity comes in 6 months-1 year or whatever.

Gotta be honest, this doesn’t sound that bad. Maybe there’s other stuff going on but timestamps don’t match, you can’t expect them to break a policy on good will. This is HR and Accounting after all. Your boss might give you a pass on that but why should they?

That is the whole thing though, none of this is stated in the policy. Nothing says, “You must not order food and consume it after you have left work for the day”. Because of that, it would have been nice to get a “Okay this is not the intent of the policy, but we will allow it this one time”. I guess it could go either way, but this isn’t all. It is a smaller firm of around 150 employees and I have come from previous billion dollar companies who do have effective and explicitly outlined company policies.

The new job I am looking at is really stats, modeling, risk, and technical (SAS, R, Python, C/C++, matlab) focused. Are these skills transferrable into buy-side research/AM/etc.? Is my main question. If not maybe I can hold out here even though I can’t stand unrefined company policy.

This isn’t bad and it sounds to me you are abusing the policy. Yes, it isn’t specifically in the policy but you’re an adult and they are giving you a bit of slack on what’s appropriate. Leaving the office at 8:00 and your receipt says 8:23 pm indicates you ordered and took the food home and charged it on the company card. The restaurant doesn’t have the ability to change the time stamp since restaurants need that data to manage how quickly they turn around a customers order.

I’m sorry man but you got called on your BS and it sounds to me you’re a bit embarrassed about what you did. It sounds like you got a sense of entitlement as well so my advice would be to apologize and not do it again. This isn’t a toxic culture and you need to grow up.

i wouldnt call the dinner fiasco as toxic

Well there are no good restaurants by our offices either, so leaving the office to go drive 10 minutes each way to pick up food and bring back while I am still at work doesn’t make since.

This isn’t the only thing though, when I was originally hired, it was company policy that all employees work a 45 hour work week. For the first year and a half this was great and we even had weeks of 60 plus hours, of which 20 would be considered OT pay. But randomly last year during September, they started cutting people back to 40 hours with zero OT without announcing any change in the initial policy in place. Since then, we have had almost 60 percent of our work weeks at 40 hours, hence impacting my pay by thousands of dollars per year.

Last week I spoke up about this, and stated that I based my expectations for initial compensation on a 45 hour minimum work week and that most of the year I have been affected by this. I told them that I can either help out in other departments of the firm to make sure I have 45 hours as originally agreed to, or would like to discuss a salary based compensation arrangement.

They just do whatever they want without informing employees of changes until after the fact and it is unprofessional and annoying.

*make sense

You need to be nicer, dude. Nearly all success in life comes down to being nice to the right people. HR and Accounts Payable are two departments that you don’t want to piss off. Since it was your first infraction, I probably would have played dumb and said sorry. Pulling out the employee handbook is aggressive by itself. Then saying it poorly worded…That’s not very good form.

tl;dr - it’s possible it is you that is toxic.

Okay, obviously a consensus is building that I was too aggressive and b****y, so I did issue an apology HR director and accounting (we are small so I did it in person). Thank you for providing candid feedback.

Bud just stop now and don’t blow out the AF goodwill which is benefit of the doubt to all regular posters…

It sucks that you’re paid hourly but nobody guarantees hours, nor are they contractually bound - this is just an expectation given to you based on the level of business activity the firm was experiencing. Business falls, your hours get cut. Paying massive OT rates to hourly workers continuously is just a bad business. The bottom line is this, you are an hourly worker, businesses do that to scale up and down as needed - this should be clear enough given your education level. It’s good that you tried to make amends but it’s a long road back into the BO good graces.

As for that Risk Analyst job… those technical skills might be be useful in a Fixed Income fund but wouldn’t make the majority of what they do. Plus working for an insurance company has never been sexy. Don’t know what you do now so that call is up to you.

It is what it is now, yeah. Agreed.

Well I am making around 65k base plus nominal annual bonus. This risk analyst role is 100-120k total comp, so my QOL would jump dramatically and immediately pretty much. I have just turned down like 4-5 six figure jobs because they don’t really fit my next move “ie buy side research” but those opportunities are really far and few between in the metropolitan areas I want to live in. My patience is wearing thin also.

On one hand I REALLY want to move into low 6 figures, but not if I am going to be pigeon holed in terms of exit opps. FWIW: The insurance company I am referring to is a worldwide leader and multi billion dollar revenue generating firm. More specifically the role is focused on Real Estate Credit Risk/Home equity (So yeah fixed income elements definitely).

OP, this stuff isn’t really that bad

I think I have just been pissed off at the world while I wait for these LII results, : /

^Never an excuse to be a jerk to someone just doing their job.

What about sidewalk performers? Specifically mimes. They really piss me off. Can I be a jerk to them?

act like you’re about to punch the meme in the face wind back your arm, then when about to hit their face, act like you hit a glass wall, and start memeing the glass wall while shaking your hand in pain (due to hitting the glass wall)

You leave your Forum Editor badge on the desk if decide to be a jerk to those hard working folk!

OP, I get it. That’s tough to turn down, but on the flip side you might have to take a pay cut once you do get to the sweet buy-side job. (At least where I am, the BS jobs pay relatively less. Tryign to make the same move but not looking forward to a haircut)

It could be worse; could be as toxic as this from Toxic Avenger 2…

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hx8_Iwpipk]