need a $200K marketing/writing/communications job that I don't take home

September 3, 2024 6:49 PM

I'm currently a marketing leader at a startup. I dig my salary but I don't love that the job bleeds into my non-work life. What can I put my skills towards instead?

I thought I'd ask here since folks seem to have great ideas. Any and all ideas that at least mostly fit the stipulations below, please share!

Skills:
- writing
- marketing
- communications
- leadership
- facilitation/public speaking
- strategy
- content creation
- project management
- product leadership


Desires:
- $200K/year or more (USD)
- a job where there is no expectation that I "take my work home with me" or be on call outside of regular business hours, excepting the odd business trip or meeting
- a job where I don't have to endlessly hustle for new business (like creating my own consultancy or freelancing for all of my money -- although jobs where someone else is your biz dev lead are welcome)
- a job that at least does some degree of net good, or at the very least doesn't actively build SUVs or bombs or such
- a job that is remote or works a curtailed/compacted schedule would obviously be most ideal


This is all mostly a pipe dream brought on by a stressful job, but I would love to hear any and all ideas. Maybe there's some wild weird government gig out there, or a communications person who works in a shipyard, or something I've never heard of.

I am happy to work hard during allotted business hours. I think I just don't really like the pressure of being where the buck stops with everything riding on me -- and that would be true in nonprofit as well as crazy startup land, I think. But I don't know! I just want to do my very solid individual contributor job, maybe lead a few people, and punch out.

I mean, truth be told, I don't really want a job and want to make art, volunteer, provide mutual aid, and hang out with my kids. But I do need one to support my family, and we're saving for an apartment in a very expensive place. I realize I am very fortunate to be making as much as I am, but in this current gig it's not where I want to be.

Thanks in advance, all!

posted by knownassociate to Work & Money (16 answers total)

Suggestion: if you're all ready to pack it in at your current job anyway, have you tried... not being available outside of business hours?

If you haven't established boundaries for your work life then no one will know to respect them.
posted by phunniemee at 6:57 PM on September 3 [38 favorites]

I don't love that the job bleeds into my non-work life

Yeah, setting those boundaries at any job - that's kind of on you in large part. But I will say, as an employee of a municipal government, that "communications" in a government setting fits most of those bullets you list as desires, except:

- Probably won't pay >200K, but will pay reasonably well (I don't know the government salary scale in NYC, where your profile says you are, but I'd be surprised if it were that high)
- Depending on what part of the "communications" area you land in, may not be 9-5 M-F

What I mean by that last bullet point is, I work with a lot of the folks in my (county) government agency's communications area, and they do a LOT of after-hours work. In any local government agency, there's always a ton of evening meetings - constituent meetings for Board members, community meetings about County-wide initiatives, things of that nature - that require our Communications staff to be on-site and responsive to press inquiries and reactive to what's happening on the ground at the time of the event.

But! There are also many jobs in "communications", at least at my municipality and many of the neighboring ones I know of, that are strictly 9-5 type things. Jobs more behind the scenes in the public relations area, putting out more routine community notice-type communications, jobs in more internal comms (think putting out weekly internal newsletters, departmental comms, and the like), and things like that which don't require after hours commitments.
posted by pdb at 8:11 PM on September 3

Marketing/comms at a large tech company instead of a startup?

I have not done that exact role so take it with a grain of salt (I don't know if it satisfies all your requirements). I'm a software engineer at a company somewhere in between very large startup and large tech company, and think you can likely get some combination of

- above $200k
- "mostly harmless" enterprise SaaS
- not needing to take work home
- not ultra stressful
- hybrid ("true remote" is rarer and rarer)

...at a company like that.
posted by Rich Text at 8:17 PM on September 3 [2 favorites]

[anti-recommendation, prompted by the SaaS remark above: stay away from AWS, they’ll destroy you. I wouldn’t do Google Cloud either. I am not saying Rich Text was implying you should pursue either option! I’m only saying you should avoid them entirely, just in case you ever thought about it in future. Don’t.]
posted by aramaic at 8:50 PM on September 3 [2 favorites]

In my area, jobs that pay in the top 5% of salaries all either (a) have a lot of stress, responsibility, or skills more specialized than marketing, or (b) come from having connections with leaders who can set you up with them. What are your options for leveraging (b)?
posted by metasarah at 8:52 PM on September 3 [7 favorites]

From my own nonprofit job searches in coastal cities in the US, it is extremely unlikely that you would find a job at even $100k in marketing or communications that isn’t a senior leadership position requiring extensive non-profit-specific experience. I’ve seen plenty of director-level positions at less than $100k, and you are 100% guaranteed to be asked/expected to work nights/weekends. (Some people are able to appropriately set boundaries, but only as a way to *manage* the asks/expectations - I don’t know anyone in nonprofit who doesn’t get asked or isn’t expected to go above and beyond on the regular.)
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:29 PM on September 3 [9 favorites]

The Federal pay scale doesn’t even hit $200k at the very top: GS-15s in NYC at Step 6 and above stop at $191,900.

I hope you find a better situation - burnout sucks.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:34 PM on September 3 [2 favorites]

Have you considered moving someplace with a lower cost of living? There are plenty of places in the country where 100k will go farther than 200k in NYC.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:22 AM on September 4 [2 favorites]

TLDR - but I genuinely don’t think the job you’re looking for exists at 200k. As metasarah mentions the back door for this would be pretty intensely leveraging your network for a unicorn role* where your connections get you higher up than the marketplace otherwise dictates. otherwise you need to do more soul searching about $200k vs. freed up time and energy.

I just want to do my very solid individual contributor job, maybe lead a few people, and punch out.

These marketing roles do exist but are increasingly hard to come by (at least in my search so far). They often require you to specialize very narrowly. IMO, the most reliable path to work life balance is in marketing is to become this kind of specialist in a niche role where you can stay mostly individual contributor or small team - these exist in certain industries and more so at large companies. They absolutely do not pay $200k, full stop and they would require you to pivot immediately to building up that specialized skill set, maybe even starting from the bottom somewhere and focusing on picking a place where you believe you could move up quickly.

Many of them top out at sub-$100k. The capital you lose is $$ but the capital you gain is more time to art / family / volunteer. If you can move up quickly into a higher level specialist position where you eventually become really efficient, sometimes you can both clock out at 5 but also actively have energy left over for fun non work things (some places you could even clock out early if top brass is pleased with your team’s productivity and performance and doesn’t care as long as work gets done well)

Or the path you’re currently on, which sounds more like a generalist multi-hat wearer, the only paths to $200k I know of are innately high-stress, quick-response-required 24/7, and/or highly managerial. OR are in highly volatile industries / departments (ex agree that the SaaS role would be great on the surface, but non-VP role within tech can be volatile - and both specialist and generalist marketing roles / teams can be first on the chopping block when the market turns down)

*IF you are looking to prioritize clocking out by 5, I would caution against putting all your eggs into unicorn special hiring scenarios. I’ve been in two of them and they are actually more pressure in the long run as you have to juggle higher degree of interpersonal expectations, favors etc. and IMO the decision makers who hire for these secret-handshake roles often are in workaholic roles themselves and don’t actually want to give you the unicorn job if you just want to punch out at 5.

Hopefully someone in the comments proves me wrong about this all (in which case I will be competing with you for that opportunity haha… only half kidding )
posted by seemoorglass at 5:44 AM on September 4 [3 favorites]

With a 24/7 news cycle, I don't think it's possible to be in a senior communications role that doesn't bleed over to some extent. The best hedges are having a big enough team working for you so that you can delegate responsibility for out-of-hours work except in the event of a crisis, and/or working for an obscure organisation that doesn't want to increase its fame.

I am in a different job market to you, and any 6-figure role where I live would require significant commitment. Things that that make that commitment feel better are (1) working in a functioning organisation with good support functions and nice people and (2) doing something that is a net contributor to the public good. The first is more important than the second. It also (possibly paradoxically) helps to have something important going on that is not work, whether that's family or something else.
posted by plonkee at 5:46 AM on September 4 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers so far! I should make it clear that I’m willing to 1. Do a little bit of schooling to potentially pivot (not necessarily to become, say, a radiologist, but perhaps to do something off beat), and 2. That I don’t necessarily need to be a Comms Director, but mentioning my skillset because I’m very good at communication small C, as well as working with people. So if anything else comes to mind there, also open.

Wouldn’t mind hearing more from others in a similar situation or who pivoted!

Also not leaving NYC. :)
posted by knownassociate at 6:56 AM on September 4

Content development at a major consulting firm would hit all your needs - look for jobs like "Executive Editor" at McKinsey, etc.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 7:16 AM on September 4 [1 favorite]

My background is in comms and I work in the greater NYC area. My advice: pivot away from comms and solidly into marketing.

As a senior comms exec it is absolutely expected that you're on 24/7 for when issues arise. Marketing, on the other hand - if you can get into a niche marketing lead role, you will spend the vast majority of your time developing marketing collateral / strategy / content and it should be doable in business hours with a small team. Our CMO makes $275K base, has a small team (5 total, incl comms), and while she occasionally logs on on a weekend to knock out some work, she leaves by 6 every day and rarely responds to emails unless her comms person (who IS on 24/7) has to escalate something to her.

In the NYC area, you should be able to achieve this. I'm not saying there are thousands of jobs like these, but I don't think it's unheard of, either. Good luck!
posted by widdershins at 7:33 AM on September 4 [5 favorites]

I’ve stayed at the individual contributor level in marketing & comms (sometimes under significant pressure) and I have to say my experience tracks with seemoorglass’s, above. Agreed also that in some industries leaning into the marketing is slightly — but not always — less frantic. The other trick is to look for areas where comms is unlikely to blow up (note: in the current climate higher ed is not this!)
posted by warriorqueen at 9:40 AM on September 4 [2 favorites]

McKinsey or MBB in general is the last place I would recommend for good WLB.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:44 AM on September 4 [3 favorites]

McKinsey or MBB in general is the last place I would recommend for good WLB.

I have run this function at a major consulting firm.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 11:02 AM on September 5 [1 favorite]