Lately

High salary, high expectations, hightail it out of there

Episode Summary

Lately, we’re ditching the grind and our so-called dream jobs along with it. The hidden tolls of a coveted Wall Street career.

Episode Notes

Pop culture loves to fetishize the world of high finance, but are the perks and the profile really worth the pain? Our guest, Carrie Sun, author of the new memoir Private Equity, describes her disillusioning journey working at a billion-dollar Wall Street hedge fund.

Also, Vass and Katrina talk about what happens when your job doesn’t love you back.

This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day. 

Lately is a Globe and Mail podcast.

Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad.

The show is hosted by Vass Bednar and produced by Andrea Varsany. 

Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.

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Find the transcript of today’s episode here. 

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Episode Transcription

Katrina Onstad [00:00:00] I'm Katrina Onstad, I'm a producer on Lately.

Vass Bednar [00:00:02] And I'm Vass Bednar I'm the show's host.

Katrina Onstad [00:00:04] Vass.

Vass Bednar [00:00:05] Katrina.

Katrina Onstad [00:00:06] Does everybody hate their job?

Vass Bednar [00:00:08] I don't think everybody hates their job.

Katrina Onstad [00:00:11] Okay, but does everybody dream about leaving their job?

Vass Bednar [00:00:14] I think everyone has a secret Hallmark movie of their lives, of where else it could go if they just gave everything up today. But I think an element of modern work that most people are totally comfortable railing against is just how much it spills over into everything else, that you're always reachable, that you graze your work email, like before you go to sleep or right when you wake up, or you're thinking about your inbox on the weekend and you just never feel that you're not at work, and then you don't feel like you're your true self because you're always your work self.

Katrina Onstad [00:00:49] Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of research around the Millennial generation as being not work averse, but prioritizing life, prioritizing purpose over paycheck. That's a phrase that's been tossed around. And then, of course, we're in this moment of quiet quitting and an ongoing conversation about Millennial burnout and burnout in general. I don't think it's even a generational thing. I think a lot of us are asking ourselves, you know, is is it worth it?

Vass Bednar [00:01:17] 100%. And to that question today, we're talking to Carrie Sun about her new memoir, Private Equity. The book's all about her time working at a hedge fund on Wall Street, which is the center of the hedge fund universe. And in the book, Carrie's about to turn 30, so she's at a turning point in her life. At the time, she had been a financial analyst, but she was starting to back away from finance a little bit and starting to consider her next move. And she gets cold called, I guess I should say cold messaged on LinkedIn about a job at a very secretive firm, and she ends up working at this firm, which she calls "Carbon," a great, slick fake name. Anyway, she's working there for a hotshot young founder who's a billionaire, and he also gets a pseudonym. And the role is fascinating and demanding and lucrative.

Katrina Onstad [00:02:07] Yeah.

Vass Bednar [00:02:07] So at one point she was earning over $300,000 USD with some pretty nice bonuses.

Katrina Onstad [00:02:13] Yeah, this is a very moneyed world, and it's a very juicy memoir.

Vass Bednar [00:02:18] Yeah.

Katrina Onstad [00:02:18] There's clearly a big audience for this stuff. There's been so much dramatization of this world in movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and in the recent Netflix movie Fair Play, a surprise hit thriller about what it's like for a young woman to be a financial analyst at a cutthroat hedge fund, a firm that also employs her totally unhinged boyfriend. Fun fact: Carrie says that she was once brought into the writers room for the show Billions just to share her experiences on Wall Street, and she believes that she was the inspiration for a character on that show.

Vass Bednar [00:02:50] Yeah.

Katrina Onstad [00:02:50] So the culture is infatuated with this world, but Carrie's book really undoes our fetishizing of the high finance workplace, even though it's also a prurient read. Right? We get to be excited by the same things that she's critiquing. She kind of has it both ways, but in the end, this work almost destroys her. Her dream job kind of wears her down to a nub, and it quickly becomes a nightmare.

Vass Bednar [00:03:14] And it's not a story that's really just limited to high finance, right? The kind of job that spills over into your personal time and gobbles it up.

Vass Bednar [00:03:23] Yeah.

Katrina Onstad [00:03:23] She has to be so reactive to every little thing that comes across her desk or phone call that rings. While there are major expectations around being proactive and planning and dotting the i's and crossing the T's and anticipating people's needs, and it's not just technical, for all her quantitative skills, it's also really, really emotional. And that's got to have contributed to how draining it was for her.

Katrina Onstad [00:03:47] And yet the ethos of the workplace is wellness and giving back. And also there's a kind of incredible disconnect between the talk and the walk. But yeah, the courage to leave. I think that's also part of what's interesting about her book is how she does muster up that courage to follow a dream that she deferred because of the lure of this level of success. Right. So she exited that job. And that's not really a spoiler, because the end product of that exit is this book. She always wanted to be a writer, and she put that to the side because extra, extra, not as lucrative as working for a billionaire hedge fund guy.

Vass Bednar [00:04:24] Exactly, exactly. What she's talking about in the book is really quintessential and really of this moment, the arc of being totally seduced and enthralled with the promise of a particular workplace, and then realizing that even though you're literally and figuratively giving it your all, you know that cliché work doesn't love you back. Let's head over to our interview with Carrie Sun. This is Lately. So going back when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? When you were anticipating all the different pathways that you could take in life? Where did you see yourself winding up?

Carrie Sun [00:05:22] I have always been interested in writing. I wrote my first novel when I was eight years old, but growing up in Mid-Michigan with my parents, who were doing their graduate studies at Michigan State at the time, they were English professors in China before they immigrated to the United States. And after that, they kind of switched careers into more quantitative things. So the idea of being able to switch careers at any time, in sort of the very American notion of self reinvention, has always been a part of my story and worldview. And around seventh grade, I became very interested in the business section of the library. And a lot of that was because I saw my parents, even when they didn't have a lot of money, they would think to invest it in the stock market. And I just became very interested in why this was of such interest to my parents.

Vass Bednar [00:06:13] Fast forward us to the position that you write about in the book. There's kind of a wild process of getting the job. And why did you even want it? Like, did this wild process freak you out, or did it end up enticing you more to the role?

Carrie Sun [00:06:27] Yes. The wild process had actually made me very interested in the job. I thought that if the recruiting process for an assistant level position, I was the sole assistant to the founder of this firm who is a hedge fund billionaire. If a person had to go through 14 interviews and something like ten reference checks just to get this position, I thought that if they apply that same level of diligence to their investments, I just thought that this was probably the best firm in the world. And so rather than seeing how that intense process might be foreshadowing my future work, I thought here was a place that very much seemed to care about ethics. That was very clear to me. They cared about being on the right side of the law. I was really attracted to the atmosphere of being surrounded by people who constantly strove to be the best of the best, and we're talking their motto, which was the best in the world at everything. So even small tasks like finding a 70% dark chocolate bar for the office, it had to be the best in the world of that thing. You know, I just really was attracted to that work ethic. And initially I took the job because I had felt stagnant in my life. I felt that I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was 29. 29 is such a time of possibility and change. You know, you're going into a new decade and.

Vass Bednar [00:08:08] Some of us stay 29 for a couple years just to stretch it out as well, really make the most of it.

Carrie Sun [00:08:13] Exactly. And going into my 30s, I wasn't sure that the life I had lived in my 20s is how I wanted my 30s to go, but I wasn't sure what exactly I wanted it to look like, because in my 20s, I worked as a quantitative equity analyst at Fidelity Investments.

Vass Bednar [00:08:29] Right.

Carrie Sun [00:08:29] And I started business school, dropped out of business school because I had never really afforded myself the time and space to develop the self-knowledge of who I was. And in fact, in many ways, I felt like I had a delayed coming of age. I had just been working so hard, both in growing up in Mid-Michigan, also at MIT, I double majored and minored and graduated in three years, and then I started working immediately after that. I had just been running, running and going, and I just wanted to clear my plate and see, you know, what my true interests were and.

Vass Bednar [00:09:07] Start fresh.

Carrie Sun [00:09:08] Start fresh. Exactly.

Vass Bednar [00:09:09] Because you moved as well, right? You were in Michigan. You moved to New York.

Vass Bednar [00:09:12] Yeah.

Carrie Sun [00:09:13] Now I got to back us up for a second because you've mentioned this word "hedge fund". And I have two questions about that. One, just for the benefit of our listeners. What is a hedge fund? And two, your boss didn't want you to call it a hedge fund. I'm really interested in that too. Why would that be?

Carrie Sun [00:09:29] A hedge fund is some sort of partnership arrangement whereby investors can pool their money together and is a private fund not open to the public. And because of the private nature, they're able to make investments, usually in much higher risk situations and products. And so hedge funds can connote a sense of elitism and privacy, because the investors are very ultra high net worth. And it can also connote extreme risk and also secrecy, because they're often not held to the same transparency and reporting regulations as other more public products.

Vass Bednar [00:10:10] Let's go back to starting at this place of work. So a super fun element of the book is kind of the Succession-esque insider peek at this world of hedge funds. There is something intoxicating about the office, especially when you start. And the culture, the beautiful art, the fashion, the drive. You know, people barely stopping in the hallway to chat with you because it's a wasted second and we've got to invest the time elsewhere. Can you tell us about some of your first impressions of that world?

Carrie Sun [00:10:43] My first impression of this world was pure awe. Everything was beautiful, glittering. The walkways were carpeted, but people were gliding from meeting to meeting. And in the 10 seconds between meetings, you know, doing like, really important work and making decisions about millions of dollars of investments. The office was not one of what you often see Wall Street being depicted in movies, and.

Vass Bednar [00:11:11] Phones weren't ringing off the hook?

Carrie Sun [00:11:12] They were ringing, but they were totally on silent and people were speaking in very controlled, gentle tones. You know, it wasn't yelling, people talking over each other, and it just wasn't this Wolf of Wall Street atmosphere. The Wolf of Wall Street was the antithesis of where I was working, because I just couldn't imagine how anyone would have any time to even drink, have hangovers, and recover from the hangover. You know, everyone was just so about not just work optimization, but life optimization and self optimization. There was a heavy emphasis of all the employees at the firm to take care of their bodies and minds so that they could be better workers, and that discipline of mind and discipline of body was the same discipline that they brought into the intense work ethic.

Vass Bednar [00:12:04] So it sounds like the stealth wealth element wasn't just dressing in neutrals, but kind of blanketed around the office that you were at. You've mentioned optimization, and one of the first things you're told by this boss is around maximum optimization and total availability. What was that like for you? You seemed to have started out a believer that this was something you were willing to adhere to and kind of jump right in.

Carrie Sun [00:12:31] I wasn't under the false impression then that it would be easy in any way, but I thought that the job would have boundaries of some kind. Because my boss had implied he is a pretty easygoing, these are his words, easygoing, chill, boss. And I learned very quickly that this was actually my first day on the job. It was 8 or 9 p.m. and he had sent me an email. It wasn't even directly to me. There were other people copied on it, and it was a photo of his kids. And I chose not to respond because, well, I thought I would respond in person and tell him how cute I found his kids. And you know, I thought that could be a little opening for a conversation. And the very next day, one of the first things he said to me was, did you get my email? And I said, yes. And he said, I need you to respond to all my emails pretty much as soon as you see them. He wants me to know he reads all of his emails. You know, the email was not even on a work topic, but that kind of set the tone immediately about what was expected at this job.

Vass Bednar [00:13:37] By the way, unsolicited photos of your children and your private life feel like the workplace equivalent of a d-i-c-k pic. To me, right? It's like you didn't. Why are you sending me this? At night? Why are you sending to me at all? Like, maybe framed on your desk, and then I can see it because I'm in a meeting. I'm like, oh, that's a beautiful picture of baseball or something. Your job description too. You had 96 responsibilities and 13 expectations? I was interested in this idea that a job can be so thoroughly detailed and all encompassing that you can see it on paper.

Carrie Sun [00:14:12] Well, the job responsibilities weren't absolutely so detailed, and there were lines like "going the extra mile," "above and beyond," "willing to help with any item as needed," you know and so that just encompasses literally everything. So it's both extremely detailed, like for example, no unanswered phones. And so literally if we were away from the desk and the phone started ringing, we would just run back because my boss wanted all calls ever to be answered by a human. The level of expectation was just so high, so specific. And then, by the way, in case we didn't get all expectations and responsibilities in the 96, there are line items that tell you and anything else we might want you to do, ever.

Vass Bednar [00:15:01] I know some people take the attitude that as long as something's well compensated, that's kind of the trade off. Do you mind telling us a little bit about some of the perks of this, for many people, foreign world that we only maybe see on TV?

Carrie Sun [00:15:14] Yes. There were so many perks. I'll start small. So, yeah, I mean, we had a stipend for lunch. We never had to go downstairs to pick up our food because we had someone pick it up for us and deliver it straight to our desk. Your butt never needed to leave the chair to get your lunch. And more than that, our gym was beautiful. It overlooked Central Park and we had really luxurious clothes. Lululemon workout apparel just in all sizes.

Vass Bednar [00:15:40] Canadian firm by the way.

Carrie Sun [00:15:43] Yeah, and you never need to bring your workout, exercise clothes. And the shower had Malin and Goetz shampoos and conditioners and they're $30 a bottle. And so the gym certainly felt like a spa in many ways. There was a yoga room and barre room where you could do floor exercises. There was a Peloton bike.

Vass Bednar [00:16:03] Oh wow.

Carrie Sun [00:16:04] You could Peloton overlooking Central Park and you can watch the sunset or the sunrise. It was just incredible perks. And more than that, my boss to me, he would give me coats worth $6,000. $2,500 to SoulCycle, a package of private massages, in-home massages, spa vacations, surf vacations to Montauk, $3,000 to Ritz-Carlton Lake Tahoe.

Vass Bednar [00:16:30] Surf vacations that you can work during, though. So I found that duality really fascinating. Maybe I could zoom out and also ask how this lavish environment relates to the give first culture. What is a give first work culture?

Carrie Sun [00:16:48] A give first work culture is when you are ready to help someone else at your firm, hopefully, you know this is a corporate work culture, and really expect almost nothing in return. You are there to volunteer your time and effort first, just knowing that it will come back in some way in the future. And so I think it probably first came to front of mind through Adam Grant's book Give and Take.

Vass Bednar [00:17:18] Right.

Carrie Sun [00:17:18] Which I was asked to read when I started this job. I'll say that on paper I definitely agree with give first, I believe in caring about your peers and your coworkers. But I also think that when the firm gives first to the employees, it's all giving in service of Vass, as you were saying, kind of keeping you there.

Vass Bednar [00:17:44] Right.

Carrie Sun [00:17:44] And so the luxury of the gym and then also, you know, my spa packages, it was all in service of me being a better worker. I don't think it was real giving on behalf of the firm. It was an investment that they were doing to hopefully have their workers perform better and have, you know, higher productivity. But what I really thought of as give first was lending a helping hand with tasks to your peers, your coworkers, and to even your manager and other people but...

Vass Bednar [00:18:16] That didn't happen for you.

Carrie Sun [00:18:17] No.

Vass Bednar [00:18:18] Going back to the maximization and being the best all the time kind of put coworkers in a sort of competition where everyone was probably a bit overloaded, kind of suffering similarly, but also looking really beautiful and ordering a really cool lunch and having a really great purse and coming back from a vacation that they worked on the entire time. So just that sort of tension. And there are comedic aspects of work too.

Carrie Sun [00:18:45] Yes.

Vass Bednar [00:18:46] To me, there were elements of probably unintended comedy. So you're at a company retreat and you sit through a PowerPoint presentation about the company's long term ambitions. And there's one slide exceptionally high returns only for the next 15 years. All right. That's a great ambition. And then there's a slide on the firm's community impact. And then there's three letters TBD, to be determined.

Carrie Sun [00:19:11] Yes.

Vass Bednar [00:19:11] What was it like for you in that moment to be on that retreat and see that slide?

Carrie Sun [00:19:17] The moment was really- the entire world fell away, and it was one of those moments where I felt that I was able to see through to the heart of things. It's such a symbol of everything that I was trying to show in the book, which, you know, the firms and billionaire owners of these firms can have the best intentions. But at the end of the day, what are your priorities? The TBD was just such a eyes wide open moment for me because it was like, well, we don't have time to think about this now because we're so focused on making money. We'll think about it later. And that, to me, is also just such an unfortunate, sad, but true analogy for many of what I think of the social problems that we have. You know, solving climate change, for example, things can wait. Things can be punted down the line. But can they really? I don't think they can.

Vass Bednar [00:20:25] Going back to the optimization element for a second. There's also wastefulness at work. There's a $200 bottle of unopened Johnnie Walker Blue Label just in the trash can. After a party once found $1,000 birthday cake that was made especially for the boss, it was tossed in the garbage. No one even cut a piece for themselves. How did you reconcile this optimization and maximizing every moment with what seemed wasteful around you? Or are both those examples just food that didn't match people's special diet?

Carrie Sun [00:21:00] I mean, to me, it just was so wasteful to have $1,000 cake go directly in the trash. But what feels wasteful to me, I think to the firm, probably was still optimization.

Vass Bednar [00:21:14] Right.

Carrie Sun [00:21:14] Because the thing with optimization is all of us are optimizing on different variables, and they are optimizing on purely the life that they want, which was certainly high return on time, just maximizing profits, but also they're unwilling to give at all on the kind of like luxury of experience. And so if we had any event, it was by the absolute best in the world of this thing, and it was more suboptimal to not have that thing than to have that thing and waste it. The money wasted was really not big of a deal.

Vass Bednar [00:21:59] It's kind of like these elements were a props of work in a way that didn't have to be consumed to be enjoyed or appreciated. It's just something that had to be there. You write about the relationship between work and your body. Can you talk about how the intensity of the work played out in and with your body?

Carrie Sun [00:22:17] Yes. Prior to taking on this job and working there, I had what I consider a fairly healthy relationship with my body. It wasn't perfect in any way, but I never felt like I was not in control of my body. When I started this job, it was okay for a few months, but as soon as I started feeling more burnt out, I felt like I didn't have any control over my days, any ability to plan my day, or to even determine what I was going to do the next hour. Certainly the next day. The next day felt like the next year to me during much of this job. I started to have an uncontrollable appetite. I started eating and eating and eating, and I found myself unable to say no to food in the same way that I felt like I was unable to say no to my boss. Whenever anyone asked me to do anything, I just said yes. In fact, having a can do yes attitude, those words, they were built into my job description, and I developed this inability to say no to certain food situations. But really, more than anything, what I was binging on was even less specifically food, but rather I was bingeing on the one sense of choice and freedom and control I had, which was over my food choices, because I was unable to have any sense of freedom throughout my day. I really was bingeing on agency is what I was doing there, and so I ended up gaining 36 pounds in one year at this job. And.

Vass Bednar [00:23:58] Wow.

Carrie Sun [00:23:59] It's really.

Vass Bednar [00:23:59] Who's counting?

Carrie Sun [00:24:01] Well, so, you know, I didn't count for a while until I really felt, again to optimization, my clothes no longer fit me and I had to get new clothes. And, you know, I was not even so sad about that. Rather, my first reaction was, well, how am I going to have the time to buy a whole new wardrobe?

Vass Bednar [00:24:17] Right.

Carrie Sun [00:24:18] But now I think about my body, and it's kind of ballooning there as a symbol of the weight of responsibilities I was taking on at work and how it accumulated and accumulated over two years. And of course, there are tons of research studies that say severe burnout impacts your decision making faculties. And so you just don't make healthy, good decisions in your life. And also, you know, unfortunately, people in severe burnout perhaps understandably turn to sometimes substance abuse. And for me.

Vass Bednar [00:24:48] Right.

Carrie Sun [00:24:49] That substance was food. It also helped numb me in many ways to the pain of the burnout I was experiencing.

Vass Bednar [00:24:57] Well, to that pain, you still carry an injury from that time. Not just psychological, but on your body. You have scars from this time. Do you mind telling us about what happened at the gym?

Carrie Sun [00:25:10] Yes. So I was at this gym. I was running on the treadmill. It was a beautiful spring, early evening. The sky, the sun, everything was beautiful. And at the time, I'd been working in this job about six months, but I was already starting to feel the effects of burnout. I really told myself that I needed an hour to myself, an hour of no interruptions. Well, midway through the run, I get an email from my boss and I'm having this debate on the treadmill. Should I answer it? Should I not? Can it wait 30 minutes? Can it not? And going back to that email he sent me of his kids on my very first day of work, I thought, I have to respond to this. I can't not respond to it. So then I try to answer while running and I wipe out, I fall. The Lululemon pants were completely intact, they were not hurt at all from the fall, but as soon as I roll my leggings up, really thick parts of my skin on my knees were missing. It was terrible. I had burns because treadmill burns can be really, really serious. I had them on my palms, my elbows. It was really, really bad and my knees are still scarred from that.

Vass Bednar [00:26:28] You literally got off the treadmill, literally came off the treadmill, right? That that imagery too, right? You had to have that moment of coming off the treadmill, but you don't even seek medical care right away. You kind of try to go back to work, too. And I just thought that so illustrated your adherence or feeling bound up in this role. I'm struck by the way that roles like this in finance are glamorized in pop culture. And you were the inspiration for a character on the show Billions. And I wondered if you could recognize yourself when you watched it.

Carrie Sun [00:27:04] I definitely did recognize myself. She was introduced as a new character, and she was introduced as the chief of staff to Ax, the major billionaire hedge fund manager of Billions. And I thought she was wonderful. She was so smart. She really held her own in a room full of men, and she also spoke her mind. I really loved her character.

Vass Bednar [00:27:27] I wonder why you think were so kind of drawn to this world. Is it a curiosity? Is it that it feels foreign or is it just the belief system?

Carrie Sun [00:27:38] I think people are so interested in this world for many reasons. There's just this broad sense, which is true in society, that these alternative asset managers who run hedge funds, private equity funds, venture capital funds, that they're kind of owning more and more of the world. They are owning everything from hospitals to single family homes. You know, they have a ton of capital, who knows where they deploy the capital, but they're just owning more of the world. And these are the shareholders, the owners to whom so many workers have to answer to. And yet there's this aura of just secrecy around this industry. So I think people are curious to know who is at the top, how do they work, what do they think and how do they live?

Vass Bednar [00:28:31] What shampoos do they use?

Carrie Sun [00:28:33] Yeah.

Vass Bednar [00:28:33] What do they wear when they exercise? What are they order for lunch?

Carrie Sun [00:28:37] Yeah.

Vass Bednar [00:28:38] I want to pick up on what you just mentioned around ownership. I've been reflecting on the title of your memoir, Private Equity. Do you feel like you invested yourself in the job expecting that it would pay off in some way? What is the equity exchange between employer and employee, or is that something you weren't gesturing at?

Carrie Sun [00:28:57] I was absolutely gesturing at that with my title. My title certainly is about the industry of private equity and the asset class. But really, really, it's about exactly the kind of notion that you just expressed of private in the sense of the self and equity in the sense of I'm investing so much of myself and my time in my work, and what is it that I'm actually getting back? Is it an equitable exchange? And for me...It really wasn't because while I on the surface was compensated well for my job title. But there's this question of how to value what the person in the role actually brings to the workplace. And in that sense, when I think about it, I'm providing operational leverage, administrative support, I'm providing also research support, communications. I'm doing all these roles and jobs, and I felt like I was only being compensated for really one job that just ballooned and expanded into five extra full time jobs. And...So I quit right before my holiday bonus. But beyond that, I also quit right before the holiday party for which I was supposed to do the planning.

Vass Bednar [00:30:12] Bold move.

Carrie Sun [00:30:13] Bold move. And I just really could not do that planning. And when I quit, they hired outside support to do that planning. So, you know, I don't know how much they spent, but why couldn't they have done that when I was there actually. So I was just taking on the extra role of an outside event planner. I just hope people who read the book and who are listening to think about what are you investing in your job and what are you actually getting back? That is the equity, I mean, in private equity.

Vass Bednar [00:30:41] And then just walk us through that day you tendered your resignation, ahead of the bonus, knowing that you don't get to go to the holiday party. How did you get the courage to leave? And how did you know it was time to pull the chute?

Carrie Sun [00:30:57] I went to my boss, told him I was really burnt out and asked him for help. He told me to seek professional help in getting a therapist. So I started to see a therapist, really at his behest, and I asked my therapist what is wrong with me? And after one session, this was in the first session. She was like, nothing's wrong with you, your job is killing you. And that just completely blew my mind. My therapist made me realize that I can't change my environment, but I can change how I choose to respond to the environment. And about a week after I first spoke up to my boss about me feeling burnt out, I walked into his office and tendered my resignation because it was just not worth it to me anymore. I think if you have reached a point where former things full of joy in your life are no longer full of joy for you, as in things that gave me joy before, even like reading, I didn't look forward to reading because it was another task to do. I just, I knew it was time to leave, and no amount of money could make staying two more months worth it.

Vass Bednar [00:32:05] Carrie, I think you said it so well. What's worth it? Thank you so much.

Carrie Sun [00:32:09]  Thank you.

Vass Bednar [00:32:22] If you've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varasny and our sound designer is Cameron McIver. I'm your host, Vass Bednar, and in our show notes, you can subscribe to the Lately newsletter where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.