Advice: My boss is beyond awful, but my comp is at the top of my industry. Should I take a pay cut and get a new job?
3 min read
Advice: My boss is beyond awful, but my comp is at the top of my industry. Should I take a pay cut and get a new job?

I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place, even though I'm making more money than I've ever made before in my life. Here's the deal: I'm about four years out of college and working for a financial services firm in the midwest. The job has a great base of 80k, with OTE of about 158k, which have been extremely attainable over the last few years. Pretty much everyone here is hitting quota, and if they're not, they probably don't belong in sales.Sounds great, right? Well, here's the problem: my manager is beyond awful. Like, possibly a psychopath. He's an old-school guy who is probably just a few years away from retirement, but he runs the place like he's a headmaster at a boarding school. I know it's a terrible environment, but given my work experience, there's almost no way I'll be able to find a sales job with comparable pay. Everything else in my industry has a much lower base and a much longer ramp up period, so I would 100% have to take a huge pay cut if I wanted to leave. There's also not a ton of job opportunities where I live, so finding this role was a bit of a godsend (I grew up fairly poor), and I feel like I might be walking away from a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Switching managers isn't an option (we're the only sales team) and there's nowhere else to move within the company. What should I do?

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