I used to think I would do pretty much anything I didn't find immoral for a million dollars per year. An abusive boss for 80+ hours per week changed my mind.

When I quit my third job, my boss told me "Karl, I know you hate me now, but in a couple years, you'll be making a million dollars a year and love me."

My response "Even if I believed you, I wouldn't do this job for a million dollars".

Let me guess: You wouldn’t have ended up making a million dollars a year.

Maybe I would have. We were trading interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives in 2006. 2008 / 2009 would have been very volatile. We were generally long volatility, but sometimes we had some legs on some trades that would make significant losses in extreme volatility. It's hard to say. It's possible our 4-person desk could have made 100 million and my boss would have thrown a few my way. It's also possible the desk would have folded.

I still think I made the right choice by leaving. You have to live your life, and unless you really love your job, 80+ hours per week in the office is not living your life.

Also, I left that macro quant job by calling up Google and asking if they'd re-open the job offer I turned down 4 months earlier. It certainly helped that I had good backup jobs available.

If the money is exceptional, the longer you stick it out, the more freedom you have to leave at a time of your choosing to pursue your next adventure.

And the more emotional and mental scars you'll have. And the more time you'll need to wait patiently for them to heal.

Not just the paycheck. If your boss is mean and stupid all the time, you'll learn so little from them, the net work experience you got from the job become a negative.

In my opinion, a good boss can be loud, but must also smart and willing to hear, learn and teach, which are essential if you want to increase productivity and get your team full of smart and idea generating people together.

If you work for a mean and stupid boss, not only you'll work in hell, if the business failed due to their mistake, they'll probably put failure on their employees. Which is really bad if their false words got into the ears of your next recruiter.

Life is short, if something is obviously bad, don't try it.

I now realize how lucky I am to have worked with great people. The worst job I had was just boring.