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Comment by joshvm | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't Google recently on the opposite end of this? They paid their engineers so much that some of them left because they had the financial security to take riskier options.

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The logic on this statement doesn't really check out, as if this were the case it would be impossible to retain CEOs, they would all leave after a month. Yet somehow companies do so ...

But it's 100% true: https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/13/14599186/google-waymo-sel...

To be honest, I don't have any idea why ANYONE keeps working after they have F-YOU money, CEOs or otherwise.

At some point, the work becomes the hobby. If you had fyou money, what would you do? Presumably not sit and stare at a wall all day. You'd do something you enjoy I assume. And for some, running one of the world's most powerful entities is enjoyable.

I could definitely keep myself entertained. Maybe that's why I don't have f-you money.

I'd just learn.

Learn everything.

I have a goal, it is to be better than average at every "skill".

and then what?

lol, you know its not possible to learn everything! There is no "then what?". Then entropy catches up with us all and we die eating at The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.

If your job involves hearing smart people talking to you about amazing ventures before getting into a fancy restaurant the night before you take a plane to some foreign headquarters it earned the right to be called a hobby.

Consider the possibility that what you may perceive as work, someone else considers play with certain benefits.

If you have certain goals in life e.g. building certain large infrastructures, it might be beneficial to do these in an existing company than starting your own or doing it in a nonprofessional environment.

Plus, yes, there are other goals than "not working".

Because in most cases, your needs rise together with your salary. Once you start earning 200-500k/year, you just get a house/car/boat that costs nearly that much to maintain. Obviously there are people who keep their cost of living low and stash that money in a saving account so that after 10 years they can realistically stop working altogether, but that's not the pattern that I'm usually seeing.

> The logic on this statement doesn't really check out, as if this were the case it would be impossible to retain CEOs, they would all leave after a month.

Or, CEOs don't have the same set of options engineers have, or, CEOs are drawn from a pool with different preferences than engineers have, or...

Well, lots of other reasons your dismissal of the claim about engineers based on CEO behavior is unconvincing.

The general point is valid, though, and often comes up in discussions about basic income or similar programs: if the hypothesis is that someone whose needs are already met will refuse to work, then we can look at the existing population of people whose needs are already met as a way to verify the hypothesis. And we find the hypothesis is falsified by observation: some people who don't need to work don't work. Some people who don't need to work do work.

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