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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

Money is important, but past a certain point (when you are able to live comfortably and are no longer feeling stressed about your personal/family finances), other factors come into play. Off the top of my head:

1) Respect. By that I mean professional respect - I want to feel that my contributions are valued and that people recognize my talents :)

2) Team. Working with dirtbags is miserable no matter how much you get paid. Sure, I'd do it if you threw enough money at me, but all else being equal, I'd like to work on a team full of smart, pleasant people.

3) Growth. Learning opportunities (conferences, training, etc.), promotions, stimulating projects, etc.

4) Time. As in my time. Overtime is kept to a minimum and really only happens when there is a true emergency. This kind of ties in with #1.

To an extent you can substitute cash for any or all of these. However, if your working environment and/or culture is toxic, you're going to have trouble with retention no matter what else you do.

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Let me be a Certified Finance Asshat to demonstrate that you are externalizing money:

I will give you $35k/year for 40 hours a week total compensation and you get all the other 4.

Why aren't you taking this job? The reason is because you know that it is a laughable salary.

FRC has an agenda. Its agenda is convince naive people to go work for their startups ( and other startups ) for Magic and Unicorns, rather than $$.

P.S. Thanks for downvotes!

You're being downvoted because you ignored this:

>Money is important, but past a certain point (when you are able to live comfortably and are no longer feeling stressed about your personal/family finances), other factors come into play.

It's difficult to counter his comment when you don't address it and give an obviously low salary.

Whenever one needs to quantify using unquantifiable words like "important but past a certain point" it is helpful to solve that point at the limit.

Pacifists, for example, will refuse to kill someone who is pointing a gun at their family because of their, in my not humble opinion, stupid beliefs. I may think their beliefs are stupid but I cannot say that they themselves are full of crap because, after all, they live their beliefs.

The people who are making claims that money is not the only mandatory thing and everything else is optional nice to have thing(s) tend to weasel out of the lets solve for money being zero ( or minimum wage ).

Unfortunately, while pacifists do not disrupt my life (when their world collides with reality, they die and their ideas die with them ) the people who are claiming that conferences are more important than $$ disrupt my market. This means that my goal is to illustrate as much as possible how silly their positions are.

>The people who are making claims that money is not the only mandatory thing and everything else is optional nice to have thing(s) tend to weasel out of the lets solve for money being zero ( or minimum wage ).

Except it wasn't his claim.

The claim is pretty well known: Below a certain threshold, money is the most important thing. Above it, it is not. This is very different from the extreme pacifist mindset. The equivalent would be: "There are certain circumstances where it is important to kill another. Outside of those circumstances, it should not be the primary means."

As an aside: Telling people what is important to them and ignoring their own claims on what is important to them will not make you many friends.

> The claim is pretty well known: Below a certain threshold, money is the most important thing. Above it, it is not. This is very different from the extreme pacifist mindset. The equivalent would be: "There are certain circumstances where it is important to kill another. Outside of those circumstances, it should not be the primary means."

The claim is horse manure which is why it includes no numbers for the threshold. My number matched his claim. Except that the claim is not what was meant. What was meant is "if I'm compensated well into six figures then the other things matter more than incremental dollar".

The article is describing how to peddle low salaries + magic pixie dust as a way to swindle the candidates to accept non-competitive offers.

> Telling people what is important to them and ignoring their own claims on what is important to them will not make you many friends.

That's ok. I do not need many friends. Especially if I have to accept as friends those that claim 'oh, it is excellent' when in reality they mean something else.

>The claim is horse manure which is why it includes no numbers for the threshold.

Attribution of intention is a common step towards the breakdown of dialogue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias#Types

>That's ok. I do not need many friends.

OK, perhaps I was too narrow in my statement. Let me rephrase:

Telling people what is important to them and ignoring their own claims on what is important to them will not get you fruitful conversations.

Which is likely why people are downvoting you instead of replying to you. You are giving strong signals of poor communications, and people are not finding it worthwhile to engage with you.

Well, based on the + of the post, it seems not to be the case.

Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes

> The claim is horse manure which is why it includes no numbers for the threshold.

There's no absolute threshold. It's relative. I recently left one job for another that paid less than half as much. Things is, both were well into six figures, so the difference doesn't mean much to me.

Still, if the old job had paid into seven figures instead of "just" six, I wouldn't have left. It was a boring, easy job, but not intolerable. At seven figures, I would've ridden that horse into the ground.

People do stuff like offer lowball offers that aren't livable.

Back in 2000, I got exposed to this out of school-- VP of whatever offers me $27k (with a salary review in 6 months) to be a DBA. "I got up and said 'thanks'". He followed me out to the parking lot and doubled the offer.

At the end of the day, money matters, and all of the bullshit about "other factors" are just brought into the mix because fringe benefits are cheaper than cash. For me, a good working environment is the ante. If you're an asshole, you don't make the cut. The rest is all about compensation.

If you commit to giving me premium health insurance, I'll accept a discount in pay. If you commit to giving me more vacation time, I'll accept a discount in pay. I can play ping pong at the gym for free and my Dr. Pepper habit costs me about $10/week. If you're not an asshole, expect me to take <=10 days of PTO, have a $10k healthcare deductible, you'd best be paying a 50-70% premium to what I'm making today, as I'm going to have to hire minions to do shit for me.

>People do stuff like offer lowball offers that aren't livable.

Which is not disputed by anyone in this thread. Why do we keep bringing it up?

>At the end of the day, money matters, and all of the bullshit about "other factors" are just brought into the mix because fringe benefits are cheaper than cash. For me, a good working environment is the ante. If you're an asshole, you don't make the cut. The rest is all about compensation.

You do realize you just admitted there is something you care about more than compensation?

Think about procurement. Even a pure commodity has to meet minimum standards.

If you’re buying eggs at the supermarket, they need to be of uniform size and not be spoiled, for example. Other than that, they’re a pure commodity.

  Money is important, but

I'm going to stop you right there.

#1 is solved by more money. Want me to work in a team that mocks my work? $100k extra will do it

#2 is solved by more money. Want me to work with dirtbags? $100k

#3 is solved by more money. Want me to wear a "super junior nobody" title? As long as you're up front about it, $100k.

#4 is solved by money. My overtime rate is 2x normal rate

You know why? Money buys more than just "roof" and "comfort". It buys everything. Planes. Parachutes. Yachts. Horses. Jet skis. Vacation homes. College and private school for kids.

If you think that more money doesn't motivate you, either you've never been paid enough, or you need to go find some interesting hobbies. You'll quickly find they cost money (and do not accept "but I'm happy at work" statements as payment)

OK, so how do I buy a 3-day working week with my extra salary?

You can. Yes. Go to your boss. Ask to be paid 60% of your current salary to work M-W. I'm sure you'll get a yes.

I'm sure he'll laugh in my face.

That means you are not making enough money.

Haha the length of time to complete projects would go through the roof, so that would never work here.

Perhaps, but that would be exactly valuing the extra free time over the pure amount of cash, which is a counterargument to your "solved by money" idea. I would take "$60,000 and a 3 day week", but "solved by money" suggests you should take "100,000 and a 5 day week".

60k for 3 days a week is exactly the same as 100k for 5 days a week.

Tried this a few months back.. didn't work :(

Honestly I don't think that works on long term. The amount of money you make will soon become your new normal, but the shitty condition will continue to make your life miserable.

The only difference the extra money makes is that once you got used to the money, you're trapped in that position.

Hobbies

Try them.

I promise you that when you're making a 14-person formation in freeall, or flying a new faster turboprop, or signing for your new yacht, your work will not be on your mind.

They have to hope people succumb to lifestyle inflation. They probably try to get you hooked on $5000 suits, $200 diners, luxury vehicles, vacations in the Hamptons, etc.

A lot of these things don't bring you much additional happiness compared to their lower cost alternatives (especially not suits or fancy dinners).

However, what does bring you lots of additional happiness is being able to afford a home that is large enough for you within a short walking distance of work. In many places like SF or NYC that requires a serious amount of money (many millions), and yet it does significantly improve your happiness in a way that a lesser amount of money cannot by buying you more available time each day.

$5000 is a Kilgour suit. I can take them or leave them - you can get really nice suits for $1k. In NYC, you can get really nice ones for $750.

$200 dinner is nothing special. You can easily spend $200 for two people in any major market in any non-garbage restaurant:

Appetizers ~ 17-20 each Mains 29-60 each Bottle of wine - 40 and above Tax ~ 10% Tip ~ 20%

> If you think that more money doesn't motivate you, either you've never been paid enough

Or you have; there's significant evidence that behind a certain level, additional income doesn't actually provide additional improvement in most measures of satisfaction and subjective quality of life (IIRC, some studied in the 1990s showed this on average at somewhere around $250,000 in then-current dollars in the US.) Once you've reached the point where that occurs, it only motivates to the extent that knowing you've missed an opportunity to run up a higher score is disappointing to you.

I've been poor, and I was much more motivated by money then than now, when I'm being paid much more.

$250k then could be $500k+ now at which point I'd agree with you.

When the FRC backed startups start paying developers $250k a year, we can have that conversation. Alas, the argument is that they should go work for them for $100k because of all those extra perks that in a $$ terms cost about 30k/year.

It is certainly true that money has diminishing returns. Think of it as an asymptotic function approaching a maximum level of happiness as income tends towards infinity.

However, it's also important to take into account the cost of living. That $400K/year figure (accounting for inflation), which marks something like 90% of the way up the asymptotic curve, is an average across the US. But if you're living in very expensive parts of the country, you need a good deal more than that in order to be able to afford a nice house, with separate bedrooms for all of the children that you (would like to) have, with a short commute, and then a bunch more in the way for child care, college tuition, maybe private school, extracurricular activities, and a whole host of others if you have those children.

To give you an anecdote, I know a guy who's making $500K/year and has all of those expenses, except he does not live in the city, and he's barely treading water. He's experiencing significant financial stress that more money would be a solution to. And this is at $500K/year, which is not quite enough to support his lifestyle.

Sorry if you make 500k and have financial problems you are either stupid or you fool others by complaining a lot. A lot of well off people complain about money all the time. I guess that's what motivated them to make more.

This doesn't make sense to me. Cities are the most expensive place to live, no? I would have thought that living in some small town and making 500k would give you even more buying power than it does in the city.

Where does your friend live that $500k does not pay for rent or a mortgage on a nice house, dinner at restaurants on a regular basis, and still money in the savings account?

You are severely underestimating how much it costs to put multiple kids through expensive colleges. Also, they don't live in "some small town", it's just not the city; it's still seriously expensive compared to the national home value.

But I'm not here to debate this other person's life choices, nor could I. The point is that even $500K/year is not enough for a decent number of people, whereas, say, $1M would be.

I would admit that there is probably some amount after which more money would not necessarily increase my motivation, but for me that figure is going to be pretty large. Probably 20X more than I make today, so I'm in no danger of suddenly finding myself unmotivated.

Nah. I gave up on the money grub once I had enough. Then I had a life.

A limit to how much you want to spend on hobbies. Only so many restaurant meals I can eat. Only so much time in the day, and so much more to do with it than, all that horror show.

> once I had enough

It's easy to find other things to prioritize when you have F-U money in the bank.

Doesn't take nearly that much. Just keep working, but stop obsessing over it. Contract instead of full-time is how I did it.

I'm not disagreeing with you in principle, but nobody is going to offer me a job and say "It sucks to work here, the people suck, the conditions are stressful, and the hours are long. In fact - if you join us, I'm going to hire someone whose sole job will be to kick you in the marbles every morning when you walk in the building. You say you earn $X at your current job in which you are content? How does $X*5 sound?"

I mean I might put up with a lot if I'm being paid so much that I'd be able to retire after only a couple of years :)

My impression is that a lot of coding jobs in finance are like that - the offices are ugly, the business people more chaotic and sociopath than in other industries, the working conditions poor (terrible tools, security tying your hands etc.), the mission uninspiring - but they pay top market rates to compensate for that.

This isn't really true in my experience.

In which part - is the job not dreadful, or pay just average?

BTW this was obviously a gross generalization that was only signalling that such jobs exists and that there is a significant amount of them. At the same time, most finance coding jobs probably don't pay top market rates.

> You say you earn $X at your current job in which you are content? How does $X5 sound?"

Sign me up.

See, had an uncomfortable conversation with a wife of fourteen years who went through hell and back and managed to claw from the bottom to a relatively stable plateau*: she's freaking out because we don't have much savings (read: not 7 figures in liquid cash). Probably for no reason considering most of people that she knows won't be able to pull out ten thousand from a bank account. But this is life and her not carrying about finances carries more weight that I would have to color code a spreadsheet.

Thinking as an employer, though, is it worth an extra $100k to be able to mock you? Hell no. Politeness is free.

Is it worth an extra $100k to be able to employ dirtbags alongside you? Maybe for some jobs that involve ethically dubious actions, but probably not for most.

Is it worth an extra $100k to be able to give you a super junior title? No, titles are free.

Is it worth 2x your normal rate to get you to work overtime? Maybe, but that's pretty expensive. They would be better off if they could get another person to do it at a normal rate.

So, you might be willing to put up with those things for more money, but for the employer it is usually a waste of money pay that. It doesn't make sense for an employer to pay extra for those things unless they are really getting a lot of value out of it.

If it is important to you to be able to mock your employees, and you wouldn't run your business without being able to be a jerk like that, then you might want to pay that extra money.

Good business? No, but not all businesspeople are good at business. People get into it for very different reasons.

I've worked for a lot of acerbic bosses. I charge extra. Right now, with things so tight, it's approaching a 100% premium. You know what? The "jerks" keep paying it, because they can't find anything else.

Are they good bosses? Hahahahaha! No. About the only thing I do is make it really clear is that I'm there for the money, and I will walk off if I don't like it. So, I get the extra pay, without the abuse.

Yes, there are many poorly run businesses. I would never debate that point.

However, this article is explicitly targeted at businesses, so obviously they should be providing advice on how not to be a poorly run business.

>Is it worth 2x your normal rate to get you to work overtime? Maybe, but that's pretty expensive. They would be better off if they could get another person to do it at a normal rate.

>So, you might be willing to put up with those things for more money, but for the employer it is usually a waste of money pay that. It doesn't make sense for an employer to pay extra for those things unless they are really getting a lot of value out of it.

Good. The whole point is to make it painful for the company to have you work overtime regularly. In fact, 2x is quite cheap and a better way to accomplish that would be to charge more for each overtime hour (so that 16 hour days would cost much more than 2 normal 8 hour days).

If the company can't extract enough value out of the employee's time, maybe they shouldn't ask them to work overtime.

> If the company can't extract enough value out of the employee's time, maybe they shouldn't ask them to work overtime.

Exactly my point. For highly-remunerated workers like software developers, companies can rarely get as much value out of poor working conditions as it will cost them in extra wages, so it is usually a poor business decision to have poor working conditions.

2x overtime means that one 16 hour day equals three 8 hour days. This is standard language among workers in the US who get paid overtime. It means you get paid 2x your hourly rate for each of your overtime hours. Also referred to as doubletime.

I'd agree with some of yours but not others. I definitely won't take 1 or 2 for $100K extra for the long term - maybe a year at most.

For 3, I'd have to be paid a lot more. There is always a serious concern that while I have all the skills to do my current job, I don't have the skills to do most developer jobs out there (stuck with old paradigms and technology). So me getting paid a little extra now may mean I'll be out of a job soon with little to show on my resume.

4 is definitely an option for me if it significantly reduces the time to retirement.

>You know why? Money buys more than just "roof" and "comfort". It buys everything. Planes. Parachutes. Yachts. Horses. Jet skis. Vacation homes. College and private school for kids.

Of all these, only the last one interests me.

To be totally frank, an average paying job which lets me retire at, say, 60 and gives me a lot of free time and is very low stress is ideal, and none of the above would interest me. The only reason I don't stick to such a job is because I know job situations are fickle. Management changes, etc. But if I knew the job situation (decent pay, lots of free time and no stress) would stay forever, I'd just stick to it.

Which is what the parent was saying: Past a certain point, money isn't a great motivator.

I agree with you, that money will offset those issues. But throwing more money at it is a short term "fix". I'll work that crappy job making piles of money with a short time horizon in mind. I'll do it for 6 months to a year saving as much of that over and above normal pay so that I have options in 6 months to a year to take a low or normal paying position someplace I enjoy. (Or fiddle with my own ideas for a year.) The company that just throws money at the problem is also just thinking short term, they are likely going to have high turnover. But, if they have the money to keep throwing at that problem too then their model of burning money and burning people could last a while. Make sense it sounds like it wall street/finance firms focused on money and short term results...

> Money is important, but past a certain point (when you are able to live comfortably and are no longer feeling stressed about your personal/family finances)

My problem is with that statement. I know this is a very common belief, but has anyone actually hit that point?

I have gone through several cycles over the past 10 years, where I thought 20% more money would get me there. At each point, what was required to be comfortable would change.

At first it was having enough money for me, then having enough that I could get married and buy a house and help my wife, then it was having enough money for my kids to go to a decent day care. Now I'm worried we don't have enough to send our kids to private school.

Once I hit that, I will probably want to have enough money that my wife doesn't need to work. I wonder if that's when I can relax and the stress of finance will go away?

In my current job I am paid below market rate. If I cared about money first I absolutely would not remain in this job. However, the coworkers are absolutely excellent and I am treated with respect. I would hesitate to trade that for anything less than an absolutely stellar offer well above market rate because not only what I have good, but also that I am content with my current lifestyle.

It makes me really happy that there are people like you who have achieved this.

Anxiety is destroying me in my current job, even though I love my co-workers. I need to figure out how to value money less and find an employer that would work with me on a 4 day week schedule.

The good old Hedonic Treadmill ("as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem"). I do agree with you, but is private school strictly necessary? (not judging - in your position, I'd want to send them too btw).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

I live in Nevada. Nevada is 50th (or sometimes 49th) in the United States when they rank public education.

I grew up in Utah, and would NEVER had considered private school for my child there. My experience was fantastic.

But the difference in quality of education between these two states is so extreme, its hard to believe they are part of the same country and adhere to any of the same federal standards.

This is true, but can I just pay devil's advocate here. What if you're exceptionally stoic and enjoy learning things in your spare time?

If you're emotionally stable enough and a hard worker outside of your career, you might want to just grow yourself a nest egg (pension, housing, shares, etc.) or make as much money as possible to provide for your children/wife/hedonism.

Also, it's a good thing to learn how to placate toxic personalities and to be low maintenance.

Not saying that it's easy, but I wanted to say this because I think people assume too readily that their own personal comfort is the most important thing when they take a job. Personally, as my emotional health has gotten better and I've made deeper connections with people, I've prioritised very different things than my younger self.

A lot of these are independent from salary, however, and usually uncorrelated. I pretty have all of these at my current job, certainly the best I've ever had at any job (and I'd throw in a #5: Perks). And my current job, at a Big 4, also happens to pay by far the most of any job I've ever had too.

I would certainly never sacrifice any of these for a minor bump in pay, but oftentimes you don't have to sacrifice any of them even for a major bump in pay.

Most people have this idea that either you get paid less and have a good job environment or you are highly paid in a bad environment. From my experience it's the opposite. Companies that pay well also have a good environment.

Here to second that notion. So far in my career every move I've done has been for a salary bump and quality of life improvement.

Same for me!

Actually, I guess I do have to agree with that.

Actually, oftentimes they are correlated. Your pay is often low when you work on a shitty overstressed team on a dead-end project, and vice versa.

I don’t know, $750k per year would put all of those concerns to rest for me.

I don’t care about respect when I’m sitting on a boat off the coast of Nice. “Comfortable” for me means having the option to not work.

And that's how it works in finance. You are hired to do a job. For boat load of money. When that job is done, you are fired. And no one cares because working 3 years for guaranteed $800k/year + $500k bonus that you will probably get is worth being fired on a 3 year + 1 day anniversary.

Serious question, how many people in finance really make $3.6+ million in just a few years then retire? Honestly that's enough to pay off every cent of debt for both my wife and I, and then pull off over $100k/yr for the rest of our lives.

Give me $3.6 million today and I will never touch an office door for the rest of my life.

Devs? Not a lot. Senior devs that are basically tech leads + PMs for projects with a visible termination point? All the time.

Depending on the lifestyle you want, your choice of location etc, 3.6MM doesn't go far. You also have to take into account inflation / insurance against major changes in future (divorce / health hits / accidents?).

Yes, you can choose to live in rural India for <10k a year, but that's exactly what you are getting away from by going after these high paying jobs. I want to live in a good / safe place, have good schooling opportunities for my children, have the ability to enjoy the activities around at a fun level (skiing - about $500 per day, cycling - about $5-10k a year, eventually it adds up).

Finally the concern about uncertainities of future means you can pretty much never afford to go out of touch with the industry that made you all your money. Yeah I can F off on my bike / paint etc after $X MM, but there might come a day when that isn't enough and here I am with zero marketable/sellable skills having to downgrade my life style because I chose to not practice my profession. You might think but I will do open source, but I will do hobby projects etc. - in reality, I have seen very few (again with equal or more discipline to what they were putting into their desk job) succeed in keeping up with the market via a 'hobby'.

If I didn't make it clear, I don't see myself not working on software until the day I die :). It might be lower hours, but it is going to be a significant portion of my time. The alternatives are too risky, but again YMMV because your risk tolerance is different.

> (when you are able to live comfortably and are no longer feeling stressed about your personal/family finances)

This is too vague to be quantifiable in the way you intend.

Money is important because it's by far the most common medium by which we acquire things that are necessary for life (e.g. food, shelter). It's important to have sufficient income to have these things in the present and to be able to stash enough reserves of money to have them in the future. Money is important (full stop).

Here's my entirely subjective, anecdotal view: I've never met a person who says "money isn't the most important thing (about a job)" who also was not either: a) well off enough their entire lives that they never really had to worry about not having money or b) engaging in some serious sweet lemons rationalization so as to avoid facing their reality.

I agree that those are important, but money is a HUGE indicator/proxy of how much a company respects you, your talents and your contributions.

I've quit a higher paying position because of bad leadership and no growth opportunities, but I dug myself into that hole, and I'm absolutely looking forward to a raise (and I'm not yet at the point where I'm not stressed about finances).

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