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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

  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)

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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%

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.

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.

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 :(

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

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