Comment by zerogvt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zerogvt | Hacker News Reader

Funny enough I had a related talk with a friend just yesterday. Say that there is a hard contest with cruel winning odds which -if you succeed- you get a permanent position in a public sector body (say ECB) with very good salary for life. Also say that the situation in private sector (job market) goes to hell and shows no signs of reverting any time soon. Then say you succeed and get that lifer position where no one can fire you from but yourself. Then imagine you get a boss or an environment that it is so damned toxic that is unbearable. But still no one can fire you. No one but you. But now the dilemma is huge. Do you quit a permanent position and jump back to hell (even less well equipped since the time you left it) or do you just hang on in there hoping for a wind change? The stakes are much higher than if you were in yet another private job where you'd be just refreshing your CV and interviewing.

Dunno - I guess there are cases where you need to be careful what you wish for.

This sounds like the tale of many Brazilian civil servants. Civil servants in Brazil are either indicated by someone ("comissionados"), which means your job is tied to the current administration, or you've passed in a selection and have your job stability for life ("concursado"). These selections usually have tens or hundreds of thousands of people competing for a handful of vacancies, so people spend years studying and doing many of these (they're called "concurseiros"). Once you're in, you're set for life.

Adding to this, the public sector pays much more than the private sector (often 50% ~ 100% more). Have job stability, generous vacations and other benefits. Depending on where you are (federal, state or municipal government levels), you also have a special retirement plan that gives you 100% of your salary when you retire (the private policies are capped at around 4.5 minimum wages, for comparison a good dev in the bigger cities can get about 10~15 minimum wages).

And so we have many "lifers" in the public sector, and this kind of job is the dream for many people (which is terrible IMHO).

To a large extent a job is what you make of it. I understand why being a lifer might seem terrible to one and a dream to another. There are no constants here - it's all relevant.

Someone gets a permanent position and is dragging his feet and dying out of boredom. Someone else sees that as an extra degree of freedom (not having to worry about his job security) and he is branching out say to explore/contribute to a tech stack that is not popular with employers.

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