Ask HN: How do you handle jealousy of well-compensated software engineers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you handle jealousy of well-compensated software engineers?

2 pointsoefrha4 comments

This post is mainly targeted at HN readers who are good at programming but are not professional software engineers, with a focus on academics and aspiring academics. I know there are plenty of us here.

Say you were exceptionally smart as a kid and dreamed of being the next Einstein, Gauss, etc. You went to a top college, by which point you should have realized that you're not really a child prodigy, but you're still among the brightest. Then you went onto a top grad school (in a non-CS field), by which point you realize you're now competing with equally smart people, and there are bound to be losers.

Meanwhile, you discovered programming at a young age and love it. By the time of your grad school career, you've been programming for north of a decade and you're pretty decent, but don't have flashy projects to show for since you've been focusing on your main academic area for the most part.

However, you have software engineer friends/acquaintances who started programming only in college, who are probably less technically capable and less passionate, who nevertheless got into FAANG or similarly well-compensated companies right out of college, pulling in six figures right off the bat.

You? Your grad school stipend is peanuts, and in a crowded field you're looking at multiple terms of postdoc even if you're modestly successful. You're nowhere near any achievement you dreamed of, the future is unclear and probably unexciting (statistically speaking), and your paycheck sucks. It's hard not to feel jealous, especially when research is going nowhere.

So, how do you deal with this? I'm interested in perspectives from both people who stayed in academia, and people who left. Other comments and observations are of course also welcome.

I left academia (Computational Neuroscience) to work in Data Science.

Some of my best friends stayed in and are now postdocs (I left the PhD with the consolation master).

I'm in Europe so the difference in compensation is nowhere near as big (tech pays less here and grad school pays more) but really it's about what you want to do.

If the compensation is the most important thing then you won't be happy in grad school, equally if the research isn't fulfilling you then you might as well work in industry and earn more.

My friends who are happy in research are those who are working on things they really love (in High Energy Physics etc.) and wouldn't exchange it for the higher salaries (and less freedom) of industry.

For me, it wasn't the pay that turned me off academia but the insecurity - you can study it for years just to be cast out of the field when you can't get a permanent position and in the meantime you continually have to move which makes serious relationships very difficult.

Basically it's a compromise - I think I made the right choice, but perhaps had I better chosen my field in grad school (maybe if I had stayed in Phyiscs?) I would have preferred to stay - I certainly wouldn't say industry is always better.

Your point on insecurity is spot on. Your concerns are my concerns as well. Compensation is just (the most quantifiable) part of the insecurity formula that plays a greater part in my case.

Funny you mentioned hep; I happen on work on hep-th. Do I love the subject? Absolutely. Is compensation the most important thing? Absolutely not. However, I've learned over the years that appreciating other people's successful work and actually trying to build on top of that are pretty different, and the handful of successful theories I love are really built upon the (life-long) failure of thousands and thousands of nobodies, and I'm very likely to be a nobody, given that I'm not thrown of the train of nobodies in the first place. It's just natural to think that if I'm going to be a nobody, I might as well be compensated well for that (and not making my head explode all the time), like that guy. The thought really puts a dent on the "love", and I'm personally (maybe just me) much more prone to exchanging pure passion for something more tangible.

> higher salaries (and less freedom) of industry.

Depending on the definition of freedom, when you have a "jobby" job it's at least easy to separate work and life, whereas in academia, at least in the theoretical branches, it seems much harder to draw boundaries. (I'm not saying people in the industry don't work hard.)

By the way, glad you're happy with your decision.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, I suppose.

Yes, compensation is vastly better as a software developer, _if_ you don't mind working on uninteresting rubbish in a stultifying business environment for your entire career, which is what the vast majority does. Even if you decide to value money over intellectual stimulation (I won't judge; having creature comforts is indeed comforting), there's no guarantee that compensation is going to stay that nice forever; people are literally flooding into software and that's bound to drive wages down at some point.

Personally, I'd give a lot to be in academia; I'm damned sick of the rat race.

There's very stressful competition in academia, especially in early academic careers, so depending on the place and person the experience could be stultifying as well. You could also work on uninteresting (or at least unimportant) rubbish in academia, or you could work on interesting stuff that doesn't deliver; in either case you're heavily published for that. No one gives a damn about "ten years of experience" if you weren't producing quality papers on a regular basis within that period (actually, in that case ten years of experience might be worse than no experience).

> that's bound to drive wages down at some point.

Yeah. But at least in my field, the pay is guaranteed to suck in the early career (we're talking close to a decade here), and won't get that much better afterwards, assuming you're successful. Kinda hard to fall that low.

I guess it does boil down to grass greener on the other side of the fence for the most part.

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