What the Average Person Doesn't Understand About High Paying Jobs

Some of that culture develops pretty early, I think. Certainly by undergrad there seems to be a culture at many engineering schools where it's a point of pride to put in lots of hours. Sort of part of the "hardcoreness" to brag about 16-hour coding binges, weeks of sleep deprivation, etc.

On the other hand, there's also a culture, possibly smaller, of doing the opposite: making it a point of pride to not put in lots of hours, while still doing top-quality work. That culture emphasizes a different kind of hardcoreness, sort of the hackerly virtuoso who can bang out an A-quality semester project in a single day of in-the-zone wizardry.

I definitely notice that among adult engineers as well, at least as far as attitudes go (not sure how much variance there is in actual hours worked). There's the person who brags about how much they work and sees 9-5ers as slackers; versus the person who sees 60-hour weeks as a kind of failure, and instead brags about the time he fixed a huge problem in 3 hours and left work in time for happy hour.

I've never liked this expectation. To me a lot of overtime is a sign of bad management.

It also burns out employees a lot faster. There are times where overtime is needed(if you're on-call, or around a release occasionally) but it should always be repaid in lieu time or a bonus.

If you're putting in 60-80 hours a week standard you're probably so tired and miserable most of the time that you're not going to be performing at your peak anyhow.

I agree. Hours spent and performs are not synonymous.

If you are counting the hours and bringing up the subject of unpaid overtime, then the blog post isn't really directed at you.

People get paid excellent money in big companies because they are able to get results out of all proportion to a employee that's thinking about pay-per-hour. They are think more about payback-per-project or results-per-strategy.

I'm not showing off, I actually often hated it. I'm sorry you took it that way.

But it is what it is, and I think so-called average people fail to understand that when they talk about how they wish they got to work a high paying job at a big company.

    > It's articles like this that perpetuate the acceptance of unpaid overtime.

No it's not. Unpaid overtime is perpetrated by the incentive structure at companies where it's in the culture. The same bosses that are so happily getting their peons to work overtime for free are the giving positive performance reviews to people willing to work long hours. There's an economic incentive to working longer hours, so people who are willing to work longer hours will flourish and people who aren't will languish or find a new job where the incentive structure is better aligned with their work habits.

If you don't like companies like that, don't work for them. They'll have no shortage of other employees to choose from: most engineers coming out of college have adjusted to the notion of long work hours.

(Frankly, there's nothing wrong with this: there's a lot to cover for an engineering degree, and making it easier would do a disservice to the students.)

I would argue that these small companies are simply at an even higher level. My last paragraph deals with that type of company. Those people, the real difference makers that can do amazing things, are often better than anyone you'd find in any big company (examples like Google are outliers). Furthermore, I restrict the statement you're quoting to people who WANT to work in big companies but don't. The people you're talking about would never want to work in a big company because it sucks so much.

I'd say big companies in general don't value creativity. That's why they can't in general make good innovative products. I talk about that in some of my other posts on innovation, disruption, etc. However, I do believe that one needs to be creative to get through all the crap and problems that one experiences at a big company. It's a different type of creativity than what is required to develop a groundbreaking new product, but it's still creativity.

I think it really depends on what "big company" means. The author was likely talking about big software companies that recruit the best, such as Google, Facebook or Apple. Your comment makes me think of big companies that do software badly on the side, such as banks or telecoms.

edit: I see you said software companies. Maybe I have been brainwashed by their HR materials and those companies employees aren't so special.

I think stats where not the strong point of the article...

A top 1% (US) athlete might make it to college, but would still have little chance of becoming a professional. A top %1 musician would probably make a lot closer to $0 than $1M.

Thats just how salary works. I've never looked at it as "You're getting paid to do N hours of work", but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."

In the UK your employer cannot force you to work more than 48 hours a week, but written into my contract was a clause waiving that maximum. I dont think I've ever worked less than 60 hours a week. The weeks where you work 80+ hours, you just try not to think about the hourly rate...

I hear what you're saying and I tend to agree. I can't help but notice a huge parallel to my days in high school marching band. The state (Texas) imposed a limit on how many hours a school band could practice that our school mostly respected. However, one of our rivals did about double the allowed max by having "optional" practices. Yeah, you guessed it. Only those that showed up to all the optional practices got to march, everyone else was stuck on the sidelines.

Granted, it worked...This school's band was always awesome due to so many extra hours and handedly beat us and everyone else in competitions. :-(

Amen. Actually what I've learnt from people working in big corps (be it banking, pharma, IBM, whatever) bureaucracy and politics reign supreme. I'm absolutely sure that they don't fare any better than the most despised government bodies, actually. So much for the free-market legend.

It's possible that there is no overlap between the set of upvoters and the set of bitchers. There are dozens of people on the internet.

Some people upvote an article not because it was good or because they agree with it, but because it is thought-provoking and conversation-starting. Which this one clearly is.

Well, if that were the case, people wouldn't need to get paid at all!

Salaries track two things:

Supply: If something is unpleasant, dangerous, or illegal there will be fewer people who will do it. Construction workers, drug dealers and prostitutes can make some decent cash.

Demand: If you are awesome and your skills are in demand, companies will pay more to keep you. This is why a high-class prostitute can make quite a bit more than a street walker, despite the danger of street-walking that should limit the supply.

So yes, if working at your job is pleasant, you can pay your employees less. But if your employees are in high demand, you can't pay them that much less because the whole point of work is that you're exchanging how annoyed you are to have to be there for cash.

In addition to supply/demand, from the other comment, there is another point.

A high salary means that your employer consider you to have high worth. They won't waste your time -- and they will try to keep you happy (you're a valuable resource).

Edit: I should add a corollary -- for job satisfaction, stay away from situations with too little money and hard competition for few jobs. (The academic world and bureaucracies comes to mind.) It is like too many rats in a too small cage...

Another question, about 60-80 hours work weeks:

I've always read/heard that 40 hours was a work "optimum". If you do more/less hours, the productivity over time will be less. Are high paid people generally able to work 60-80 hours a week over years and be productive?

(I wouldn't know -- I'm not certain that 40-hour rule fits me personally.)

This has always struck me as well: given so much inefficiency, waste and corruption, how do they still survive? On a macro level, given human irrationality, such as our well-documented cognitive biases, how does the world continue to 'work'?

Not sure I'm buying the idea that gender has much to do with this. I'm sure Google could instead find an additional 10 female programmers for $100k each - thus changing the averages without having to overpay this one employee.

Looking at organizations in general, the pay structure is definitely not a Normal distribution (which people might intuitively believe it should be). If the average there is $100k, the bunch of people earning more than $500k are in a different class altogether.

Then what about a black, lesbian, Jewish female?

I mean, Jewish folks are doing pretty good now, but in the past that would certainly have been the most persecuted and rare combination I can imagine!

Probably true, a huge amount of game theory there that no doubt contributed to the scenario. But just because she wasn't worth $6m when she joined, it doesn't mean that she's not worth $6m now. Almost nobody (maybe 1 in a billion, and that's if you include professional athletes) is worth $6 million if they're only just starting out. But after establishing an amazing track record, that's when a lot of people are able to cash in. I think it may be naive if we attribute the dollar amount to only what knowledge she can bring to Facebook, and disregard whatever merit she can bring herself to the table. When was the last time you heard of someone being paid millions to just shut up and do paperwork in the basement mail room? I think that stuff is just for spy novels, no?

"The value the person is bringing to Google was never close to $6m, otherwise she would have already been getting that (or close to it)."

This is rarely true, unfortunately. Salaries are determined when you join a company, before you've had a chance to bring any value to it. After you've joined there's usually just the annual increment to look forward to and maybe some once-off bonuses for exceptional achievements. It's very unusual for salaries to be adjusted otherwise, no matter how much value you've been bringing to a company... unless you indicate that you might be leaving - which is what seems to have happened in this case.