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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

This comment is wonderful. As a company founder (and de-facto CEO), I'd love it if all of my employees did this every year (or even continuously!). I think I am going to steal this and make it part of an annual review process (once we get big enough to have those).

I did notice however that one thing that isn't your list is your salary. I'm curious if that was intentional or not?

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Salary as a variable has changed over time;

Initially of course there was a minimum to meet my goals. My target was to be able to live somewhere, cover my cost of living, pay down my debts, and save 10% of my salary in long term savings.

Then as expenses started moving from being "in the future" to being "in the past" I was able to be more flexible on salary.

It helps that I have never equated what I was paid with how much I was "worth." It also helps that I don't have a lot of innate materialism. Although the funny story there is when I went back to Los Angeles to visit my old roommate from college I was showing him a fancy laptop that I had saved up for an bought. He had a pretty crap laptop but had recently bought a nice late model Mercedes Benz. Meanwhile, I had a 10 year old car at that point. We laughed at how the two different areas of California encouraged different status symbols.

I usually ask the questions differently:

    "Is it worth being paid $X to work here?"  
    "What is the likelihood I'll be paid $X elsewhere"

And if they're paying a lot of money, I can tolerate the crappy working conditions -- I first heard of this a couple decades ago as "crying all the way to the bank."

A CEO that comes in to fix a company has a similar question. "It's going to be a nightmare to turn this company around, is the pay worth it?"

If the money doesn't really matter all that much to you then I suppose some people wouldn't be willing to sacrifice their happiness once their basic needs and wants are met.

Interesting. I'm asking this question myself right now (crappy management+high stress but good pay/stock options). Of course the $ amount to satisfy 'worth it' differs for each person. Can you share your personal experience? How did you go about answering this question of 'is it worth it'?

I've seen this posed the other way. "How much money would it take to have me quit immediately?" On bad days, a grand or two would do it. But I guess this a combination of both love/hate for your job and any current financial commitments..

If the answer is anything less than what you make now, then it's really time to go.

The problem is a pay bump usually only motivates you for so long. Once you are above a threshold and don't have to worry about empty pockets (so you meet a subjective minimum standard), every additional $ might motivate for a period and then the effect is weak or gone. And then you need another pay bump to motivate you.

On the other hand horrible managers, colleagues, or general work conditions will grind you every day, long after the effect of that pay bump wears off. Bad working conditions of any kind are far more effective at dragging your spirit down than money is effective at pulling it up.

So a large percent of people have a crappy job and work with crappy people and have crappy bosses. The last century of management still hasn't solved that issue, so it's likely going to be an issue for the next century.

I ask myself these questions:

1. Do I have a life outside of work? "Yes" is a good thing. But "No" is not a deal breaker.

2. Is my identity of myself too entwined in the corporation? If "yes" it's time to do things entirely unrelated to work. They're paying me to do work, not sit around and stew how unfair they're treating me after all the loyalty I've shown them.

3. Are the people there decent human beings that don't know how to manage, or are they back stabbing assholes? The former is far more forgivable than the latter. Once the culture of back-stabbing starts, you're not gong to fix it ever.

4. Are the hours you're working actually making a difference? IOW have you been told to work 60 hours a week on a project that got canceled? This one is rough, because you're not getting those hours back, nor are you going to get to get a bonus for working hard on a canceled project. At what point did it become clear things weren't working?

5. What does my job enable me to do that I couldn't do without it? Expensive hobbies or travel?

6. Is work/life balance a two way street? "Yes" awesome. Again a "No" is not necessarily a deal breaker. Many people have jobs they need to be on call for or stay late for.

7. Am I growing? Am I learning how to deal with difficult people? Or is this a wasted amount of energy?

8. How long does it take me to reset from "anger" and "frustration" to calm and productive? If I can't leave in the evening and forget about work then something's wrong.

Good list.

> How long does it take me to reset from "anger" and "frustration" to calm and productive? If I can't leave in the evening and forget about work then something's wrong.

I think it's worth noting that this one really has nothing at all to do with the job. Not to trivialize it at all; it's hard work to change your mind, but it's entirely within your court to learn how to recognize and work with your mental state like this. Therapy and meditation are two useful tools for that.

Sure, those are valuable, and useful -- but they shouldn't be necessary as part of dealing with your job.

Totally agree; that's what I was saying.

Sorry to reply so late.

I use this as a metric. I like to think I'm a reasonable person in things I ask or told to do. I've worked in places where frustration was low and people were authentic and honest.

If something is wrong I ask myself if I need to reset my expectations or is what is happening very atypical?

Feelings are intuitive, and should be used that way. If something feels not right or not good, I tend not to want to bury them, but rather explore them.

It's important to keep in mind that organizations are dynamic and can change significantly in less than a year, even while keeping 95% of the same people. If there is one person making everyone's lives miserable then it may be worth sticking it out. In my own experience, people that were the most antagonistic or abusive toward their colleagues were also the closest to leaving the organization, either due to ambition, dissatisfaction, or personal illness/death.

I went to exactly one company because of the pay. For me it was a horrible choice, when my only motivation for working somewhere is the paycheck, I don't do my best work. Since that experience I've turned down big offers from companies where I knew from talking to them that they would not score well on my evaluation.

In the long term its better for me and for them that we don't have to go through the dance of 'why aren't you giving us more?' and the ultimate resolution will always be us parting ways.

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