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Comment by downerending | Hacker News Reader

One of my measures for whether a tech job is "good" is how it compares to the pizza place that I worked for in college. Ignoring the lower pay, the pizza place wins more often than you'd think.

And as for Google, no not terrible, but no longer good enough that I'd accept a position there.

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> Ignoring the lower pay, the pizza place wins more often than you'd think.

It only wins because you're excluding some of the most important criteria. Stay at the pizza place for 12 years and see how you feel about what has happened to your life and well-being. Did you buy a house? No, you couldn't afford one. Did you get married and have a family? No, you couldn't afford one. Did you have amazing health insurance? No. Did you save anything for retirement? No, your bills are pretty close to your wages and the pizza place provides squat for benefits.

The only way the pizza place wins is if you work there for a short amount of time, otherwise entropy will particularly badly eat away at you (in every regard). Low paying jobs are brutal on people over long periods of time, living at the line of existence perpetually is very harsh. You can't fix things that break, you can't acquire values that you want.

"Ignoring the lower pay..."

I think it's just saying if both jobs paid the same, the pizza place would be a more rewarding, fulfilling and pleasant place to work.

Going back to In-n-Out instead of unknown-pizza-place which I can't look up and may not be on the list of good places to work:

"The typical In-N-Out Burger Store Manager salary is $84,315. Store Manager salaries at In-N-Out Burger can range from $55,134 - $130,157." — Glassdoor.com

That's pretty good for most of the US, particularly so outside of major cities, and especially if you've been making money — even just mediocre money — for 4 years, while skipping student debt.

What's sad is that if you are right, then some tech companies are only better than a restaurant because they give you more money. It's very, very sad when one's life and career are reduced to just making money.

It's also infuriating because you'd expect these large tech companies, with all their surplus resources, to be able to do better for their employees' happiness and well-being. Yet this would also be a money-focused way of looking at companies. I suspect employees' overall well-being has less to do with money and more with their bosses' attitude and the work environments they create. Many of these tech giants sound hellish to me, with their relationally-unenlightened, cutthroat, misanthropic corporate cultures. The maxim that "A players hire A players but B players hire C players" also applies to the human decency side, regarding the kind of managers a company's bosses hire or cultivate (as well as the policies they establish.) Some of these bosses may be A players on the technical/business side, but are B or C players on the human-decency scale (as with Steve Jobs, for example). Thus their company, though bursting at the seams with money, struggle to provide other things their employees need or want.

Employees who worship their company might be overjoyed that they're one of the chosen ones, but other employees who don't drink the Kool-Aid might not be as happy with the cult's toxic aspects, regardless of the money they're making.

How about if Google sweetens the pot with $350K/yr in sweet, sweet cash? Would you still prefer the "pizza place"? I mean, higher pay is pretty hard to "ignore" to folks without a trust fund. This is _five times_ what an European software engineer typically makes, and it's by no means the upper bound.

FWIW, I loved my years at Google, and I think of going back from time to time. Is it an ideal workplace? No. But it's the best I have worked at by quite a margin. Why do I think that? Because Google is able to offer competitive pay and the projects that don't make your eyes glaze over right from the start, with the potential for truly breathtaking pay and world-leading projects with a little bit of effort and moving around internally, if you have the chops. It's not the best paying place anymore (that'd be FB), but not far behind, and on the balance it more than compensates for that by offering more meaningful work and beyond state of the art dev infra.

Disclosure: I no longer work at Google, and hold no positions in its stock. They treated me well when I was there, so I wish them well.

'Best place to work' is different from 'place I chose to work'. Indeed, money sweetening the pot signals that a job isn't at a place that people want to work.

In theory, a place could be so great to work at that people would pay to be there. That would be negative pot sweetening with money.

Doesn't work like that if you have a family to support and a mortgage. In fact, it doesn't work like that at all. The probability that you will find interesting work as an engineer at least is directly proportional to how much the employer (or client) is willing to pay. If you're paid half a million dollars a year, chances are you won't be doing something mind numbing that a $100K/yr fresh grad can do. You will be doing gnarly, interesting shit where there's disproportionate ROI. In fact in my current consulting gig, some of my clients insist that I offload bullshit work to their FTEs. I like that. I wish I could do that when I was an FTE. :-)

ROI is only half of the equation, though. It will tell you the maximum the employer is willing to pay.

But the wage is determined by the least amount a suitable employee is willing to accept, which is affected by how interesting the work is and how "good" the environment is.

Do you really think Google is "compensating" for its shortcomings as a workplace? I mean, if you do that's great, less competition drives up the wages, but from personal experience that's just not true. They're a great employer (both technically and in terms of quality of employee experience) who also happens to pay really well. That's how they're able to attract the kinds of people they're able to attract: by not sucking and paying well. In fact, if they did suck as an employer, they'd not be able to compensate for it with pay - that only works on poor people. When your brokerage account begins to look like a phone number, you're too far up on the Maslow's pyramid to tolerate such shenanigans.

Where/how do you find employers who pay for hairy problem solving and not just another piece of CRUD?

https://careers.google.com/jobs/ ?

Indeed, I think it was CS Lewis that said salary is often inversely proportional to the inherent value of work.

> In theory, a place could be so great to work at that people would pay to be there. That would be negative pot sweetening with money.

Then it's no longer a job, it's an expensive hobby / education / retirement activity.

Most people work jobs to support themselves (or others) financially, you can't do that on negative income.

And having more income than you need means you can retire sooner and do more of your desired hobby then, so it absolutely is a pot sweetener.

The scientific world may disagree. I work in bioinformatics and take a pay cut to do interesting work. It's not negative, but I'm not making a lot of money. Supply and demand- people are willing to work in a low pay field because the pot is sweet. Academia is pretty sweet gig and pays crap to work on hairy problems. UPDATE- teachers spend money out of pocket on their classes, is that negative income?

When teachers spend money out of pocket on their classes, I would estimate they are doing so out of negative feelings, such as the feeling that it's such a shame for kids to fall due to lack of money; but I don't see that as a spiritually sweet place for a teacher to be. That is a response to pain.

I think people are different, I work for money and it is such a motivator for me that if it is good enough I don't notice the downsides of a place. I agree in theory, but I think that theory is less likely to apply in my case than others. Maybe though I just don't care about most of the things that other people care about a workplace.

Yeah, as an adult with responsibilities, that pizza place is unfortunately no longer a possibility. And I'm sure it seems better in memory than it actually was.

I've been in the $300s a couple of times, but my ability to get much useful done, joy of workmanship was completely washed out by the fairly nasty politics of the groups I was part of.

(I've never worked at Google, but after reading the internal message traffic surfaced in the Damore lawsuit, it's difficult to imagine enjoying it.)

Damore is the extreme case. There's a small clique of people there that do "social justice" activism on internal forums and little else. Damore pissed right into their punchbowl.

I'm not 100% sure why Google keeps those people around, but they are fairly easy to avoid: just don't engage, no matter how insane their ramblings are on any given week.

When it comes to things like threats of physical violence, threats to get someone fired, or even blacklisted at other companies, I expect to see offenders immediately dismissed. That's a basic workplace hygiene issue, and none of the companies I've ever worked for would tolerate it.

I agree with you on that one. But as much as this sucks, it doesn't have to suck _for you_. Just come in, do your work, leave, collect $12-20K (pretax) every 2 weeks depending on the level. Google is fine with that. You don't have to engage with this bullshit.

Can you explain why?

I'll have a shot : clear boundaries

So much this. With tech jobs I feel like I'm always on because of email and oncall.

With shift work, you have the luxury of turning your brain off work at the end of every shift.

Not just that, but even on breaks and during work there would be times where you can just turn off.

It could very well be age related, but I was never more relaxed than when I worked a retail-eqsue job. Even when on vacation.

Another shot: at that time he / she was a college student. Totally different preferences and cretira now.

Here’s my shot: satisfaction of work performed and stress levels at the end of the day—even if considered relative to remuneration.

Simple part-time job, clear expectations, no pressure to innovate, working with a crew of like-minded individuals. Yeah, I can see how it’d be more fun than a high level professional job.

No one worries that In and Out is eroding our democracy.

It'd differ by the job I'm comparing to, but in general, at the pizza place, the role and goals were pretty clear, my boss was outstanding, we were rarely idle and never given busywork, occasionally I got to save the day, and we made customers happy (in person!) many times every single day.

My highest-paying jobs generally lacked most or all of those qualities.

Possibly the most thoughtful comment I've ever read on this site :)

Gosh, thanks for your kind words!

Thank you for sharing! Fulfillment at work is about many intangibles beyond pay.

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