Comment by cephaslr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cephaslr | Hacker News Reader

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I used to get really worked up early in my career trying to win the ratings game. When I got older I began to question the concept of the career, ironically when I finally started ‘winning’ at it.

1. Ratings and promotions within a job/company are boss personality and politically dependent and typically very unfair. Lots of hard work goes unrewarded.

2. Even if you do get lucky and get a promotion, your prize is 5-10% salary bump (maybe) and more work, stress and meetings (I don’t much enjoy meetings myself). Look closely at most big company executives and think if you really want the job for more than the social prestige/ego. They travel a ton and are always in meetings, it gets old.

3. So if the executive jobs are undesirable, then climb the ladder for money? It takes allot of money to make a difference, I.e you need $500k in the bank to ek out approx $1500 a month in cash flow at 4%. If you making $100k annually or $150k annually, $200k, or even $250 its still going to take over a decade to save a decent amount of money. The 5-10% salary bump doesn’t make much difference.

So why a career? There are likely more efficient ways to make money if that’s your goal. Starting a business, blogging, consulting, etc may have more risk but the ceiling is uncapped unlike a ‘career’. So why sacrifice something wonderful like time with your child? Money? Ego? You want a great LinkedIn profile one day? If given the option tomorrow, I would max my parental leave unless it impacted teammates in a negative way.

I would genuinely be interested if this is a minority sentiment?

I don't plan on having kids, but as someone early in my career, I can agree with the sentiment.

I haven't even experienced the unfairness mentioned in many comments, but I just don't see the need to focus on climbing a work ladder at the cost of things socially or personally. As long as I do my work and enjoy it, a promotion is nice (I'm not giving up or being complacent necessarily) but it's simply not a big motivating factor in my life. I would/will happily slow my career trajectory if it means getting more time with close friends, romantic considerations, etc.

I think I'm in this boat because my career and interests are pretty orthogonal, where I think the HN community self selects for people who define some or much of their personality from technological pursuits that can often tie back heavily to work. When your work is more than your work, I think this question almost rephrases itself to be self vs kid, which I can understand struggling with.

I think you're more pointing to the fact that most 'raises' are joke tier. The word 'raise' in and of itself generally refers to an ~inflation bump.

5% per year is practically nothing. There is no point in my life at which I would have ever even noticed the difference other than on a spreadsheet, all the way up from a corner shop minimum wage job.

I think the reason most people push is for those lateral changes when you break into a different "role" and double your salary, change your working hours/respect, etc, because that's a material difference.

I grew up with an inbuilt skepticism of hierarchy, authority and work structures. School required tremendous effort to stay on track despite the material being achievable.

Honestly can't say I'll ever enjoy a 'career' where one is plugged into a corporate tree. Been there, done that. I took a small business course a few years ago. The teachers there left a job they had been in for decades to start business, tried it and didn't like it. They then took a job (they call it a 'business') teaching others how to start small businesses. Found it very hard to take them seriously when they had little practical knowledge or experience, despite the reams of information they had collected from others. Some people just aren't wired to be separate from the great corporate tree.

I think too many people sign up to a career simply because it's safe and you don't have to think too much about long term goals. There are of course other virtues to those jobs, but people who are going to hate their job for the rest of their life and underachieve should probably move on out to the less-sheltered world.

I couldn't have said #1 any better myself. I realized #1 and #2 a couple of years ago. I don't want an executive job. I would enjoy the strategy but hate the political.

I agree that the 7-10% bump is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But I have done jobs (and done them well) that were a level above me, such as tech lead, senior dev, and ASC (I'm a mid-level dev). It would be nice to be paid commensurate with the stress. Plus I would love to use that money, even though it wouldn't be much, to save for my kid's education.

I do have a business, but it's just for selling honey. I also try to make money trading the market, but that has only small payouts because I don't have much capital to risk.

Thank you for your input.

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