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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

And then when your company decides to either to “take the company in a different direction” or you notice that it is bringing new employees in at market rate that has gone up 20% in 3 years while HR is giving you 3% cost of living raises, you are out there in your mid 40s, can’t get a job and you start complaining about ageism.

I was there a little over 10 years ago at 35. I belatedly learned how to play the game. Until my current job, it was all about resume driven development and job hopping the minute my salary or what I am doing at my current job got out of whack with the market.

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You need to do this and do it early. All those years of missed revenue add up quickly.

By the time I learned the error of my ways, it was too late to do it early. Luckily, I can still get caught up if I play my cards right. I work remotely for Big Tech in a low cost of living area. The arbitrage gives me a great opportunity to save.

I'm pretty new to remote work life. Don't many companies adjust your salary based on where you live? It seems like this would counter the entire point of living somewhere cheaper.

All the remote policies of any company you can find here http://remote.lifeshack.io/, I dont think your salary is baased on where you live, albeit i am not very sure of it. But check out the link i have attached, this website has a lot of useful information about remote wotk etc!

A significant number of companies, particularly those in Silicon Valley, adjust remote pay based on cost of living in various areas.

Amazon seems to adjust their base salary up in Seattle. But even an L5 at Amazon even if with a 10% discount is much more than I could make here.

There is a slight premium for Seattle and maybe NYC, but besides that according to Levels.fyi, I’m right in line with the average total comp.

I know someone who applied for a similar role (one level up) at Amazon who lives in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska and he made about the same as someone who lives in Seattle.

I don't like this mentality. Maximizing lifetime revenue isn't some emergency to panic about. It's one goal to balance against many other important things in life. If your income provides you a lifestyle you're happy with and is poised to continue doing so (which in this context is almost certainly the case), there is no emergency.

The obsession with constantly increasing your salary year-on-year is very much alive and well, at least in the US.

I'm not European, but I imagine that this isn't the case in Europe as it doesn't have the same culture around work.

In the US, I think part of the reason why this is the case is because the cost of living goes up significantly more than the cost of living adjustments.

For example, while landlords aren't supposed to raise the rent by more than 2% per year, I've had my landlord surprise me with a 5% change, but moving is too expensive to realistically consider [1].

Factor in all the additional costs of living, and if you don't get significant raises every year, you're going to fall further behind each year and be unable to afford a family, a house, or an emergency.

It's not great.

1 - When I moved to a good neighborhood in NYC, I had to pay a brokers fee of 15% + moving costs + up front costs to the landlord. Say my rent was 3k, this would be 5400 (0.15 * 3000 * 12) + ~500 + 9000 (first + last + security), or approximately 15k just to move into a place you don't own.

Totally in agreement with you, especially in the bigger metropolitan areas like NYC and SF.

Rule of thumb for me in my career is I expect at least a 5% raise yearly to account for cost of living and inflation of currency, otherwise, like you said, you'd be losing money YoY.

Thankfully, I've gotten many > 25% raises throughout my career. It's possible, but it's rare, and jumping jobs usually gives larger pay bumps.

What’s this about what the landlords are “suppose to do”? Most of the US isn’t rent controlled. My apartment that I moved into after getting married in 2012 went from $1300 to $1750 by 2016 when I left. It was $2000/month last year.

My mortgage is less than $2200 for a 3100 square foot house brand new build and that wont go up besides property taxes and insurance.

"supposed to" means legally. 5 percent isn't allowed but they can get away with it because fighting it isn't worth it.

I'm European and I live in Europe :-)

I can't compare to the US, but I'm in one of the more relaxed European countries and I definitely feel like I'm in the minority for pursuing some continuity with my current employer rather than jumping ship for a higher salary after two years.

(Fortunately, this is a good employer that realises what the reality looks like and is willing to offer me competitive raises to make it a doubly mutually beneficial arrangement.)

I am not so sure. My wife is European and she is very much inline with always going upwards. I on the other hand very much enjoy work life balance as well as making sure I enjoy what I do even if I make less than I could elsewhere.

Well, in my case since both my salary and skillset stagnated from 2000-2008 - after 3% COL raises and bonuses being cut, I only made $4000 more in 2008 than I did in 2000, there is a lot of catching up with both I had to do. Especially seeing that in 2012, I went from being single to (gladly) getting married and taking on the responsibility of a preteen and a teen.

That being said, I was quite content with my pre-Covid salary which was pretty much average for a top end individual contributor locally. But I did need to make at least $20K more over in two years.

Then Covid happened, along with pay cuts and the local market dried up.

But now working remotely for BigTech means my base salary is a little more than it was pre-Covid and RSUs+Bonus is pure gravy that goes directly to long term savings.

It also meant my wife didn’t have to go back to work in the school system with a Covid going around.

It's ok to not forcefully grow your income, but stagnating income is correlated with your skillset becoming outdated. If you haven't worked on your network or your interview skills, you can find it hard to find a new job. In addition, a less career-oriented person would find working on those less enjoyable than keeping their skills up to date and likely do them even less.

The reality is that software engineering automates software engineering jobs the most. As a result, people in this industry do highlight the importance of not neglecting your skillset.

However, I wouldn't take that as them trying to maximize their revenue. They've simply found that they need to do a deeper analysis on skills to not get automated out of a job.

You're getting pretty far off-topic (and actually making a point that I'm trying to make myself in a separate subthread). This is the sentence I was pushing back against:

> All those years of missed revenue add up quickly

I'm only talking about money here

Your salary is your revenue. The longer you wait, the less time you get to take advantage of compounding.

Your income not only needs to provide you a lifestyle that you are happy with now, it also needs to provide you enough to save and have a lifestyle you want when you’re not working. There is going to be a day you’re not working.

But, if you are working for less than your fair market value, you’re providing the lifestyle that your company’s owners are happy with.

I wanna do it so bad .. but the whole Covid recession thing as made me scared stiff and stuck.

I went from a company with 50 employees, I was not planning on making a move for another year at least and then Covid happened along with pay cuts. Why wouldn’t I try to work for one of the largest companies in the US?

There was no harm in trying.

What does "playing the game" mean for you? How have you changed how you approach work or a new job?

Constantly job hopping, resume driven development, networking and being better at politics and soft skills.

Other than a better financial situation, what else have you achieved doing this? This makes me feel like software development world is just some big hollow game where making a positive change to the world takes the back seat.

Other than a better financial situation....

What other reason would I go to work everyday?

Fulfillment through solving meaningful challenges?

Arguably, "job satisfaction" is a factor as well, but... it's hard to have job satisfaction when you see others earning 50% more for doing less (or inferior) work, especially if it's in the same company. And it's also hard to have 'job satisfaction' when decisions are made outside your control. I can live with fewer decision making abilities if compensated for in other ways, and that's usually pay rate.

Once I had my first real existential crisis, I realized that the things I wanted to leave behind weren't things that someone else could've easily (and honestly, might as well have) done. Furthermore, I wanted to spend my life doing things I actually want to do.

So now I have a job that pays below market rate but leaves me with a lot more time, in which to write my novels. I have more than enough money - more money won't make me any happier, but less discretional time will certainly make me worse off.

you might feel different about this tradeoff when you're older (read: less easily in demand) or have family to support.

There is no such thing as having money to burn at the middle-class level unless you want to live on peanuts when you're in retirement.

To begin with, I'm not a person who 'burns' money - I'm sure I'd be in a different place if I was.

When I say 'enough money' I don't just mean enough money for current expenses. In my opinion, there really is an amount of money beyond which you're probably just adding a measure of unhappiness to your life, if you're making money your first-order objective.

You are correlating pursuing a higher salary with longer hours. That doesn't have to be the case. I quadrupled my income by just going freelance and I generally work 20-30 hours a week.

By focusing on money you can actually reduce your overall burden. In my humble opinion this far and away beats taking some low salary job just to get more time.

“I wish I had less money”. Said no one ever.

While you are busy not being concerned about money. I bet your employer is glad to be getting you cheaply.

A great many people raise families and live comfortable lives on less money than a somewhat below market dev salary. If you want to live in the middle of San Francisco or buy luxury goods then sure, you need to strive to earn a lot of money, but that doesn't describe most people.

Well, I guess I didn’t make it explicit that my being an “expert beginner” at 35 also meant that I was making a way below market salary and was (and I still am) way behind my retirement goals.

And with this being both my abs my wife’s second marriage didn’t do us any favors.

My base salary now is the same as it was pre-Covid pay cut and was more than enough to reach our short term needs and slowly meet our long term goals.

The RSUs+Bonus goes straight to long term goals - paying off the mortgage, cash flowing college for my son and saving for retirement.

I don’t care about leaving things behind - I care about not being 70 years old and broke. The best case outcome is that we both spend our last penny when we are on our death bed.

I mean based on the comment, presumably “making a positive change to the world”

I feel bad for people whose are trapped by a paycheck in a career they don't love. STEM delights me and if I became financially independent, I'd probably still go on learning about and building software & hardware just for the fun of it.

> I feel bad for people whose are trapped by a paycheck in a career they don't love.

This is kinda of where I am right now. I still enjoy programming, but its becoming more and more apparent that I should have kept it as a hobby and pursued something else as a career.

> I'd probably still go on learning about and building software & hardware just for the fun of it.

That's the thing - this is much easier to do when you're financially independent. If you have kids, and have to put them through school, and maybe have sick parents to care for - costs can add up fairly quickly; and it's easy to find yourself in a position where you can't lose your job, which is a lousy position to be in.

Interesting part is - it can also be easier to choose what you work for when you have more money (or at least that's been my personal experience so far). A different version of the "rich getting richer" dynamic, basically - it's easy to say "no" to stupid things, to avoid or leave crappy jobs. Also if you're highly paid that often means you're listened to/ your voice has some weight - so chances of working on stuff that delights you increase significantly.

To put it more succinctly. It’s nice to be in a position of F%%% you.

(NSFW:Language)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI

I have been programming as a hobby since the 80s when I was in middle school writing 65C02 assembly, I don’t hate my job, but by the time I graduated in the mid 90s, it became purely a method to maintain my short term addiction to food and shelter and my long term desire not to be old and broke.

I enjoy learning about the industrial area I'm in (higher education). I enjoy creating software that people use daily. I enjoy creative problem solving. I enjoy learning how different organizations fulfill their reason for being while handling operational details. I go to work for these reasons, as well as, a comfortable pay.

I don't mind working. I would just like to do it less. A few years ago I dropped to part-time in order to be in a grad program in CS. I found that 25 hours provided me with the perfect life balance.

For a sense of an accomplishment and knowing that you have made world a bit better place while enjoying what you do, maybe?

Japanese has a nice word for it, "Ikigai".

Don't look to the Japanese for work-life balance though.

It's not specific to software development. Every field has people who's main focus is to "climb the ladder".

Whether making a positive change to the world is in the front or back seat (or in the vehicle at all) will depend on company culture and may even differ within a single org.

Better financial situation * many, many years = freedom. You have to live like no one else until, one day, you'll live like no one else.

Sounds like the whole Mexican fisherman story.

I make good money. I work 10am-5pm every day. I don't make as much money as people who are more career oriented.

But I also save 50% of my paycheck even factoring in that I have a wife and three kids, and my wife stays home with them. What's the point of chasing more money? If anything, I'd like to scale back, but that's not the easiest thing to do.

This post makes me want to usher in the socialist revolution.

This is not meant to be offensive in any way, as I'm not judging your entire being just by the way you approach employment, but developers that do "resume driven development" are by far the worst to work with, and are so obvious to spot.

Resume driven development often involves not giving a damn about what you're actually trying to solve, and trying to make what you're doing sound as impressive as possible to onlookers who have no clue what you actually did. Complicated architectures, hip technologies, fancy percentage based "improvements", it's all bollocks.

I agree largely that Western society has created a work culture where working for "the man" is not a desirable thing to do; employment, by and large, should not be the purpose of our lives. There are so many other things, like social life, family, sports, playing the guitar, and so on, that humans can do so well, but because of the capitalist structures that have been put in place where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it's not hard to understand why this kind of approach to employment exists.

> are by far the worst to work with, and are so obvious to spot.

So? It gets them hired and at better rates than those who accurately estimate the size of the projects to boot.

Companies need to stop rewarding irrational behavior, but right now lack the right feedback loops including investors willing to "Venture" capital into a losing business, passive + TARP-like investing driving asset prices up despite inherent risks and bosses who care more about politics/appearances than facts.

Well, once companies stop having policies where they only give internal employees slightly above cost of living raises and bringing in new employees in at market rates - ie salary compression and inversion - then maybe employees won’t look out for their own best interest.

The choices are either have relevant skills to keep yourself marketable or be willing to do the “leetCode monkey dance” and remember how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard.

> soft skills

Improving soft skills isn't the same as playing the career development game by job hopping. Soft skills are as much a part of a developer job as programming. I'd actually argue it's the harder part.

A developer with soft skills can pivot into being an overpaid “digital transformation consultant” or “enterprise architect”.

Can you explain further how you got out of that, or what you did to changes things for the better?

I start looking at job boards, talking to local recruiters and seeing which technologies were trending on the hype cycle.

I then job hopped when my current company was either not keeping my salary at market rates or were getting behind technologically. I left one job that had two products - a legacy PHP product and a new C# project that was using then current technology.

The C# product wasn’t gaining traction after two years, raises were anemic and they moved everyone to the PHP product. There was no way that I wanted to spend a year doing PHP. I left.

But the smartest but riskiest move I made the next time I was looking for a job was to leave a full time job for a contract to perm where I would get the chance to build a development department and lead two green field projects.

That’s where I first (belatedly) learned about AWS and discovered how much “cloud consultants” made.

Once those two projects were done, I self demoted to a senior developer where the newly minted CTO wants someone to make the company “cloud native”. I jumped on every single project and took the lead on introducing AWS services.

Just from working at those two companies I was able to get my current job.

How do you decide which skills would look good on your resume?

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