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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, this sentiment is valid for most of the working class. But in our industry, it's not the majority of cases. I feel well compensated and not overworked.

Now, is my work fulfilling? No.

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I left work this year and while not overworked, I do feel like employers could increase my time off by 50% while reducing my time-in-seat by 20% but choose not to. I probably would have kept working with more time off, but 3-4 weeks off a year, just wasn't enough for the life my family and I wanted wanted to have.

Compensation was the hardest thing to leave, but when looking at the life I wanted to live I realized I had what I needed to to full-fill that life now. Mentally it is very hard, though. I had a great engineering job at Apple and after over 4 years I had a sizable chunk of RSU's to walk away from. What helped me with the RSU's was realizing that eventually I would leave–whether now or in 20 years–so walking away from RSU's is non-avoidable so I tried to frame it as a sunk cost.

I feel lucky as I now I have 5 paid weeks off a year, which is very generous by North American standards.

It's true time is more valuable than money. However at this point I am very sick of being at home.

Re: the RSUs that is a good point. I've been at Google for coming up on 10 years, and one thing that keeps me here is the RSU "handcuffs", for sure.

It can be both true that you're earning many times more than an average worker, and still severely underpaid compared to the value you've created for your employer.

The wealth inequality in the world is just staggering. You may be well off to the point money is not an problem for you, and still be piss-poor compared to your company's CEO and shareholders.

How can we determine what the percentage is? I'm also in your boat in feeling well compensated and not overworked, but I anecdotally feel like I'm very fortunate in this regard despite what I thought was the norm.

> But in our industry, it's not the majority of cases. I feel well compensated and not overworked.

If you are inclined to compare your compensation to compensation of workers in other industries, take a minute and compare the compensation of your c-suite with those in other industries as well. You will notice that you are underpaid and massive amount of gains are flowing to your execs.

On the flip side, the only time I've ever felt like my work was fulfilling and valuable was when was under-compensated and insanely overworked (like 80 hours was a pretty reasonable work week).

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