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Comment by pronlover723 | Hacker News Reader

> Of every developer I have seen leave, their primary motivation was a higher pay

I've never seen this ever in my entire 37 year career. I'm not saying it doesn't happen just that I've personally never seen it. All the devs I know work on stuff they choose to work on and are passing up money for jobs they're less interested in.

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I will add my two cents, which are that people don't tend to look until they are at least slightly dissatisfied with their current job, and then hop when they find a position with a high enough raise. That has been universally true in my circle of friends at least.

Mostly the same. I have had two ex-coworkers who said they were leaving for the pay raise, but were both clearly unhappy with their jobs prior to leaving. I suspect "I wanted a raise" is just a much easier reason to tell people than "I hated the people I worked with", especially when it's the people you worked with asking.

Hmm, for me it always comes down to “I don’t get paid enough for this shit.” They can then reduce the amount of shit, or increase the amount I’m being paid.

If some other company wants to pay me more for the same shit, then that is where we are going.

This is it. Everyone's line of what they're willing to deal with is different, and changes based on where they are in life, what their mood is that month/week/day, etc. It only takes so many days of crossing that threshold for someone to start looking around.

If a job is crappy in general, the pay is likely to be part of the crappiness. Or from the other side of the yin-yang, part of what can make a better job better is better pay.

I think it is little bit both I bet if offers would be lower most people would just suck it up and continued cranking code.

Anecdotally, most developers I've seen leave companies over the past 10 years have left for money reasons.

I use to assume it varied by the company, but it doesn't seem to. Invariably, shifting companies seems to be the way to get more money.

Companies seem to hand out only crumbs for pay rises but are willing to drop mountains of extra money when hiring fresh people. In 3 years of working at one company, they gave me an extra $20k in pay rises. After leaving that job for another one, My pay went up $60k AUD in one go.

I've seen this with many friends right now in Melbourne. People are easily leaving for $30k-$50k with recruiters emailing and calling daily.

I've also seen manager friends hire like crazy in the past few months only for those new hires to leave for more money as well.

Yeah I just went from an average Adelaide job to a highish end Melbourne job working remote from Adelaide and the change has been amazing. Almost everyone from my last company just left for remote jobs paying way more.

Nice. Hope you're enjoying it :)

100%, the Adelaide and regional cities IT job market has imploded. Great time to start a consultancy if you're regional.

I'm looking at moving from Sydney to Adelaide, any way I can reach out to you to get an idea of the industry over there? I'm hoping to do a remote job from Adelaide too, but would still like to understand the lay of the land.

This is an instance where anecdotes will vary wildly depending on the kind of company you work for.

Depends on what amounts we are talking. You and the people you know are probably already on the top end of pay and can chose anything. The devs I know saw $40k-$60k AUD pay bumps by switching to remote work for companies in higher paying areas. That kind of extra money is pretty life changing especially when they offer almost exactly the same work environment.

It probably depends on your market.

In areas where going from one company to another as a "senior" only ends up with like a 5k gross pay difference, it's almost negligible.

In Silicon Valley hopping companies can be like $100k/year or more gross pay difference. In a few years you might leverage that when switching companies again to get even more. Adds up fast.

>>In Silicon Valley hopping companies can be like $100k/year or more gross pay difference.

That has limits too. Its not like you can hop 20 companies in 10 years and end up making like $2+ million an year.

Eventually you will max out of levels to get promoted too. Then the only options are to startup on your own or be an exec at a large company.

Plus Im guessing any reasonable increase in your levels comes with fair degree of risks, workplace politics, up-or-out workplace policies and if you have a history of hopping 2 companies/year serious shops aren't going to hire you to only replace you 6 months from now.

Leave one or two stints off your resume and say you were having a sabbatical at burning man and never left the desert until the universe aligned you with that specific founder’s mission, problem solved

Since we're sharing anecdotes, every single person who has left a team I was on left for more money, sometimes even after much thought because they loved the work and coworkers. All the devs I know have families and hobbies and things that require money like an addiction to clothing, shelter, and food, and these things cost money.

This certainly happens quite often. However, speaking purely anecdotally just to add a data point - in my current team at a big tech firm, none of my teammates have left because of compensation. We've had quite a bit of turnover over the years and the vast majority left due to a myriad of other reasons, many even having taken pay cuts in the process.

Meanwhile, I saw a coworker do it in the past 37 days for a better paying job at Microsoft that he "couldn't pass up"

I really liked my company and the people I worked with, but pretty gladly left recently for 40% raise. Felt foolish to not do so.

I was going to argue with you, but every job I’ve left has had other factors that would’ve made me leave even if they raised my salary.

fwiw I’ve lied about passion (for their mission) at every company I worked at until I could qualify as an accredited investor via income test and buy preferred shares in any company instead of earning common stock gambles over years at whichever silly startup hired me

I was passionate about specific frameworks, corroborable years of experience, and making sure I occassionally had at least 2 years of experience at one place

But I would lie about my interest in their mission or whatever these culty developer daycares were up to, for the compensation boost and sustaining that.

(Yes I eventually got lawyers and CPAs to validate my accredited investor status, and eventually learned what “self certification” really meant)

It was super strange to me that feigning passion was the gatekeeper instead of simple work integrity.

Anyway it worked. Priorities. If I was a betting man - which I am - I’d bet you’ve run into people like me.

> until I could qualify as an accredited investor via income test

What does this mean?

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp

It means you have enough money around to throw at things that aren't certified as safe for the general public.

Money has always been my primary motivator.

Check Blind

"tc or gtfo"

for everyone else: Blind app is where all of your developers and a few other personalities are talking about industry workplace cultures. Every post also ends with people posting their "total compensation" or tc, which is a meme on that app but absolutely serious. That app pretty much only lets in tech and finance grunts. The situation is similar to how HIRED only has jobs for devs and occasionally other roles.

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