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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

What people don't realize is the job that pays 30% or so more than your current job requires alot more work and a ton more stress, and for me that is not worth the extra money - which by the way most of which goes to taxes anyway. I really feel like it doesn't "pay" to move up in an org mainly due to the extremely high tax hit along with stress the title comes with.

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Anecdotally, I don't think any of the moves I made with over 20% pay increase really came with an increase of responsibility. Some businesses just have better margin so they can pay more.

To clarify, I just mean I always moved horizontally between businesses and not diagonally. Although at a business I may have also moved vertically (w/ more responsibility) but that's moot.

I really think you are narrowly looking at things from near the peak of earning potential and an established career track. That's fine for some and this _is_ a tech oriented site, but still seems rather narrowly focused.

Sample size of 1:

- Job 1 -> Job 2: Neither in tech; 80% raise; even in terms of stress / work

- Job 2 -> Job 3: Move to a Support group in a tech company; 11% raise; much higher stress / work

- Job 2 -> Job 3: Support to Technical Sales; 70% raise (after 5 raises at job 2); less work / higher peak stress (maybe) but lower average stress

I'm not a developer but when my last job paid half of what I make now and I have even less responsibility than I did at the previous job.

this is literally what my dad told me (when I asked him why he didn't go for his boss's job). The marginal effort was large compared to the marginal revenue, and that would eat into quality of life for him.

There isn't a tax bracket in the US where most of any income goes to taxes. There should be though!

In California the top marginal tax rate can be over 50%. 37% federal tax, 12% state tax, 3.8% net investment tax.

Not sure what the net investment tax is, but just the normal Medicare tax (2.35%) is enough to get over 50% with federal and state income taxed there

That's on income over ~$500K AGI (which after deducting 401(k) )

In CA it’s 13.3% for incomes over 1 million

Not quite right: California + Federal tops out over 50%. Not by a lot and it obviously won't hit most people but it's an interesting benchmark.

Yeah and thats online income taxes!

Then with less than half left theres countless taxes built into the things you spend on (e.g. sales taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, import tariffs, etc etc etc etc and oh yeah more etc)

So in California we were losing about half of our money to taxes, its always fun to make estimated tax payments when you received your quarterly RSUs(~40% of the RSU money goes to taxes when you get them) and then with the rest putting half of that towards a quarterly tax payment, we left the state to avoid the stranglehold of taxes and will probably go to 1 income as two high earners just isn't worth it, but if you like higher taxes move to Europe, you may love it there.

I'm not sure about tech salaries, but based on several surveys, it would appear that effective tax rate for most workers is about the same between european countries and united states. They just spend less on defense, and more on social programs (although some countries have very recently increased defense spending). California taxes are extremely high though, I agree.

>They just spend less on defense

Because the US takes up the slack. Something we need to seriously STOP doing :p

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