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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Nice one - rather than attack the argument that changing jobs increases your salary, an appeal to the masses of what "a massive amount of people" may or may not care to do.

Any argument without evidence can be summarily dismissed without evidence. So I argue that a vast majority, a massive amount if you will, of working people do want to increase their salary, basing this on my own goals and those of people I know and worked with over the last decade.

I wonder what the net effect is on worker wages in our economy as a whole given the seemingly large portion of workers that take this stance?

You are essentially relinquishing all negotiating power to the share holders of the company who are more than happy to pocket the salary that you are leaving on the table by giving them an uncompetitive monopoly on your labor.

Another poster in here bragging about giving his employer a 50% discount on his labor. Why would I give the shareholders of the company a work for a huge coupon on my life? That is just crazy to me.

I know it's hard to understand, but for a lot of people thinking about money doesn't dominate their decision making and mindset. I bet most people don't think about their job as "giving discount on their labor" but instead spend time thinking on things unrelated to money.

Sure, but not thinking about it doesn't make the dynamics it enables less relevant. Don't think about it, let them pay you less, there's less incentive to raise wages. I don't know, take what you can while you can. If not, they will, and they usually have no loyalty towards you. Even if you don't want to use it, optimize your ability to help your loved ones. Minimize risk. Give it to charity, whatever.

I'm not arguing to be a salary-maximalist, but to insinuate it's not something a worker should always have in mind to some extent feels out of line with our economic system.

It's not about dominating your mindset. It's about recognizing that your employment is a negotiation and treating it as such. Applying to 2 or 3 other companies every other year to test the market is not the all-encompassing chore, dollar signs for pupils caricature, that it is being made out to be in this thread.

Your company is not your family. The company is loyal to you to the extent that it is contractually obligated to be. The coworker friendships that are worth maintaining longterm will survive past your time with the company.

> I bet most people don't think about their job as "giving discount on their labor"

All salaried workers would be better off if they did just that. As a reminder, Google and Apple engaged in a literal criminal conspiracy to suppress wages.

Personally I find it hard to believe that there's a company so good that it's worth leaving 50% of your salary on the table. Like if you have high autonomy and you're curing cancer or building rocket ships I can see it. But for the 99.9% of other jobs there are equivalents. Why leave all that money on the table?

Getting 50% extra quality of life. Working 30 instead of 40 hours. Waking up at 10am. Time is invaluable, money isn’t. Grinding at 75% rather than 100% makes all the difference in mental health.

Risk aversion.

I personally find it hard to ask for more or job hop because I think we tech workers overpaid. It feels greedy or unethical especially when i compare myself to similarly hard working or top performing peers in other engineering fields and other industries, who do seemingly more important work than me, but get paid less than half of what i get already.

I understand that it feels uneasy, even guilty, to be paid more compared to those outside of software engineering, or even to swe peers who are in different specializations or at different organizations. But that is an individualistic response to a systemic phenomenon. The tech industry as a whole is overpaid, not just its workers. It’s the greatest beneficiary of the near-zero percent interest rates since the Great Recession, which incentivized capital to chase ever-greater yields, funneling massive amounts of money into tech, creating jobs and raising salaries. Not to mention, tech is a massive lever (software eating the world) that leads to greater business cost savings and higher margins, driving up demand for tech workers, and their salaries.

You cannot reverse that trend by simply choosing not to participate in getting paid more. By all means, don’t be motivated in your career solely for higher compensation. But also don’t feel bad for getting paid more. The money you leave on the table will just get taken by some other overpaid engineer, manager, or VC shaving pennies off of their costs anyway. Take the money for the sake of your loved ones, donate it, pay higher taxes if you want to. There’s nothing inherently unethical about it.

I would hazard to say, the more problematic situation about the ease of job-hopping in this industry is that it deprioritizes grit and perseverance. There’s always a better-managed organization, more feasible business model, higher quality engineering team for one to jump to when the going gets rough. That’s just as important as the promise of higher pay and title- why bother toiling if there’s always a slightly less dysfunctional org on the other side? So you end up with very transitory, evanescent companies because personnel keep disappearing every couple years.

But, I’m not sure if that’s really on the individual contributor to solve either. The question of retention and of building employee loyalty is really the responsibility of management. And with all of the dumb money that’s flowed into the tech industry thanks to interest rates and software being the primer economic lever of the times, companies have less incentive to make necessary changes. They themselves benefit from a very fluid workforce. If you job hop away your boss will just swap in someone who job hopped from another company. So maybe that’s just how it’s going to be until the next recession hits.

When you are negotiating your salary in the marketplace, the people sitting across from you are Bezos, Sergey Brin, Blackstone, Andreessen, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and a long list of hedge funds and private equity firms.

These are the (obscenely wealthy) people that you are allowing to arbitrage your salary.

I doubt other underpaid workers are celebrating the fact that your salary differential is paying for champagne on a super yacht instead of going to your kid’s college fund or more family vacations.

And I’m sure that the people/groups mentioned are pleased that they are able to pocket the difference en masse because of this economically irrational ethic.

Yes but then why not take the extra money and redirect it altruistically as you see fit?

Sometimes those people are also the most grumpy or disillusioned and quite a drag on morale.

You know the ones, always talking about leaving but never actually doing it.

Sometimes they're just rusty or afraid about the outside world, just because they haven't interviewed in so long.

It wouldn't be so bad if interviewing wasn't such an absolute drag.

... which is why companies get away with punishing loyalty.

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