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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

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After spending most of my career as your standard enterprise dev, I fell into a remote mid level role in the cloud consulting department of BigTech.

After a year and a half of finding my bearings, the next logical step was for me to work toward a promotion where I would have more “scope” and “impact”.

I soon realized that I didn’t want the headache. My wife and I had more than “enough”.

On top of that, my wife and I decided to become “digital nomads” this past year. We bought a professionally managed “condotel” in Florida so we would have some place to nest during the winter and fly across the US the rest of the year and stay in hotels.

We got rid of our house, cars and everything we own that couldn’t fit into three suitcases. It’s been the most freeing experience in the world to get out of the rat race while watching my coworkers chase after promotions.

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I'm in pretty much the same boat as you(at least, for the first 4 paragraphs). I'm definitely under-leveled at a FANG. But I'm making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and working maybe 25-30 hours/week. Why would I go for promo to get a 20% raise and then have to put in more of my free time, when I have absolutely no need for another $75k or whatever? It just doesn't make sense from a cost/benefit perspective.

> Why would I go for promo to get a 20% raise and then have to put in more of my free time, when I have absolutely no need for another $75k or whatever?

Those that take that job and succeed figure out how to do it in the same time.

There is absolutely no way that I could enjoy the life I have now as a senior in my department.

Right now, I’m the master of my own fate. I either get small projects where I manage the entire project by myself or maybe with one junior consultant including managing the customer, the meeting cadence, when and how often I need to travel to the clients site (if at all) etc or I slice off one vertical “work stream” of a larger project and still keep it where I can manage it.

Maybe, but from my experience I see people working harder and stressing out when they get promoted. Surely there is some level everyone reaches where they need to put more time and effort in to maintain their ideal state(ie most people who are happy to be a high performing L5 would not be satisfied being a low performing L6).

In my department (cloud consulting) an L5 is expected to be able to “manage their own work stream independently”.

That means talking to the customer, gathering requirements, doing their own system design, presenting it to any facet of the business, doing the hands on keyboard work, automating the deployment and training the customer. You should also be able to manage your deliverables and the customer expectations and communicate the trade offs between time, budget and requirements.

Of course if any of the technical areas are your weakness, you are responsible for bringing the right people in.

An L6 is expected to manage multiple work streams and spend a lot more time in pre-sales.

The advantage of being an L5 is that there is nothing stopping me from performing L6 tasks. But I don’t have to. No one is going to tell me that I have to take on L6 level work. But I don’t have to.

On that same note “we control our schedule”. If I start routinely putting in more than 40 hours a week, my manager is going to talk to me and start asking hard questions like why am I not managing my customers expectations.

> when I have absolutely no need for another $75k or whatever?

I love reading all these comments where people complain (not you specifically), and then throw around raise and bonus numbers that equal the median US household income.

Know and demand your value, but also recognize the position of privilege that many of us are in.

My mom is a retired school teacher. She worked for 30 years and then retired. She turned down numerous promotion opportunities that would have meant more money.

My dad is a retired factory worker. He got a degree in accounting after leaving the military. But then decided he liked factory work more. He also turned down plenty of promotions and overtime opportunities.

My barber in his 50s closed his shop two additional days a week after he started dating so he could spend more time with his significant other.

People make life decisions all of the time to prioritize other facets of life over money.

I find most of these comments horrifying

Absolutely - my first job out of college I was making more than my mom and dad combined, and I still live a lifestyle more akin to what I was raised with out of choice, even though I have far more money accessible to me. I was writing C programs for free for people when I was 14 back in the late 90s, because I just loved programming, I didn't even have a concept of making a career out of it. I feel extremely overpaid, but I'm not exactly going to complain.

I wonder how long a comfortable life of us based purely remote work will be feasible. Will these types of jobs be taken by a global workforce? Will systems improve enough that cloud consulting will no longer be needed?

Unfortunately, remote work is now facing an oversupply (more people want remote jobs than are available). There are studies that have shown that people are often willing to forego a 6.8% premium in exchange for a remote job.

It is beginning to look like the start of a slippery (downward) slope for white-collar wages, I'm afraid.

> Unfortunately, remote work is now facing an oversupply (more people want remote jobs than are available).

Citation needed. I’ve seen this repeated without evidence several times here, but is it reality?

There are do appear to be more people who want remote jobs than there are remote jobs, but whether or not you're actually in competition with all of those is an entirely different question.

Only 6.8%? Unless I'm living paycheck to paycheck, 6.8% is an absolute bargain for 5 hours of more free time each week, assuming a 30min commute.

5h/week are equivalent to at least 4 weeks of PTO in a year.

Plus, vehicle maintenance costs, gas costs, and I can do chores around the house any time I want which saves even more time because I don't have to plan my day around the washing machine.

I wonder this also.

As someone who manages a team off highly talented offshore developers, who are working for a fraction of the pay that US developers get, it makes me concerned that this is all going to average out.

And if it averages out, US-based tech. employees will be in for quite the shock.

I see the same thing. Meanwhile watching offshore salaries go up up up month after month for senior devs (5+ yrs xp)

My entire department is remote. My specific job requires some amount of travel to company’s sites, a lot of conference calls, presentations, etc. Some of my customers require US citizenship (government contracts) and many more have data governance requirements that don’t allow offshore workers.

Andy Jassy, the former CEO of AWS and current CEO of AWS, has said repeatedly in public statements that less than 5% of all IT spend is currently on any cloud provider.

There is a long way to go

I’d also say people are more cutthroat and there’s more politics as you go through promotions as well.

This is largely the reason I favor small companies and startups. The team is small enough that you can leave your ego at the door, instead of having a career based on metrics that are only loosely correlated with anything resembling a positive change.

The most vicious, sharp-elbowed, cutthroat colleagues I have seen have been at small and growing companies, particularly those in which growth slows. They often have much poorer management (very high proportion of first-time managers vs. larger companies) and are much more cliquey (lots of hiring in small pools of people who know each other).

Those same people exist in larger companies. The difference is they either fail up, or there are more people for them to spread their shit on.

The outsized impact of a bad employee is definitely a potential of a small team / company. Maybe I've just been lucky, but for the most part the closeness of a small team also invites more visibility and accountability from owners. Bad managers and employees, in my experience, tend to have shorter careers in small companies.

On the other hand, I've seen "staff" engineers at large companies who clearly have "leaves feedback on PRs" as a performance metric, because they would add trite, useless requests for changes that would conflict with feedback they left on other PRs, and would be exceptionally petty when confronted. These same people would be lauded because they lived up to artificial expectations, despite probably having a negative impact on the teams ability to deliver if anyone really looked at what they were doing.

On a small team, you can't get away with that for very long before it becomes apparent that something isn't working.

> Those same people exist in larger companies. The difference is they either fail up, or there are more people for them to spread their shit on.

Most larger companies do performance management, where the bottom x% lowest performers are laid off every year or every few years. In my experience working in small companies, performance management has been nonexistent or very timid. HR almost always puts roadblocks when firing people, except for egregious acts like sexual harassment or stealing, making it next to impossible to fire bad performers. Likewise, bad people (who are basically somewhat competent or not incompetent) still run amok regularly and are actually given relatively free rein because of nonexistent HR, weak HR, nonexistent management, weak management, or just plain nepotism (knows the VP or founder, for example) or all of the above.

Larger companies have many defenses against this sort of thing, and they actually work a lot of the time. Of course, there are large-group politics wherein huge groups (200-300+) battle against one another, in large companies. But those are of a different nature and are considerably less nasty.

Small, but not too small. I would never take a job somewhere with less than 50 employees because that exempts them from all kinds of useful protections like FMLA.

Even most smaller shops offer short and long term disability that is either free or reduced cost.

Do you rent the condo out for the remainder of the year?

A “condotel” is a hotel or a resort that is managed like a hotel. But the individual units are owned separately. A separate property management company manages the units and gets half of the room rate. You also pay what amounts to a “condo association fee” that covers the common areas, all the utilities and the general upkeep.

It’s not a time share. You own the full unit and you buy it and sell it just like you would any other commercial unit.

The property management company doesn’t charge the owner when they live there. So it is rented out like a hotel when we aren’t there.

Unlike most things you read on the internet. This is investment advice. Condotels are universally horrible “investments”. You should treat them as a second home where the rents might cover part of the cost of ownership.

Especially since Florida is very seasonal, even putting the required 25%-30% down, there isn’t a chance we would break even if we expected the income to cover the costs all year. But, we are staying there during low season. Since it is our only home, we would have live somewhere anyway and we pay our own mortgage and fees like we would anyway - which are about the same as our big house that we had in the burbs. April through September, we expect it to break even.

Thanks for the info, you've successfully dissuaded me from lighting money on fire.

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