- base salary
- 100% remote
- flexible schedule (I can start to work at 7am/8am/9am/etc.; If I need to do some errands at 2pm, I can just do it)
- culture, product and tech stack. A standard no BS culture would suffice, but every company has its own shenanigans. A good product to work on would be nice, but I accept that the majority of products out there are just not needed at all. Also, I'm not anymore a zealot when it comes to the tech stack; and learning something new at the job is welcomed.
- standard vacation days (as dictated by the law of the country). I see the majority of unlimited PTO as a scam. There's a difference between what it's my right (my official 20-30 vacation days per year as per the law that no-one can take away from me) and what company says should be my vacation days per year (wich is highly dependant on my team/manager).
- at least in Western Europe, the health insurance is more or less the same everywhere, so it's not a perk in itself.
- free lunch/snacks/videogames is not a perk from my perspective if you are over 30. Even less now if we work remotely.
- education reimbursement could be nice, but I don't mind at all. I try to be self-substained when it comes to gathering knowledge that benefits my career
- no on-call rotation. But I accept that this is getting harder and harder to negotiate
What does that mean? If someone considers it a perk - it's a perk, regardless how old they are.
If you don't consider it a perk then it's not a perk for you - again, regardless how old you are.
The effort of commuting to the office is far less than me preparing lunch for myself. Financially too since I just ride a bike. Not sure why my age matters.
I don’t understand the appeal of video games at an office at all. Do people actually play them? If I didn’t have any more work to do I’d prefer just to go home. I guess playing games with teammates might be fun, but I’d rather just have free beer or something like that.
Remote work is my #1
Health insurance didn't used to be important in the UK but it's looking like it might be in the future.
I realize that it is cultural and probably due my generation’s reputation for work ethic and disregard for work/life balances. I also have been lucky in that I am rarely sick enough to miss work and being remote just means you power through it (I have lost only a half day to sick time in the last 15 years). I see sick days eating up a lot of my colleagues paid time off.
I think on average I probably take a total of 20 days off a year, broken out as 10 days around Christmas/new years, 5 mid/late summer, then 5 around other holidays to extend a weekend.
The ideal would be some sort of policy that specified a number of vacation days and provided flexibility for incidentally being out of the office.
Future? lol
Would take me month to get 'non-private' doctor appointment
My health insurance gets billed large sums for thr whole family. Uk is becoming like US, but with 1/3 the wages
Many places that accrue PTO will pay out for unused days at your departure.
The benefits are however much less important than not working for complete fuckwits.
Edit: +healthcare if I lived somewhere that was a problem!
I'm past the likelihood of doing another degree myself, but having a robust education reimbursement suggests that they are investing properly in employee growth.
If they aren't within about a 20 minutes commute, they need to have remote work available. I don't mind coming in occasionally for longer distances, but remote work is now a competitive standard, not an option.
Everything else is negotiable. Flexible policies about PTO are, I think, better than 'unlimited PTO' -- be generous and have flexibility at every manager's discretion, we'll be good.
For example, I won't work for a company whose health insurance only has religiously-affiliated hospitals. That's almost 1/5 of US hospitals, and it generally means that they put their religious goals above my choices.
Most other benefits can be solved with your base salary figure. For example, if you don't offer health insurance but you pay +$15,000 more than a competitor then it doesn't matter. You could make a case this is preferred because now the employee has a choice on what to do with that money.
I've seen a number of interesting things over the years like every Friday off for 3-4 months during the summer or $250 towards holiday meals near the end of the year. Gestures like this go a long ways and could be an indicator that the company understands employee happiness.
I too subscribe to "unlimited PTO" being a scam.
1. It is NOT unlimited and should be illegal to advertise that
2. It is still at management discretion so it's not like you can be sure you can always take off whenever you want.
3. It is usually capped at 2 or 3 consecutive weeks so even if there is a minimum of 4 weeks you can't take all 4 at once at many companies.
4. Companies are happy to nickel and dime you but they abhor it happening to them and this is, IMO, largely a play to avoid vacation accrual and/or vacation time payout.
Then there's stuff like this:
> Paid time off (PTO) is not considered part of an employee's salary, so it can be docked without jeopardizing the employee's exempt status ... the court held that PTO is a fringe benefit with monetary value, not a component of salary under federal law.
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
It it is a concern to you, please ask during interview.
I'm a hardware engineer so remote work isn't very important for me. I don't really want a full lab at my home. Other things are nice but pale in comparison to having good work, good coworkers, good boss, and management I can respect.
I'm curious what you mean by "owning" your time off. I wonder if this is moreso a problem with how unlimited vacation is sometimes implemented than the idea of unlimited vacation itself.
If that's not fine, then it's not actually unlimited, and you have to guess where the limit is - so you can't really be guaranteed a certain number of days off.
Though I guess an org could still set a minimum and then call it unlimited, though in practice I expect that that minimum is basically also the maximum.
Like GP, I'm strongly opposed to "unlimited PTO" policies. For the few devs and workers that are helped by it, I think there are too many cases where the ambiguity and uncertainty makes people take less PTO than under a fairly generous, spelled-out policy (and there is usually no accrued balance to be paid out if you leave having taken less than the normal amount).
I won't go quite so far as to say I'd quit if my company made the transition, but it is a strong negative if that is on the benefits docket.
In my company it means you can take the time off whenever you want, but we are understaffed, so if you take time off the whole project will be stopped and we won't raise money. But of course you can take vacation as much as you want.
So for the last 2 years I have had max 3 consecutive days off (and only once). I will never buy bs "unlimited PTO" again.
But yeah, I started sending my CV already.
What do you look for in a 401k?
Sure more money would be nice, but having decent maternity/paternity leave, a good work-life balance, no expectation of working on-call for free, etc, all add up.
For me benefits I value include a nice central office, free transport allowance, free phone, a decent sauna, interesting colleagues, and the ability to work from home as/when I feel the mood take me.
Remote work and unlimited PTO are amazing bennies. It just lets you deal with life as it comes and, when other things in life line up, go take extended trips/vacations and work from somewhere else and experience other locales. It truly enables working to live, rather than living to work.
I will say though that unlimited vacation has to have a good company culture around it, otherwise it's just a scam that encourages people to overwork and burnout.
There are rare times when a critical report has gone down (I'm a BI developer) when my boss will call me, and that's fine. But I make it a strong point to keep those to a minimum and to keep the boundary between work and home life very solid.
Right now I’m working 4 days (32 hours) a week, entirely remotely, for enough money to live in NYC, and also the health insurance, 401k, and all that standard stuff.
You want to lure me away? You’re going to have to beat that. Start by offering a 24 hour work week.
I've grown to really appreciate and desire the "chilled out hybrid" model that some places are now offering -- primarily remote, but come into the office as much as or as little as you want, with a comfortable office that has the usual small company amenities.
Edited to add: flexible hours to accompany the above!
With this in place, I'd also look for an employer that's signed up the the Cycle2Work scheme, and has their office in a reasonably sensible location.
And to be honest, with the state of the NHS these days, I'd really want private health/dental insurance on offer.
I don't much care for the following [any more?]:
* Parental leave (although I use the existence of a generous policy as an indicator of the workplace culture)
* Unlimited PTO (I'd rather have clear expectations)
* Games in the office (Nice to have, but I'm wary of what sort of working culture this might indicate)
This seems like it would be a win win situation. The effective value of the employee's "raise" is more than what the employer has to spend on the "raise".
Of course that's assuming that the company actually caters high quality, healthy food. If they try to cheap out then that all falls apart.
My job serves food at cost of the food. They cover the culinary employees wages.
If my employer instead chooses to provide the meals, they are tax-free to me and 50% deductible to them, meaning the benefit that was consuming $4000 of expense to the company is now costing them perhaps $2000. (That's before assuming any efficiency other than tax treatment efficiency.)
I would have agreed 5-10 years ago, but now I find this kinda moot.
Edit: 25 days vacation is the minimum vacation
If the company you're applying to doesn't have CBA, you might not have some benefits you might be taking for granted, namely pension (ITP)
For a small, organically growing firm like my employer, unlimited PTO is just shorthand for "we don't have the back office staff to track this, so just don't abuse it". Yes, totally subjective, but the point is when you're scrappy you don't have time to make Policy all the livelong day.
As we've grown and evolved we ditched the messaging of unlimited PTO because of the negative connotation it has that everyone here has rightfully pointed out. "Does unlimited mean none?" is a verbatim question I've fielded in an interview.
Anyway, I explain OP's question as what I call the career trifecta:
1. You are working on things that have meaning to you
2. You enjoy working with the people around you
3. The pay and benefits give you space to pursue life's other interests
Most people in the world don't get one of those, much less all three. I have all three and now I'm a spoiled brat and don't want to give up one of them to get more of the other (i.e., more salary doesn't make life better if you lose one of the other pillars).
- base salary (not had bonuses very often, guess I might calculate with them, to a lesser degree)
- number of vacation days
- not having to be onsite 5 days per week
- somewhat flexible hours, I am more of a 8-4 person but there are exception for appointments or just taking a very short or very long lunch break, or leaving earlier
- sadly worth mentioning, not having to use Windows on my machine, although it shouldn't count as a benefit
- I used to be big on the education budget but with covid my will to go to conferences has suffered so far (and I don't like online stuff), let's see how this develops
That's the important stuff.
I wouldn't say no to stuff for retirement (depends on your country anyway) or access to discounts for stuff I actually need or want, but not a decision factor.
There are some anti-features I do want to mention:
- if I need to be in the office, my commute and whether I can get lunch (a friend of mine once got a job in a remote industry zone and had to pack his lunch all day, every day)
Does it pay enough that suggests they value my contribution and care about my ideas? Actually, my living costs are relatively low because I've paid off my house and don't have a family. I don't need the highest pay available, but conversely a low offer means that they almost certainly won't value the work I'll be doing.
Location should be close to where I currently live, or somewhere I'd like to live, or fully remote.
Unlimited PTO sounds terrible to me - most people will feel guilty for taking time off, and those that don't will be noticed by their manager as taking more PTO than everyone else. In the UK, there's a legal minimum anyway, and most companies give you 25 days plus public holidays (more than the minimum).
Snacks, freebies, work events are just tweaks to quality of life. If you already love the job, they'll just make things even better. If you have any issues with the job, or if you're considering an offer elsewhere, these honestly make no difference in the grand scheme of things. Think what your hourly rate is, and pretty soon you'll realise that even getting free food when you work overtime is a terrible trade - e.g. the largest pizza you can order is probably still less than an hour's work, but you probably won't get food unless you're working multiple hours overtime. Also, fruit or snacks are cheap anyway. It's nice to not have to buy it, but really you're probably being paid more in the time it takes you to eat it than it cost. It's no big deal to buy your own if you're somewhere that doesn't provide free snacks!
With defined PTO, everyone knows how many days you are entitled to. In addition, if you get laid off, you get money for your unused vacation days.
Other than the usual health insurance, etc, the biggest thing I am looking for would be full-time remote.
At GE everyone I knew took a lot of time off--including myself. At least 30 days per year and some quite a bit more. If you took less it was because your group didn't have a budget hammered out and all work had stopped anyway. I knew a dev that built houses until we had funded projects. I didn't work any of December in addition to my ad-hoc vacations throughout the year. Life lived. In no way shape or form do I like earned PTO. That's the scam.
I'm a highly paid consultant/partner/owner now and I have to fund my time off. Do not like it. I'm paying maximum taxes on all of my PTO. Tax position has a huge impact for high earners and getting boxed into a non-optimal rule/strategy is very costly.
When I take time off I don't bill, and I have to pay out of savings AND I pay tax on the savings. Meh.
• Health insurance is a close second
• Work hours are next most important
• Reasonable salary and PTO matter but not hugely. As long as it’s generally fair I don’t need/want to wring every possible cent out of my employer.
• I don’t value reimbursements, snacks, etc. at all. I’d rather just spend the money I’m paid on things I want.
It's not for everyone, and it's certainly not something that I'm interested in. But it's not unreasonable that someone prefers in office and isn't management.
I still can work remotely but I mostly work from office
Why for all employees? Why not just for your team? Or your area? Or your department? E.g., if you are an engineer, why do you care that the marketing team has to be in the office as well?
Unless C-level. Then I would understand.
Basically I want to have some confidence that I can keep my yearly healthcare costs below $7,500. That's assuming nothing else unexpected happens. Generally, I'm looking for a Gold plan or better with as much of the premium paid by the employer as possible.
I quit my previous job because I had 3 days a week remote, and I wanted to bump that to "unlimited but I can come whenever I want". Funny thing is that I would probably have come 2 days a week anyway most of the time. What I really want is to be able to work from home a few weeks in a row if I feel like it. Just decide as an adult if I want to come to the office or work from home. Maybe something like "10 mandatory office days" a year would have worked too. Or 3 mandatory office days a month, something like that. "Week" is the wrong granularity level.
That, and remote work. I have no interest in ever going back into the office. Even a modest 30min commute each way just feels like an unnecessary waste of my life. It’s like writing a document for hours which will only be read by your manager, and then for your manager to provide you with detailed feedback on how to improve the document, and expect you to update the document. I could do without that too.
Sorry but if you use more calories than you consume, how can that be the case? It just seems like a big commitment to spend 1k a month indefinitely.
Lack of core benefits make employees unhappy. Too low pay results in unhappy no matter anything else. OTOH high pay doesn't make employees happy -- a shit job with high pay never gets better than "barely tolerable".
Non-core benefits make employees happy but lack of them doesn't make them unhappy. For example, free lunch.
The division between core and extra varies to some degree between employees.
The major point is that the extras can never make up for a missing core. Poor pay or a bad boss is going to result in unhappy employees no matter the benefits.
-Stability of the company or role. If I don’t see 10 years of possibility there, it’s a no go for me (not a benefit, but the top concern, at my age it’s harder to find a job because folks want you young whippersnappers more than us old grumps) -excellent health insurance -STD/LTD -Generous life insurance without medical qualifications -strong 401k matching or a generous employee stock purchase program -remote is nice, but not a must have
So, when a company says "unlimited," what it tends to mean in reality is "there's a limit, but we won't tell you what it is." This manifests itself in people with unlimited PTO taking (on average) less time off than people with defined number of days.
When you have a defined number of days, you know exactly what the limit is. In my experience, this results in people using most (if not all) of their vacation days.
I will note that this largely seems to be a US thing.
There is a limit, the company just delegates the definition of that limit to team leads. It makes planning holidays uncomfortable since it’s never quite clear whether you’re pushing a boundary.
Generally I just stick to the UK norm of 25-27 days plus public holidays.
A generous but fixed allowance that you’re actually expected to use in full would be a much better system.
So, "unlimited" PTO is highly subjective. I prefer to be explicit about it and state the exact number of vacation days I am entitled to.
The health insurance plus debit card allow you to have an HSA you never have to touch. HSA is tax deferred, grows tax free once invested, and is tax free withdrawal at 72. The advanced age makes this somewhat unattractive but you can use the money before that (at 60+) for healthcare expenses.
Stay away from the free snacks so you don't have to use your HSA.
Careful. They grow tax free at the Federal level, but if you are in California, your HSA gains are subject to state tax. If your HSA investments pay taxable interest or dividends, or if you sell something at a gain, you'll owe additional income taxes in California.
So nothing of salary, actual project you would be working on, people you might be working with etc. Nope, if I don't work remote I don't work.
Sounds a little 'entitled' to me, but each to their own.
Of course this is all given the choice between one or the other. If I couldn't find work and was desperate, I would do what it takes, and so would most people.
On the topic of salary, yes if you offer me a fuck ton of money I would be willing to commute to an office, but the sum that would make it worth it is just not realistic. It's tough to put a price on comfort and time.
Not sure how it's entitled though, there are some employers that are ok with full remote and others that aren't. How is it entitled to not consider potential employers that are demanding the opposite of what I want in a job?
That includes beign able to get vacation (not just me, but my team as well) when I need it.
And be able to disconnect and nothing (bad) happens.
First and foremost: remote. Not commuting gives me 2 hours of time. Every day. That makes a profound impact on my life that goes way beyond any kind of financial compensation.
Secondly: Meaningful and interesting problems.
- 100% remote
- base salary
- unlimited (real) pto with minimum required pto or something big, like 5-6 weeks/year
- flexible schedule
- no or business hours on call rotation
- healthy culture
- home office fund
- education fundAlso, it's BS: unless I can take a year off on my first day, then it's not unlimited.
IOW, "come work for me if you're gullible"
What Alt Data are you selling?
- Salary
- A place that appreciates, once you get the work done well and on time, the rest of your time is basically yours.
- Interesting project / good people to work with or learn from.
- Less beauracracy as possible within reason.
Vacations, health insurance, parental leave are all given by law here (Italy). But, if they weren't, I guess they'd be pretty important.
1. Company culture where people are not dickheads to each other, and take into account that their colleagues are also humans with lives outside work
2. Working 4 instead of 5 days
3. Allowed to work 50% or more remote
- Money. - Remote work - Zero assholes in my team - Open source preferred - Preferably IC role.
Decent salary
Interesting work