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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

To me it looks like tech is just falling more in line with other industries pay/workload. I think there are many who joined the tech workforce during the pandemic thinking the norm was to make $135k while doing 10 hours of real work a week from home, twiddling a few lines of bootcamp level javascript to appease your largely absent boss.

Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours. The pay was just decent too. Not jaw dropping like today.

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I am dumbfounded this idea gets trotted around HN so freely. I’ve met nobody like this in the industry. Most people I know are burnt out from many years of having to work over 40 hours.

Which one?

A large part of the IT community does indeed very little work.

As for having to work over 40 hours and being stressed, I guess there's a price to having to work in US under such lax worker's rights and benefits, in Europe you just say no thanks boss see you on Monday.

It is a testament to the great work they do that many people believe that IT does not do much. The work required to keep things working without noticible downtime is hardly trivial.

Thanks I work in IT, I'm a dev, and based my comment on both my own and experience and the dozens of peers I know very well in many companies of the world.

And I reiterate, a large parte of our sector does very little practical work.

I hate to break it to you but in the US, employees at many companies do not work more than 40 hours a week. There are two reasons for this:

1) People who can leave will leave if the work load is too high. Those who can leave are usually the best team members.

2) It does not work. Research has shown most people are incapable of producing more than 40 hours of work a week over the long term. They can do it for a week, maybe a month but after that their productivity is either the same as a 40 hour/week work or maybe even less. People are not machines and just because they are asked to do something (or ordered to) does not mean they will or even can.

One last thing, what keeps employers inline in the US is people can leave. If you are in a bad job, you can switch to a good one.

Another thing about Europe v. USA conditions: it is considerably harder to fire a bad hire or team member in Europe.

I work at FAANG. People here coast while making mountains of money.

Google is the big tech company with that reputation though. MS has pockets but pays considerably worse

> I’ve met nobody like this in the industry.

nobody is going to admit to other people they know that this (slacking off) is what they do. You only get this on an anonymous forum like HN or reddit. Of course, some of them might be lying, but where there's smoke, there's fire imho.

Jaw dropping pay is inextricable from the jaw dropping Bay Area housing market. Standard white-collar pay for Bay Area-only roles is a pretty bad deal, and most tech workers would be better off learning something else. But standard white-collar pay with the geographic distribution of other white-collar work (i.e. any mid-sized and up metro is fine) would be a perfectly good equilibrium.

It's arguably more expensive in West Los Angeles (where tech is in LA). Most articles compare LA to SF but LA is giant. If you lived in La Verne (cheap), the east most side of LA, your commute to tech companies on the West Side would be 2 to 3hrs.

Looking at Rent Cafe:

SF: $3267

Santa Monica: $3956

Venice: $3844

Playa Vista: $3726

Marina Del Rey $3896

These are all places near Meta, Google, etc....

I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet but in LA on the west side it's all over the place. "Coliviing" where they rent out individual bedrooms for $2500-$3500 a month and you share the living room and dining room. It's like having a roommate except you have have lock on your bedroom door and no choice who your roommates are (and no responcibility if they don't pay their rent).

> I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet

There was a startup for just this a few years ago. Home share is what it was called.

Makes you wonder if these mega corporations wouldn't be better off lobbying to resolve the housing crisis instead of paying more in salaries.

>Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours.

Exactly. Look at industries that also recruit smart college grads and pay well: consulting, finance, law. These jobs have very demanding schedules.

Not saying that's good, just that it is.

Software industries outside of VC are still pretty normal, decent pay but in line with other local industries, nothing jawdropping. Working pretty hard still, but balanced enough compared to the overtime all the time days. That's going to depend on your company.

I’ve had this conversation with my boss, we’ve settled on about 3-4 modes of compensation.

Lowball, either because on ignorance (bro I have an app idea!), intention (fast buck artists preying on folks that don’t know better, maybe it’s a BS startup with 80k S.E. base and worthless ISO), or something like government.

Middle-Road, all the normal companies in all those “flyover” states or something to that affect. You’ll get paid a reasonable market rate for a reasonable expectation of work, e.g. an American 40 hours work week. If you’re lucky these might be a small tech-shop, but no flashy VC driven mania. I’ve worked at several, currently work at one. From the inside looking out the ZIRP issues are nonexistent, Cost-of-Living raises might not be as high as I’d like but I have 0 worries about the trends of tech layoffs I read of here.

Upper-Middle, places that are similar to Middle Road in that they are not flashy VC driven firms but “real” companies delivering profitable software or tech-enabled products and services but they also highly value their IT as a force multiplier. As a result the compensation might be a fair bit higher than Middle Road but nothing insane. You’re not walking about with 300-500k Total Comp. Nice 200k TC for a quality Senior here for a normal place of living. I’ve worked at one such firm but something of a unicorn.

Finally, VC world where the rules don’t matter and the points are made up… or something like it. Compensation is ludicrous and often detached from real-world value provided.

I know this is neither exhaustive scientific, but rather to play with the idea that there are different patterns of compensation than the 5 hours of work and 500k of compensation I see some thinking is both reasonable and deserved (trolling?)

> Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours.

And I can't understand sorry, why should we go back to this scenario, exactly?

The implication isn't that we should, rather that IT sector is reverting to some saner curve of compensation vs skills and effort.

It will still be insanely cushier and well paid than other jobs.

The comment didn't say that

Takes a low IQ person to accept ridiculous workload for kinda ok money

Only when there are better options available in the same industry. Nobody is getting a CS degree from a good school then switching to nursing because they can make the same money with better hours (or better money with the same hours).

The gravy train might be ending, I just wish it would end with the jobs that actually do nothing (product) rather than engineering first, but oh well.

Ouch :) I felt that

You take what you can find and negotiate.

No offense, I'm curious: do you happen to be younger than 30?

No lol, why would anyone work crazy hours for not an impressive salary?

Off the top of my head:

- They're a founder

- They're a spouse of a founder

- They're a friend of the founder

- The worker is unskilled and needs to work crazy hours to break even

- They believe in the company and have equity

- The vertical is more politically compatible than alternatives

- The vertical punishes newbies before the career starts paying off (lawyers, doctors, academia)

- The work is interesting/fun on its own (in these cases, the type of work would never be paid well -- teaching, charity work, homemaking, niche tech, etc.)

- The worker is being compensated in other, non-monetary ways (aside from equity)

- The job is poorly paid locally but well-compensated elsewhere, and moving/remote work is not possible

Are such people idiots? Maybe.

That said, people who place money above all other factors trend closer to the "idiot" line, in my book. YMMV.

If you require the literal best pay possible, you'll be job-searching forever. Some people do not have that luxury.

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