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The idea that you can perform poorly if you are paid less is not really true. It's always best to earn the maximum. Expectations are set on you regardless of your compensation. Often your direct team lead / line manager who is doing your performance ranking isn't even completely in the loop on your total compensation.

Performing poorly is what will trigger the PIP like process, compensation only comes up later. Further, it's rare for an org to truly let a manager slice up their compensation budget however the like (hey you can hire 2 juniors or 1 senior, your call).. so it often doesn't cost your direct line manager extra headcount just because you are on expensive end. Usually headcount is decided, and then the compensation required to fill that headcount is a secondary concern, as crazy as that seems.

Further, it's a rare interview process that doesn't shake out that you are at a lower seniority level than you are representing. Interviews may fail to shake out exact level of technical proficiency but I think most interviews do place you on the junior->senior spectrum fairly well.

Only once in my 20 year career have I almost gotten a job that in retrospect was way ahead of where I was at the time. 15 years later I ended up finally taking a similar job. But they didn't hire me!

It's not so much about performance. But especially in tiny companies, if you need to make redundancies, you are going to sort your spreadsheet of employees by cost descending. And if you look at the top spots and you're like "that guy really isn't our best employee" then you're going to be the first to go.

Financially, this will likely still work out well for you in the long run. But it may not be a great way to get top job stability.

You don't get top pay & top job stability, that's life.

Job stability implies staying somewhere for a long period of time, and that's generally not how you maximize compensation.

Compensation maximizing career management usually involves moving every ~5 years or so, depending on industry.

But I'd rather make more money AND have more opportunities/experiences than to rely on the continued benevolence of my single long term employer.

When they start sorting spreadsheets by compensation for layoff purposes, you are already in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being paid less for years and years so that you are lower down the spreadsheet isn't a career strategy.

You don't get job stability. Period. If you're getting paid more, you can at least bank more for the downturns. But in general, unless you're being unfairly underpaid, your salary doesn't have a lot to do with if you get selected for a layoff or not, all other things being equal.

I agree... but it's important to recognize that the smaller the difference between one's pay and one's expenses, the more impact any kind of disruption has. 'don't go bankrupt' isn't a requirement with a lot of leeway - the leeway to take risks comes when losing a job wouldn't lead to immediate bankruptcy.

Savings is important no matter your income.

However you'll find its a lot easier to save money as you make more money.

My savings rate AND my absolute dollars saved have gone up as I progressed through 20s/30s/40s/etc.

Increases in your rent or real estate taxes +/-5% don't matter as much when housing is a lower overall % of your income. This is a big hurdle in HCOL areas when you are starting out, so the faster you can move through that phase the better.

Any company over about 200 employees is not going to perform layoffs this way. They will perform layoffs by strategic function and job role, not by a descending sort on the payroll database. R&D roles tend to be more stable than most other role types, as long as the company is on a general growth trajectory for the overall strategy. Once a company stagnates, R&D roles tend to be the least stable. What roles are the biggest target for layoffs generally has more to do with the industry the company is in and where it is on the maturity cycle than whether or not an individual person is being paid +20% over their cohort. In any sufficiently larger company they don't even look at salary outliers, because it's irrelevant at that scale first of all, and because salary outliers usually exists for a reason secondly.

Also, people should just stop expecting job stability. The evidence is blatant and public that this simply isn't a thing for anyone. Instead, you should work on maximizing successful outcomes in your life and career regardless of which employer's logo is on your paycheck/badge. Having a budget, having an investment plan, and actively building up and managing your savings are just important life skills for success irrespective of how much you get paid and where you work. The more money you make, though, makes everything else easier. It is a fruitless and misguided plan to try to make /less/ just so you can "stay under the radar". Not only does it not work, but it's actually self-sabotaging.

Correct. Being +/- some % compensation to a peer is less of a factor frankly than if you get along with your management.

There was a recent round of layoffs at my previous employer very last minute and chaotic. Skip level managers were given an hour to produce their list. My former skip level boss basically whacked everyone he disliked in one swoop as long as they weren't in operationally important roles he had no backup for.

> And if you look at the top spots and you're like "that guy really isn't our best employee" then you're going to be the first to go.

The solution, then, seems to be: Be one of the best employees, particularly if you're getting paid more than most of them.

> The idea that you can perform poorly if you are paid less is not really true.

Can confirm from my experience. The greater the salary, the better the working conditions. Companies that paid as little as possible also tried to squeeze out as much work as possible.

Yes this is in general the rule my wife & I have observed throughout our careers.

By and large companies that don't want to pay individuals appropriately also don't want to hire enough people, so everyone is stuck underpaid, overworked and miserable. They also tend to collect people in leadership roles who would not be hired anywhere else.. leaving their ICs all the worse.

My best paying jobs generally all had the best benefits and nicest people.

There are some examples of companies that are known in their industry to pay a premium "hazard pay" for working you to the bone, but they are something of an exception.

> or were laid off and have been unemployed for 6-12 months with a dwindling emergency fund, you may have to take the first sensible offer you get. Especially if the job market is tough (like it is right now) or if you need that paycheck to keep a roof over your head.

Also, if you see yourself in such a situation and see yourself having to choose between competing offers, it may make sense to go for the offer that pay less money if this position will expand your long-term employability. It is better for your career to become a tech lead for an upcoming Y-Combinator using Rust, than making some 50k more to be a Senior Java Developer in a oil company from TX.

EDIT: I meant 50k MORE

This depends on what you want to do in your career. If you want to pursue a career in working in startups and early-stage tech companies, then working for a YC is better for you. A senior developer in TX is making way more than 50k. And working for an oil company in TX is good enough for your resume to get a serious look at 99% of the other traditional corporations.

Texas isn't some backwater. It's the second largest state with a long history in deep tech.

I hear working for oil and gas makes it hard to leave O&G because most companies have a hard time paying as well (aside from Big Tech, I guess), and maybe the ex-O&G engineer will go back to O&G for the higher pay sooner rather than later.

I wonder if the same dynamics, if it exists at all, apply to Big Tech alum.

I've got a few colleagues around the industry. Layoffs are super common, but so are the hiring sprints. And they generally use the same tech as any industry with a few exceptions. A lot of them never bought into the cloud because they have their own datacenters and their own bespoke compute and storage.

I meant 50k of difference between offers.

> Essentially, people who have the luxury of taking their time to delay the hiring process as much as they can in order to maximize the number of concurrent offers.

I think this isn't as clear-cut as you're making it; the advice also applies to earlier-stage engineers. The key observation for those cases is that there _is_ a big return from running as intense a process as you can manage.

I think lots of folks apply for a few jobs at a time, and the point here is that you would likely be better off applying for 100 roles at once, rather than browsing and applying for a handful every week (and then tapering off if you get through the filter into a process that seems promising).

It's true that more-junior engineers will have fewer options, but I think you can still directionally update on this advice. I would also advise more junior engineers to actually run the funnel calculations to get a feel for how many applications you need to send out per onsite, as the dropoff is quite grim and therefore you need to push way harder than you might hope.