Ask HN: Is fulfilling but lower-paying work worth it?
Find myself resenting my big tech job and wondering if it is worth it to look at doing more noble work like non-profit or even government services. Is the grass just greener?
But you could also end up in low paying and fulfilling that nonetheless make it hard to live off of. Ironically, again, many 'elite' cultural jobs are an example. There is a reason why, in general, people from wealthy families end up working in those jobs. Sometimes they aren't even advertised. Other times they don't pay at all. Your average lower-middle class person can only work in low paying non-profit cultural jobs so long before taking an exit ramp for the for-profit world and higher pay.
Non-profit work is extremely org and team dependant. Lots of orgs will take advantage of people doing non-profit work. They will use the idea of 'doing good' as an excuse to force overtime, pile stress on people, and use theoretical better pay as a carrot on the end of a stick. Non-profits can also be extremely donor dependant, which is a side of the 'industry' that leaves a sour-taste in many mouths; there's a lot of sucking up to wealthy people.
Government work can be extremely fulfilling and, relative to the median wage of people in America, can actually be quite well paid. The benefits are usually also amazing. It can also be slow, bureaucratic to levels you simply cannot believe, and depressing, however; working in government requires a certain mindset and expectations that some people simply don't have.
The middle is just nice. There's a lot of these curves though. If you can only work in Japan, then there's probably a top tier Japanese company that absolutely sucks, and it's probably easier to get an O-1 visa for some mid tier job in the US or something. There's also some overlap between top tier tech giant and lower-mid tier startup founder. Lots of people do startups because it's easier to sell a company for $30m than get a $1m salary.
I think Ask HN lies on the upper end of the curve which is why you see "how do I deal with burnout" posts every other month, or cynical responses by clearly intelligent people (key symptoms of burnout). So keep that in mind. Reddit is probably squarely in the middle globally and you'll get different job advice.
When I came up with this theory, I was in a group that was saying $50k annual is being too ambitious and they should stick to a $36k job.
Remember that nobody is going to post "Everything is going well for me right now." You're looking at only part of the story and have 0 idea how big the piece you're not seeing is.
To a lesser degree, there's "How do I motivate myself to work more than 10 hours a week?" I'm not sure if 'comfort zone' indicates happiness, but it's comfortable at least. Comfort zone posts are pretty damn common, but I see none here.
A litmus test I do on communities is write a variation of, "I spent my Sunday sleeping." If people congratulate you on your rest, they're likely overworked. If they hope you have a more productive Sunday, they're likely in the comfort zone.
Another metric is smiling. They're hard to see online, but I'd say the optimism-pessimism ratio, or excited-cynical ratio.
Sure "it was good to do the works we did" helps. And them bastards walked off with hundreds of thousands of dollars whilst others burnt their health running the shop on a shoestring.
From a psychological point of view, fulfillment usually comes from doing something that is challenging, which means that the challenge has to align with what you perceive as value, which is a very personal thing. If work takes up a significant chunk of your time and energy, but its something that you don't see as valuable, you are probably going to burn out.
However, depending on your skill level and ability to figure out how to move internally to better teams, big tech work can be very easy, which means you aren't going to get burned out, which gives you both money and time to do things that are valuable.
For example, I used to work in Amazon, standard team that owned a few backend services. I dunno if it was just me, but I never had a hard time implementing features in fraction of the time that everyone else did, mostly because I knew and understood things beyond code (like for example, nobody on my team even knew that you could capture traffic with tcpdump and see the json request and responses directly). So as a result, I only did about 6 hours of actual work per week, but my "output" was the same or greater than teammates. Never got burnt out. My current job is pretty much the same pay, just actually part time contractually, because I really wanted to focus on improving my fitness for longevity which takes a bunch of dedicated planning and training - and this is the part that is challenging for me that I also find great value in.
If your noble work won't satisfy your desires for pay, then that's going to cause stress and resentment, and the fulfillment won't be enough, IMHO. There's also the possibility that your noble work is a real drag. I'd strongly prefer a not particularly noble job where I can work the way that works best for me over a noble job where I had to work in ways I don't like.
For some people, money is the only thing in their field of vision. For others, spending their lives making a positive impact carries more, and real, weight.
Speaking as someone who works for the public sector, making moderately good money and helping real people everyday, I can tell you that I'd much prefer that to working for FAANG. Actually, I wouldn't be caught dead working for Meta.
It depends on who you are and what you value.
I’d actually prefer a 500K per year job with 450 going to charity than an 80k job.
But if it causes anxiety about bills every couple of weeks then very soon the work stops being fulfilling.
IMHO