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Comment by weatherlite | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I feel really bummed out I am getting 1/2 (or less?) of Google compensation. But then I open my eyes - see the workers in my daughter's kindergarten slaving away taking care of 30 toddlers for less than half what I make, nurses and doctors working in conditions I wouldn't be able to tolerate for more than a few months without mentally collapsing, the people in the supermarkets, gas stations, police, fire departments, social workers, teachers etc etc. Really I don't see what we have to complain about - whether its a 3 man startup with "low" compensation or anything else. You're getting paid for solving code riddles the whole day. You're getting paid a lot. Quit comparing yourself to your friends that work in Google and try to learn how to cultivate a peaceful and happy mind.

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As a Xoogler, I have to say Google isn’t what it once was. You pay for your high salary with the fact that the one thing you can be sure most people you work with care about is how much money they extract out of Google and how they could get more.

Taking care of toddlers is ostensibly a better use of the one life you get.

Nope; not with the abysmal pay. Or actually not unless it's my toddler. I mean it; respectfully.

(Longer PS. Teachers taking care of toddlers usually have a miserable time doing that and most of them are not there by choice in case you were wondered about that. While they are there they take care of them not out of some love or fulfilment but because that is required of them as part of their roles. That's it. It's a job for them, like yours is a job for you.)

You know that feeling you get when you see a screaming toddler board a plane? Now imagine that's your work, times a dozen, eight hours a day, every day.

I’m thankful for those people and they should be appreciated, awarded, and compensated more. We need more people able to handle stress in this world

No that's not what its like. Thats maybe the first week on introducing the kids to the new caregiving situation. Once thats cleared its a lot more manageable.

I'm not saying its easy I'm just saying it isn't what you described.

Right - I'm a parent, and I have kids in daycare, and it's not at all like "a screaming toddler boarding a plane ... times a dozen, eight hours a day, every day". There are moments like that, just like there are moments of incredible frustration in any job, but it's not 24/7.

Kids, more often than not, do a very good job of reasonably listening to their caregivers. It's when they get home and are in their safe space around their parents that they feel more free to act like little hellions, for lack of a better phrase (and I sure love my little hellions, lol). That's not an absolute, sure, but it's a lot more representative of the reality of daycares than "it's constantly screaming toddlers boarding planes".

I sometimes also want to scream after going through passport control and security check. That doesn’t mean I would scream the whole time if a nice lady took care of me and 29 other grown up people

> You pay for your high salary with the fact that the one thing you can be sure most people you work with care about is how much money they extract out of Google and how they could get more.

Dang, must be rough. I know somebody who only pays for their high salary with long hours and hard work.

Probably not uncommon. My final year at my last employer post re-organization and other changes was cold-hearted money extraction for (generously) part-time work. I was sort of disappointed I didn't get a package when they laid a fair number of people I worked with off. But I took a hard look at my vacation balances, upcoming holidays, RSU vesting, etc. and decided to coast for about the next year which, as it turned out, was just about the point it would have been difficult to continue on with no real job not that I would have wanted to.

> Taking care of toddlers is ostensibly a better use of the one life you get.

sounds like an extremely subjective assertion. Unless you have a well-off partner/family, it's possible and maybe not even uncommon to be very miserable taking care of toddlers and maxing out around minimum wage for life.

He probably tried to say that taking care of toddlers is a bigger positive impact on society than writing some crappy code that will be discarded a year later.

Yes, some software is important to the world and makes it a much better place. Vast majority of the code does not make such impact though. And then there's plenty of code that makes the world a worse place (insert your favourite evil company here).

It has to be used at all first. Even that's a hurdle.

> You pay for your high salary with the fact that the one thing you can be sure most people you work with care about is how much money they extract out of Google and how they could get more.

That's every job though, right? I only work because my employer pays me and either them or someone else will probably pay me more in the future. I'm not here because I just LOVE writing code for someone else, I'm here because I like money and want lots of it.

i mean you are a small cog in a giant machine, what else can you expect?

Sometimes I can't believe how much money I make for that little input, and whether that is ethical at all. This idea popped in my mind while on "home office" (sightseeing on the village with my wife) and saw the waitress panic because we paid her with a 500Kč for a 360Kč bill and she didn't know how much change to give... I got my answer right there.

That's a failure of society, not her fault. Subtraction is a skill chimps can master. The fact that she reached this stage means society failed her.

It indeed a failure of society, a sobering one at that.

This is such a condescending and arrogant way to look at another human being. "My waitress isn't good at math, hence she's dumb and deserves little pay." No. This is not the world anyone wants to live in, including you, even if you don't know it yet. This is how you get highly segregated societies where everyone points fingers at one another as the whole thing slowly collapses on them. A somewhat spicy take, but see the United Kingdom as an example.

While I see your point and how OPs comment could be interpreted that way I don't think that is how he meant it. I read it more along the lines of your sibling comment, I.E. "I can't believe I am getting paid a ton for little work while others are slaving themselves away" in a shameful sense, not a bragging sense.

Is the extent of judgement around who makes the most money a recent phenomenon? It seems more common these days for people to look down on others that make less than them. Maybe there are more visible status symbols now. The older I get, the more I realize how little I need in day to day life. But I have profound gratitude for the opportunities I have been given. I have deep respect for those that help to repair my plumbing, deliver my mail, and cook a breakfast sandwich at 6am. Part of me suspects that politically the US is experiencing class struggles right now, particularly around how we treat each other. A little bit of seeing the human being in the people around us and treating them with empathy can go a long way IMHO.

> Is the extent of judgement around who makes the most money a recent phenomenon?

Within the last generation, we have seen a large increase in wealth disparity. Technological progress and the multiplier effect that “internet scale“ enables seems to have amplified the effect.

I think the emphasis was on simple affinity for certain skills and their how society prices this.

Someone who does not have the luck (genetic, cultural or institutional or otherwise external) to develop so a skill so fundamental (and for her current job critical) and as evidenced by this story will face a long list of adversities at virtually no fault of theirs.

Social rewards are very non-linear. (And mostly because it is the naturally optimal heuristic. Help those close to you, distrust strangers, and watch out for freeloaders. All this aggregated over society is so powerful, and feels so natural that it usually takes a concerted effort of the majority of the people to try to even get it recognized.)

It can be much worse if people have to use computers and of course trust them completely. Just this week I brought five crates of empty beer bottles back, the machine to feed them into didn't work so the cashier had to do it "manually" at the checkout and after a little learning experience and hitting a key 100 times (5*20 bottles) they wanted to give me 85 Euros in return which I refused as it should have been just 24 Euros...

Is there much to think about? It should be fairly easy to know the effect your input has on the economy as a whole. The reason to use IT in the first place is to process information more effectively.

So much this. My dad was a school caretaker, recently retired. He said how relieved he is because the work was grinding him down so much. My partner is a nurse and actually dreads going to work on a regular basis. I never dread going to work. Far from grinding me down I feel like I'm growing. I would honestly still do it even if I didn't need the money. My job gives me an outlet for something I really enjoy. A way I can apply my skills to make myself useful and other people really happy. And on top of that I get paid like 3x as much as dad and partner.

So many of these HNers are in a bubble. I've said it so many times here. They have no idea what the world is like outside. How could they? They've essentially been treated like royalty. And no matter where people are in life one thing is constant: you can't take anything away and they don't want to go backwards. Doesn't matter if they've started beyond where some people will finish.

All these people complaining. Really? You don't think programming is useful? You don't think there are businesses out there who could use your skills? Yeah you won't be working in a tech company making addictive shit to sell ads. The owners of those are just chewing the fat now. But you'll work in an actually useful business that actually contributes to society.

Glad to see you have a healthy perspective on this and I hope your wife will eventually find a healthcare job with better conditions. Its really quite amazing how much we depend on these people yet treat them so poorly.

> you can't take anything away and they don't want to go backwards.

I'm considering switching occupations and becoming a registered nurse (in my country in europe).

The demographics here are so bad, I don't think we will need a large STEM workfore in ~15 years. Your shiny Vision-GPT model is useless when there is no one that wipes the asses of the elderly.

And I don't think Silicon Valley has the capabilities to solve this problem, no matter how often Sam Altman assures that it does.

When I stayed in the hospital for 2 weeks without being able to move, nurses where doing everything for me. I remember how much I cried over that when I left the hospital, how much grateful I was. They all just looked like angels to me.

Nurse is one of those occupations with pretty much guaranteed employment unless you burn yourself out (which is a real possibility unfortunately), but as long as you are able to and want to work there will be plenty of work for the reasons you've just said.

If/when humanoid robots are a thing (probably not this decade or the next) then yeah we can all pretty much retire, but nurses will be the last to go.

We have to complain about literally everything you just said. The entire system is broken.

Everyone should be entitled to live their lives without being subject to these awful conditions, but we as a society keep allowing this to happen because we don't really see them as equals. As long as we individually can get by, we can easily dismiss what everyone else endures.

I would happily live with less if everyone else could live a better life for it. In reality we wouldn't even need to sacrifice much since the wealth accumulation is so large. Redistributing that alone would be more than enough.

I say quit trying to solve systemic issues with individualistic solutions.

Not sure how we can have a "peaceful and happy mind" while everyone outside of our little bubble suffers. This line of thinking is, to me, an example of why we'll never fix any of this.

This attitude of "be happy our bubble isn't as bad as the other bubbles" is a tragedy. Folks, remember we're all in the same boat!

> This attitude of "be happy our bubble isn't as bad as the other bubbles" is a tragedy.

Its not really what I meant. Being a bit more stoic about life (which is what I suggested before without using the term Stoic) doesn't mean you don't care about other people's suffering or that you won't do anything to help. In fact the opposite, a part of being stoic is looking at the ugly parts of life and dealing with them. And its also very much about reframing whatever difficult moments we all have with the appreciation that for most of us things usually can be so much worse. You are probably not dying of cancer, you don't live on the streets etc. To ruminate about those facts every now and then is to me a healthy habit and not a selfish act.

I agree that having a more realistic mindset that we are already in a great position can help if the person's comparing themselves with others earning a lot more.

But I argue that this alone is not enough. Phrasing it merely as something we have to deal with as individuals to cope with the insanity of the current affairs is insufficient and perpetuates this individualistic thinking.

I don't believe the comment was mean spirited or anything like that, but when seeing a list of very bad realities we have today, we can't stop at individually coping with it by comparing ourselves to those that have it even worse.

I consider myself a stoic too and totally understand where you're coming from. But I'd argue stoicism is an individualistic solution that cannot really be applied to something systemic as the job market crisis

You can be thankful that your little bubble is still intact while wishing that there was a way to provide similar bubbles for the masses. I recently realized that the stability I have in my life, which I would've perceived as boring or mundane as a younger man, is more than I ever could have asked for compared to what most of the world gets, especially in times other than ours.

I think a lot of the problem comes from the phrase - 'comparison is the thief of joy'. Many people would be much happier with life if they weren't barraged by other hypothetical lifestyles and constantly comparing themselves to their neighbors. That's nothing new but much more amplified in the current environment.

This makes me think of ‘Why a meritocracy is corrosive to society’ by Philosphize This! It was very interesting to hear the downsides expressed, and how ingrained it is in society to the point that we don’t even notice. Perhaps the most important point: how thankful we should be to have the skills to be highly valued in this environment, which will give you some empathy to the people who don’t. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ASBhftzNrJnFL0NV3Iqtu?si=c...

for anyone who doesn't like Spotify or prefers YT

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TKQTbVT0kzQ

unfortunately the transcript is not yet on the website

> Not sure how we can have a "peaceful and happy mind" while everyone outside of our little bubble suffers. This line of thinking is, to me, an example of why we'll never fix any of this.

I agree with you that this individualistic line of thinking will never fix the systemic issues we find here. But I challenge you on your conclusion, "That's why we'll never fix any of this". There should be another "line of thinking" that will fix stuff. What is it? Maybe something not individualistic, aren't people able to cooperate?

> Folks, remember we're all in the same boat!

By "we" in this sentence I understand you mean ones reading this, or interacting here. Just want to point out that, there are people out of this boat. Their interests are protected by the State and they never, never had to do a 8h work shift.

> Quit comparing yourself to your friends that work in Google and try to learn how to cultivate a peaceful and happy mind.

Ha, I work in games. My goal was never to aim for 300k+ total comp.

But also, I work in games. You kind of need to abandon the idea of "a peaceful and happy mind" going into such a field.

Who is making $3 million/yr at Google ?

A Google L9/M3 makes $2 million/yr (per levels.fyi). I feel like a sucker, but I don't know a single person who's made L9/M3 at FANG before 30, and wasn't also the shining star of their Ivy-league CS class or the slimiest ladder climber I've set my eyes on. The exceptions are acqui-hire startup founders, but again, that's just amortized compensation as part of acquisition package. High risk - high reward.

I have close friends at Deepmind/ FAIR and even they don't make more than a million. I'd say Nvidia and OpenAI folks are the only exception, and both were anomalous one-time spikes. (HFT is usually not considered part of the tech world per-se)

We have to complain about people who are exploiting all of us, instead of looking at the people in the kindergarten look at people like Elon musk stealing billions

Psst... it's the government

No, this is Patrick

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