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Comment by BadHumans | Hacker News Reader

This entire piece starts from the conclusion that engineers leave because they aren't paid enough then works backwards from there. This is wrong from my experience. Anecdotally, I have never left a job because of money. Sure, I left jobs and got ones that ended up paying more money but the reason I started looking in the first place wasn't money. It was for other reasons that usually included frustrations with management.

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You should try leaving a company for money sometime. Financial independence really is life-changing, and you can get there surprisingly quickly in the tech industry by putting yourself on the market more often.

Anecdotally, at my current company nearly everyone I know who left did so within a few months of hitting the 4-year cliff on their signing equity. I've left 3 companies in my career primarily because the next company doubled my comp. I've only left 1 company for reasons other than pay.

I make low six figures in a low to medium cost of living area. I don't think even doubling my income would change my life too much.

I've had my income more than doubled now, nearly tripled in the past decade. Just because I was willing to move where I would be paid market rate.

There's a lot of companies in high cost of living areas that may be willing to split the difference in salary.

Money isn’t everything, but the math behind retirement saving is compelling.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

Right but what if you enjoy your job and don’t want to retire?

Knowing that you have F-you money in investments makes it a lot more likely that you can enjoy your job and removes other stresses in life, or at least it did in my case even with only lowercase f-you money.

Having the option is better than not having it

What if you stop liking your job?

This happened to me sometime between my first and second kids (last year or so). It was some mix of changing priorities, less time, starting to feel my age, work becoming more difficult, company cultural changes, etc. I think I've stuck a decent balance of saving and living, but man does life come at you fast. Went from happily working 60-80 hours (including some side projects) to struggling to work 40 hours. Reminds me of how one day something switched and I just couldn't drink anymore. Age is probably the biggest factor, and I can't imagine what this is going to be like in my 50s (just turned 40).

Then take more unpaid sabbaticals, or buy a boat.

"Too much money" is a solved problem

I love my job but having too much money would let me email someone 4 higher in the hierarchy to give them my opinion on things. :)

Paradoxically, I think the willingness and ability to do that (assuming it's used at all reasonably) tends to increase your visibility and perceived value to the company when averaged over a large number of trials.

"This is stupid, but I'm going to keep my mouth shut because I like to eat and live indoors." vs "This is stupid and I'm going to tell the CEO that and suggest a better alternative."

Work is more enjoyable when you don't have to do it for money

Yep, I look at every extra dollar I could make (that I don't technically need to survive) as some number fewer minutes until I can retire. So every extra dollar is worth it, no matter how frugal my lifestyle is.

Wow. Is this really true? Do you live in a studio apt in the Midwest while working for a FAANG?

I consider myself a "FIRE devotee without the compensation necessary to actually FIRE." So yea, time to retirement is definitely a variable that I actively try to minimize however I can. I don't want to be one of those guys who has to wait so long to retire that they're dead.

I’ve known far too many people who die within 3 years of retirement regardless of age.

Quality of life now is more important to me.

Here’s hoping you’re lucky enough to live until then. Don’t forget to live in the meantime. It’s a lot easier to hike across Europe in your 30s than in your 50s.

"Here’s hoping you’re lucky enough to live until then."? The median lifespan is over 80 and developers are paid above the median, often by quite a bit. It's far, far more likely in your 50s that you'll be staring down the barrel of a layoff + industry downturn and cursing yourself for the money spent on your trip across Europe and other frivolities in your 30s.

I don't think this is true for most people, when you ask older people about their regrets, it's often that they worked too much and didn't live enough.

There are many people who don’t get asked about their regrets when they’re older. And there are many people living lives of quiet desperation.

Yes but the set of people we're talking about in this context is software engineers often paid well above median.

I’m at that point where I’m working less and making more money and I’ve done most of the stuff people want to do traveling, hiking, gaming, etc. and I’m still in my 30s. Now everything starts to feel same old boring there’s no excitement.

If you spent a ton of money to hike across Europe, you've done something terribly wrong. I spent a month traveling across Europe by train a few years ago, and it was fairly cheap, certainly FAR less money than I would have spent on any vacation in the US.

Taking a vacation (any vacation) in the US is a frivolity, even if you live in the US. If you could theoretically rent out your home in the US while you're gone (for the same cost as your current rent+utilities, so no net profit), you'd probably end up saving money by spending a 2+ week vacation in Europe instead of just spending that time at home and going out to restaurants in your own town.

This is only tangentially aligned, but I live in Canada and find the same equation in the winter. I travel south, to a low-cost area, and get to shut down the heat in my house for 4 months. The result is a $2000 savings over those months on heating costs.

I couldn’t imagine living like that. Yes, it’s possible that I’ll get screwed since I started my money making career late, but I might have died of depression much younger otherwise. Everyone needs to find their own route through life and working your youth way is really really scary when you turn 59 and realize you haven’t lived yet.

In my 30s my single driving goal was to pay off my mortgage and be debt free (I came to home ownership late).

Thanks to this industry, I got there at 42.

I’m sure as shit not going back to the treadmill, for what?

So I am taking my young family on trips and experiences I never had growing up (visiting other countries, camping, hiking, etc.), and working on the health I neglected in my 30s.

Also being more assertive at work and not sacrificing like I used to.

Because of this, I’m probably not going to have a wealthy retirement, but I have a lot of peace of mind knowing we could keep the family afloat working minimum wage jobs, with the house paid off and no debts.

The median lifespan is no longer over 80, at least not for middle age males in the US, though it is for females:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

It also depends a lot on what your current age is. If you're 60 or older it's 80 or more. If you're younger than that and male it's under 80, going down the younger you are. Covid and other things reduced life expectancy in the US. This is the 2021 table, the most recent, life expectancy may go down further as new tables are published. However the graphs here tell a different story:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Part of these graphs are future projections, so it's difficult to tell what to believe. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the first table is what the insurance industry and Social Security uses.

There are some uh, relevant socioeconomic correlations here.

to a degree, yes.

but obesity -- which correlates with income level and area code -- is what's killing people early. if you're fat as hell at 19 you're probably going to be even fatter at 60, and heart disease or cancer is going to kill you.

> Covid and other things reduced life expectancy in the US.

It reduced life expectancy for people who were alive in 2019. Those statistics say nothing about the life expectancy of people who are currently alive.

The sentiment is right, and sure, there are some differences, but please dont think your 50s is some geriatric period of your life where hiking across the alps/europe is not thoroughly enjoyable!

A lot of my swiss neighbours are more fit than half my friends in their 30s, and they are 70+.

I'm not sure what the secret is but I'm fairly sure just moving here added an extra 10 years to my life expectancy.

That's because we hike across our 30s, and don't stop until our 80s (at least a part of the population). Work is fine, but being outside makes you live longer and better.

My grandfather was still skiing while being 80.

Also I think less dependency on cars, in my experience (living in Switzerland) moving around by foot/bicycle/public transport is normal.

Soon to have 25% skimmed off every year and that's assuming you get to live long enough to spend it.

I assume you're talking about the proposed tax on unrealized gains that only applies on holdings over 100 million. 100 million dollar threshold being a critical piece of information you conveniently left out.

How many people did the original income tax apply to?

I don't think it matters. I'm in favor of the tax as proposed. If it changes I'll adjust my stance accordingly.

What's your FIRE number? When are you going to retire? Doubling your income shouldn't change your current lifestyle but it should change your trajectory towards retirement. Why retire at 65 when you could retire at 55, or even 45?

Have you considered worst-case scenarios?

An injury that prevents you from working, or something like cancer in the family, could be a whole lot easier to deal with if you have a sizable nest egg.

I have considered it and it is a legitimate concern to think about. I'm still fairly young and healthy and I have enough money to not work for years if it came down to it so you could call it hedging my bets but it is something that does lurk in the background as time passes.

On an unrelated note, big fan of your work :)

for me, I like donating. So more money is great!

Doubling your income would mean you can take 50% of your time off with the same income.

Pretty sure that would change your life!

It doesn't really work like that. The reality is that you can't work 50% of the time for half the salary (if that's what you mean). When you make more money you typically want a nicer place to live, maybe a nicer car, your standard of living will go up somewhat. Now to maintain that standard of living you're going to need to save more money.

Maybe you have kids and you want to be able to pay for their education, or buy them a place to live... Maybe you're helping your family.

Personally I could have "retired" a long while back if I wanted to have a lower standard of living and also take some risk. But I don't hate my work, I do things out of work as well, I prefer a nicer house and a nicer car, I'd probably be bored if I didn't work.

Developers in the USA earn far beyond the level where the lifestyle creep that you describe is so compelling that it makes any sense at all to say "you can't work 50% of the time for half the salary".

A more solid factor is that companies don't want to hire part-time developers, because coordination overhead means twice the number of developers each working half as many hours are far less effective.

I meant it in that sense. Even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to work 50% for half my salary (likely) because my employer would have a problem with that. For the reason you gave and others.

If anything, most tech company contracts are written the other way around - there is almost never overtime pay and any thinking/work done both within and outside work hours is completely owned by the company.

I have asked to work 4 day weeks at 80% of my salary a few times, and not had a problem. When I once asked for a 3 day week that was turned down.

The other way to work 50% is to take a few months or years break between jobs.

I've enjoyed doing that. It's certainly not for everyone.

Typically with a higher income you taxation rate increases even more. So 50% more salary might only end up being 20% more in your hand.

    > So 50% more salary might only end up being 20% more in your hand.

Can you give an example of a tax regime where this would hold true? I find your example hard to believe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax

Even under a progressive tax things don't work the way conservative fiscal armchair economists would like to have you believe.

Poor people still, comparatively, spend more of their income to taxes. That's because poor people have to spend more of their income on direct consumption, i.e. not investment.

If I'm poor I'm easily spending 90% of all my money on stuff for me, right now. If I'm rich that drops to 10%, and the rest goes towards stuff that isn't taxed.

So, while income tax may favor the poor, sales tax very obviously favors the rich. The only reason a progressive tax exists is because rich people are so powerfully favored in modern tax systems, we need to try to bring them back in line to the burden poorer people face. Even still, poor people face more burden.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/10/blog-post.html

> you can take 50% of your time off

The economy and society isn't structured like this. I'd happily take half the pay I have now for half the time. But the only way to get that time is to make 10 dollars an hour flipping burgers.

I love it when people guess how changing or trying something new will affect them without doing it and never having done it.

Maybe not for you, but for your family and future children it could be a life changer. If something happens to you, having a few millions in the bank is also very nice.

> Financial independence really is life-changing.

This.

All companies want you to be loyal to them and them only. But they won't reciprocate it. Only the C-suite is deserving of hefty pay bumps.

I always find my salary very difficult to replace, and it's not particularly high. I'm assuming it's all pay cuts from here on out with the economy the way it is.

For the next few years at least, probably

The economy has been objectively really great last few years.

Many people say the economy is bad, whatever the measurable macro-economical state of the economy is.

If you find it almost impossible to get jobs I don’t know if it matters.

Your immediate situation is equally shitty, sure.

But if you realize the problem is not "the economy" (which you can't possibly affect), but something about you (which is the though you can affect the most), you have a chance to find a better path for yourself.

You see, according to that one HN commenter everything is always fine (they own capital)

This is because the idea of economy has been highjacked by armchair capitalists.

The economy has almost nothing to do with the average person's quality of life. We've completely lost the plot. That's why a country like the US can have such an insane GDP and GDP per capita and have comparatively much lower quality of life than countries with worse economies.

When people say the economy is bad, they mean the things that actually matter. When economists say the economy is good, they're speaking of some theoretical economy nobody can see. They're speaking of numbers on a screen, that don't go into your pocket. That's where the discrepancy comes from.

I've never been in a position where I had any kind of leverage to negotiate a serious increase.

I've even been in an extreme situation in crypto sector where I was putting pressure on the company founder for a salary increase. I was earning like USD $100K per year comp total. They had over $100 million of assets. The founder, a multi-millionaire who had more money than he knew what to do with said that the pressure I was putting was like "Holding a knife to the company's throat." Guess how much of a raise he offered? 2%! I quit. Within 1 month after I quit, they fired half of the company. Coincidence? They didn't even need to do layoffs, they still had over $100 million in liquid assets/runway. They were spending at a rate of like $1 million per month. WTF!

Out of the 10+ tech startups and corporations I worked for over the past 20 years, that was the closest I ever came to receiving a raise and still didn't get it.

The whole market feels fake. Like a kind of weird social engineering PsyOp.

Getting more money from your current company based on market conditions almost never works. Even star performers get shafted on the regular.

I'd have to make it into FAANG or similar to double my comp. I'd certainly be open to the idea, but the path seems awfully narrow for senior level midwestern engineers like me.

HR has a saying "employees don't leave jobs, they leave managers".

Pay has motivated me to look for other jobs, but only after I was already worn out and frustrated with my current job. Switching jobs isn't like getting a new car or moving to a new apartment. It's traumatic, kind of like going through a break-up. You work with the same people for years and then suddenly you will never see them again. That isn't pleasant.

If the pay is bad enough, I like to think I would leave anyways. But I think most people are given better reasons to leave their jobs and onto greener pastures.

I wonder if LLMs would do a better job as managers, if they can make up for cognitive biases in humans. Managers treat new employees with lesser experience, with higher regard and respect than existing employees with longer experience that remained at that company for a long time. Switching jobs is also the best way to get a raise, due to managers being heavily biased towards obtaining new hires. On one hand, they're supposed to keep good performers, but on the other hand they're supposed to keep talent flowing in. Employees should then also try to keep their jobs best they can, while also searching for better jobs and not getting more attached to their employer than their employer is to them?

Humans in general are too biased and faulty in their thinking. Sure, LLMs hallucinate and propagate existing bias in society, but at least they can maybe (in the future) evaluate employees and form more objective opinions towards existing staff and new hires? sounds better than humans winging it based on "vibes"?

Still traumatic with remote?

When leaving jobs? For me it's even more traumatic. In-person working tends to come with a lot more drama, so leaving can be a relief in part. Remote working, at least for someone of my personality and slight obsession with technical matters, I could get more attached to like minded co-workers; with WFH I encounter minimal drama. But on this topic, pay is much less of an issue as well for WFH. I think I would put up with a lot more of undesirable work conditions remotely than in-person.

Yes. You bond with people when you communicate a lot with them, regardless of the medium.

You think unprofessional workplace interactions, lack of growth (personal or/and company), and micromanagement aren't bad because it happens to you while you're at home?

> HR has a saying "employees don't leave jobs, they leave managers".

I'd say they leave people. The people aren't necessarily managers.

well, the thinking there is, managers manage people, so ultimately it is their failure to manage people that causes good performers to leave.

I mean, that thinking is obviously wrong. Not everything is within your manager's power to fix. And people have different tolerances with how many headaches they put up with too. The manager might need much more time to improve things than their employee might tolerate.

Those are good points, but at the end of the day, people issues are management issues. It may not be your specific manager that is responsible but the management of the company and HR, who are responsible for the work environment that is set. I'd imagine it is a business (think money) decision on how much time and effort is put into cultivating a reasonably tolerable work environment. if employees have unreasonable demands for their work environment, I agree, it is the employee's fault. But fault aside, even for unreasonable and overly sensitive employees, they're still leaving managers who can't or won't fix people issues in their teams, more often than not, with many many exceptions of course.

If by "people leave managers" they mean anyone in the chain up to and including the CEO, then I guess? That's hardly a meaningful statement though, it's practically a tautology... the CEO is ultimately responsible for everything the company does, so whatever reason you have for leaving is their responsibility... by definition. I can't say I find a tautology like that to be a particularly insightful observation, but maybe I'm missing something.

Yeah, the "managers" in the term "people leave managers" refers to their immediate manager in my experience, and often their immediate manager doesn't make the call on a lot of stuff.

Let me put it differently and talk about immediate managers only. If the people problem is coming from other teams, the immediate manager should "shield" their team members from that. If it is between their team members, then they need to somehow manage the person reporting to them. They can't always, and I personally find that understandable. But still, the "people leave managers" expression is implying that either that manager is not capable or they are not being given enough resources, authority or training to manage people in their team and outside their team.

From the CEO down to line managers, management is responsible for setting the tone and culture. Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook alike are responsible for how horrible and toxic of a work environment exists at amazon and apple. If the company is great, employees can usually switch teams when they don't like a manager.

>It's traumatic, kind of like going through a break-up. You work with the same people for years and then suddenly you will never see them again. That isn't pleasant.

That depends on your co-workers. It may be more like getting a divorce from an abusive spouse.

Either way, unpleasant.

How so? Getting out of a bad marriage isn't unpleasant at all. A bit traumatic perhaps, but that's like going through the trauma of major surgery so you can have your badly broken leg bolted together so you don't have to get an amputation or die of infection. The feeling of freedom and peace you get after getting out is worth the trauma of divorce.

Same goes for getting out of a shitty job with bad coworkers or a bad boss.

Sure, there is relief and a feeling this was necessary and for the best - but also broken dreams, failing social expectations, broken friendships. I guess I mostly agree with you, but I think such traumas make for unpleasant experiences...

Sure, I agree with all that, but also I think it's simply part of life for many people. Not everyone has everything go well for them in life, and people frequently make bad decisions (I'll freely admit to that myself). What's important is how you handle things afterwards. For another example, look at someone who's a really bad drug addict, but then cleans himself up and turns his life around. Sure, it sucks that he had to go through that bad phase in his life and suffer many years (which could possibly be blamed on himself, though addiction is also a biological failing). But we generally like to celebrate these turn-around stories where someone takes a bad life situation and makes it much better. The ex-drug addict will probably always be scarred from his experiences, and always need to be very careful not to get into that trap again, but usually people are happy for him despite all that.

Consider the following: we don’t train LLM to optimize for a decision made on local context. That would cover a minimum viable manager-bot.

We train on (admittedly flawed) context and offer decisions. Much closer to an executive advice bot.

If given two checkpoints: your competitions manager bot, or your competitions executive advice bot, the latter is much more valuable.

If you train the LLM on today's practice, guess what, they will act exactly like today's managers, bias and faults inclusive.

This. If you leave every 3-5 years you get to flush all that frustration down the toilet to make room for new, hopefully better frustrations.

Same. Over the past ~25 years, I've had 10 jobs, everything from junior engineer to a (failed) startup CTO. I've never left a job due to compensation. Poor morale, stubborn leadership, dysfunctional teams, uninteresting work, obviously bad business models, managerial incompetence and nepotism, have all been reasons. I even left jobs to take a pay cut to get out of these bad situations.

Same.

It’s because you’ve never stayed lo my enough for your salary to get stale. Around year 5-7 you’ll get tired of the less than inflation amounts of raise if you even get that. Every time I’ve switched jobs I get a title bump and a big raise.

That is true, to some extent. The longest I ever held a job was 6 years. Shortest, 6 months.

Not only have I never left a job simply to get more money, I have on more than one occasion left a job for one offering less money - and considered it an upgrade.

Sometimes you have to ask: how, exactly, is the extra money I might earn here going to buy enough extra happiness to make up for the crap I'd have to put up with in the process of earning it? And sometimes there is no good answer.

I haven’t left many jobs because they paid poorly, but I’ve definitely stayed at jobs because they paid very well.

For many people working in the tech industry for the past ~15 years, they could easily find a new job with comparable or better pay. That’s no longer a guarantee for most people.

Kind of depends. I live in Canada, most companies don't pay software related jobs like dev or SDET particularly well. When I left my QA / SDET position at 9 years of experience my salary was $52,000 Canadian a year.

To give you an idea, it would've been like living in Denver, Colorado on a $35,000 USD salary in 2020-ish or so.

Not every engineer is going to be making six figures. You just don't see those folks talking about it too much.

I would say that's a very low total comp for an SDET in Canada in any major metro area (e.g. Toronto or Vancouver). New grads with a CS degree that can code can find an entry position for double that compensation. Startups or big co.

Low but it wasn't exactly unheard of either. There were full time positions publicly offering only $20,000 a year right on the listing itself. Not sure how publicly offering below minimum wage makes any sense though.

Highest offer I've heard specifically for a mid level SDET position was $72,000 for 4 to 5 YOE but it was with a big company out of Vancouver. AFAIK they had no problem filling that opening within a few weeks.

I find it pretty soul crushing to work hard and have a successful engineering team, only to have bonuses withheld because sales/marketing couldn’t hit lofty goals…

Followed by the company spending huge amounts of cash on acquisitions in the same year…

Too many companies are eager to invest in everything except their own employees.

> This is wrong from my experience. Anecdotally, I have never left a job because of money.

Leaving because of money isn't the same thing as leaving because they didn't pay you enough to stay. For most frustrations people encounter at work (or elsewhere for that matter) that causes them to want to leave, there is a price at which they would put up with it and stay. The price is often much higher than management would consider paying, and higher than the income they'd have at their new job, but it does exist. So the question of why don't they pay you enough to stay isn't really based on the assumption that you were going to leave because of money.

Anecdotally in multiple decades of jobs every single time I left it was for money. Sometimes as much as a 50% increase.

I’ve left two jobs, because I was dissatisfied with my compensation.

> It was for other reasons that usually included frustrations with management.

and here I am thinking this was a meme by HR

myself and all my competition leave jobs due to - and for - money. if you're sticking around to stay in graces of your comfortable management you are contributing to the wage gap for your respective gender in the wrong direction.

> if you're sticking around to stay in graces of your comfortable management you are contributing to the wage gap for your respective gender in the wrong direction.

I have no idea why I should care about this.

privileged take

Wage gap for gender? There are a lot of things in life to fight for. But to fight for a meaningless stat that doesn't take into account pregnancy is probably not the best use of my limited power.

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A job with good management and a good work environment is hard to find… that is worth lower pay to a lot of people.

I’m a person with tech skills in academia… myself and most of my coworkers and colleagues could make at least 2x in industry yet we’re still here because we like the job better. I have however lost a lot of colleagues.

I make “okay” pay at a non-profit, and I could make more if I left. However, I would then have more hours, more stress, and less freedom. Why do that?

For me it's the same. I'd be ok if management is crappy, but the pay is good. I actually left a company this year, because I was looking for (what I thought) was a very reasonable raise, but the company made negotiations very hard and annoying:

- first meeting with direct manager: I was offered a very meager immediate increase and offered a "personal improvement plan" for proper raise end of the year (I declined - I hate this nonsense and I know I'm already a senior, no need to work towards "senior").

- then 2 times a meeting was planned with the CEO, but CEO wouldn't show up. He stated both times something came up, apparently more important.

When I announced my decision to leave, at that point suddenly more was possible. I could get the raise I wanted, CEO excused himself for his behavior, etc... But at that point, too much harm was done, from my point of view.

I would have stayed easily 1 or 2 more years if the pay was decent and I didn't have to deal with the nonsense for salary negotiations.

> included frustrations with management

Which I presume this is another way to say “your direct boss”.

Because 99% of an employees view of a company, and opinions about their employer, is actually just a reflection of their like/dislike of their direct boss.

Not in my case. I left Google but it wasn't because of my direct manager. It was because of Google-wide issues that are outside of my or my manager's or my director's control.

Usually front line managers are kind of hamstrung. Yes they can fight for their people, but the reality is, that if the C-Suite only wants to give you a %2 raise because well, they have an off-site meeting in Maui -- well tough.

The modern management model has been to reduce the power of the front line manager to the point he can only maybe hire and fire, but then he is the one to give the employee bad news.

There was never a management model where front line managers could freely decide on raises. There's always a budget, and you playing favourites causes drama.

Red Pill:

The boss/employee relationship depends equally on both people. If you always "have a terrible boss" that really means your relationship with your boss is bad, which depends on both people.

You were warned. The Red Pill is near:

To spell it out: If you consistently have a terrible relationship with your boss, with several bosses... I'm sorry, but the common factor is you. You're probably a shitty employee.

The more negative things a new hire has to say about their former employer or coworkers, the more likely that they are unbearable to work with.

Maybe, but it’s a mistake to begin applying this without a big-enough sample. A slippery slope exists: what if they say negative things about the domain? Worry that new patterns in project management are unproven but unchallengeable? I’ve had new hires say that their old team was “hard to work with” but for a release cycle I can’t be sure if that’s a compatibility odor or simply the truth.

What you wrote doesn’t seem related to the comment you are replying to.

Plus, your unrelated response comes off as arrogant and judgemental.

Telling someone they are a bad cog is the corporate machine is not Red-Pilling. It's Blue-Pilling.

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