Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> All while knowing that there are people out there taking more abuse for likely far less pay.

My anecdotal experience: The best jobs in my career were the medium-pay, medium-expectations jobs.

Most (but not all) of the very high paying jobs I've had also came with very high expectations. They were paying a lot of money and they knew that people didn't have many other options to get paychecks that large. Managers were compensated on performance of their teams, so they had to extract as much work as possible to get the maximum pay. They knew that they could post a job ad tomorrow with the high salary listed and it would attract hordes of qualified applicants who wanted that paycheck.

I never got to experience the golden era of certain FAANG companies where many people were making bank and few people were ever fired.

Likewise, the lowest paying jobs I've had were also terrible. They had no concept of anything other than extracting work from people for minimum pay. They kept everyone tired, demoralized, and afraid of being fired. People don't search for other jobs as much when they're constantly burned out and overwhelmed.

The sweet spot, for me, has been right in the middle. Good pay (great, relative to all professions), but not top of market pay, and reasonable expectations. Surrounded by a mix of people from different ages but with a lot of parents who have families at home. If I interview somewhere and it's nothing but mid 20s people who don't have families, I stay away because they have much worse concept of work-life balance in my experience.

I‘ve found that the „high expectations“ were acutely stressful because they were concealed: there was no way to match them. This story wonderfully expresses the dread of trying to guess what’s expected of you by an employer. Yes, a middling wage might be more sustainable when it’s compensating obvious work tasks that demographically average people can perform.

> I‘ve found that the „high expectations“ were acutely stressful because they were concealed: there was no way to match them.

That's a very good point.

I remember the first time I was in a cycle of trying to meet impossible expectations. We kept putting in a lot of effort and doing some very impressive things, but every time we got close to delivering something the goalposts would move.

After far longer than I'd like to admit, I realized that those lofty expectations weren't designed to be met. They were designed to keep us perpetually insecure. Always feeling like we needed to try a little harder. And it was working on us, at least for a couple years.

The illusion was briefly shattered when a manager gave us a goal that numerically meant that one of our vendors would have to serve us at a loss. He wanted us to negotiate a contract where they paid us to be their customer, when you added up all the factors. When we showed him, he did a pretend-angry routine and lectured us on how we should be thinking bigger all the time. We "failed" to meet that impossible expectation, to the surprise of absolutely nobody on the team. After that, it was like the team had been freed from the shackles of impossible expectations. We did our best and shrugged off the disappointed manager routine when it didn't meet the arbitrary expectations. It was interesting to watch as the manager realized his power over us had been broken, which quickly gave way to a slow-motion process of sidelining us for younger replacements who were more receptive to the disappointed manager routine.

I miss many of those coworkers, but I do not miss that job.

I strongly agree on your point about families. If a company can attract and retain parents, that is massive green flag.

If no one in management has kids, run the other way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com