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Comment by dkasper | Hacker News Reader

Except at big tech the next level might be 500k more not 5%

That might be if you're hitting a "distinguished" level or moving from IC to M or M to E.

Even at Netflix who is famous for "all cash, no stock, almost never bonuses": https://www.levels.fyi/companies/netflix/salaries/software-e...

Biggest jump is 400K and that's at L7, for Principal SE, the top level. Below that each level is about a $100-150K jump. Nothing to complain about, to be clear.

E6 -> E7 at Meta is $1M (which sounds a little bit crazy tbh). Google L6 -> L7 is 300k, but their numbers look smaller than what I'm privy too. A generic Level 6 to 7 (staff to senior staff) promotion can easily be $500k at a tech company.

And yet, how many people are actually happier with that extra $500k? It's one thing if you're not making enough to allow you and whoever else you might need to support to be happy and comfortable and be able to save enough for emergencies and retirement, but I'm dubious that someone only one other away from a half million dollar raise is in that position.

Something that's often overlooked is the time equivalent of money. If the average salary is $50k but you get $500k, you only have to work 1 year in every 10, and that's crazy.

Source: got paid 180k and took 2 years off.

yes thats true if you survive it. Have two friends with a salary over 300k a year. one worked 5 years and retired the other bought more luxury products to reflect his income and is now completly burned out after 3 years but forced to work because of his 300k a year lifestyle

And the feeling of safety that comes with it. I left my previous employer during an acquisition and took a year off and am taking my time to find the right next gig. I cannot imagine the terror of having to find a new job, any job, ASAP because otherwise we starve and lose the house. Substantial savings are honestly much nicer than spending on a lavish lifestyle.

i make ~50k (well 70k) in japan.

at that price level as a senior engineer there are plenty jobs available, no stress on that point.

i have little savings but my life is great, my kids love me, my health is good, i work from home and i have time for my friends. honestly everyday is great.

> And yet, how many people are actually happier with that extra $500k?

A hella lot people, are you seriously that dense? If there were gladiator fights for 500k, I would be a fucking janitor cleaning up the bloody mess, because of how many people would die for a chance to make 500k extra.

I think you're overestimating how much making $800k versus $300k would actually make most people happier. You're welcome to disagree with me, but there's plenty of research indicating this might be the case (from a quick Google for "happiness self reported by income" this is the first result: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/does-more-money-correlate-g...).

If you think that everyone is the would either agrees with you or is "dense" without doing any sort of cursory investigation on whether the alternate view might actually be common or supported by evidence, I'm honestly not really sure why you're bothering to engage in discussion in the first place.

The difference might not make an enormous difference in my day to day but it allows me to retire significantly earlier.

It might let me actually buy a house too. 300k is not enough to afford anything in bay area.

Here you go https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

> The main finding of our reanalysis of MK’s study is that the shape of the distribution of happiness changes—slightly, but systematically—as income rises. The same increases of income have different effects on the happy and on the unhappy regions of the distribution. In the low range of incomes, unhappy people gain more from increased income than happier people do. In other words, the bottom of the happiness distribution rises much faster than the top in that range of incomes. The trend is reversed for higher incomes, where very happy people gain much more from increased income than unhappy people do. The upper part of the happiness distribution rises with log(income) at an accelerated rate in that range, while the lower 20% is almost completely flat.

So it sounds like this study is saying people who are unhappy and have low income or are already happy and have high incomes will become a lot happier with more income. The lower end would be consistent with people are are unhappy because of the lack of income, and I don't think would apply very much to people one promotion away from a $500k raise. For the other end, it seems like it would be consistent that people who have high incomes and are happy might be just as likely to become happier from other things instead of more income; maybe they're just people who are naturally happy whenever something good happens regardless of what it is, and because they have high incomes, they don't need to worry about existential life issues most of the time.

In other words, none of this seems to heavily contradict what I said, other than the caveat that if you are already happy, you might still be happier with more income (but we don't know that you might be just as happy from getting a new hobby or spending more time with your family instead of getting promoted). Even without that caveat, it does not seem like your link is nearly enough to make a reasonable argument that I'm dense for happening to cite an effect from an article that, according to your link, was a valid result according to both of the authors.

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