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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

For reasonably skilled people, it's often more just a matter of priority.

A lot of people get wrapped up in pursuing compensation opportunities or prestige brands as their top priority, only to burn themselves out or wallow in a domain/culture that doesn't suit them, but if you're willing to deprioritize pay or dinner table cred, you often end up with a lot more flexibility on other work factors. And sometimes, flourishing in those better-fit environments pays off bigger in compensation and career growth in the end anyway.

Granted, Fowler was able to do very well on more axes than many of us, but most competent mid- or late- career people have plenty more flexibility on worklife than they admit to themselves.

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I have been trying to find one of these "lower pay better conditions" places, but it is _such_ a gamble. It is so hard to tell how the work is going to be before you join. If I am almost certain to at least have a mild dislike for the work I might as well go for the place that pays better.

Also in my experience lower pay places tend to eventually suck because they tend to get into financial difficulties much more easily.

It’s always best to just aim for highest compensation. Even if a team is your dream fit today, it can easily change.

High compensation can also bring more freedom and happiness, since it’s more costly for your employer to replace you. It’s cheaper to keep an existing employee happy than to spend a lot of time and money to bring a new person on board. If your compensation is lower, it’s not as big of a factor.

I wouldn’t take a job if it clearly doesn’t fit me at all, but within the band of “acceptable jobs” aiming for highest compensation is the way to go in my opinion.

This comes with age, too.

In my 20’s and early 30’s i wanted to work places where I felt this cultural and work fit since work was a bigger part of my life — but now I’m in my 40’s that shifted just want to get paid as much as possible and provide for my family.

Don’t much care about who I work with, although I do draw the line at crypto, porn and harmful stuff.

Mmh, I really don't think your age has anything to do with that

Your personal development surely did, but people of all ages ended up in that mindset, and there are countless anecdotes of people talking about the reverse... Both older and younger then you.

> porn

I would totally accept a job for a legit porn company. Regarding harmful stuff... "harmful" is such a broad definition, because it heavily depends on the culture. Having "volunteered for an LGBT organisation" on your resume would've killed your career not so long ago.

The unknowns are so high going to any job, current state unknowns, future state unknowns. Higher compensation is the only proxy we have for importance and leverage, always chose higher leverage over lower leverage unless burnout is a possibility.

Just make sure that if you aren't born into wealth and status you know how to code switch into it, lie if you need to, as long as people think you are from the wealth class they won't begrudge negotiations around compensation.

> I have been trying to find one of these "lower pay better conditions" places, but it is _such_ a gamble. It is so hard to tell how the work is going to be before you join.

Is that one of those situations where having a wide network comes into play? About the only way to know with someone is to have someone you trust vouch for the workplace culture.

> Also in my experience lower pay places tend to eventually suck because they tend to get into financial difficulties much more easily.

I'm not sure if the tradeoff is explicitly and consciously "lower pay for better conditions." It's probably more like "conditions a good enough that there's less pressure to increase pay."

I actually work at a place that had pretty good conditions (based on everything I've heard) until a few years ago (when a long trend of offshoring and other site-shifting reorgs brought the site below a critical mass of upper-level representation to maintain its culture). My gut feel is a big factor was the business was pretty lucrative and predictable for a long, long time. Once there was customer-driven pricing pressure and competitive pressure, things started to deteriorate.

be more honest in your interviews. i have always found my jobs this way. You want to work somewhere that sees you as a person first and an employee second - so when you get to the interview you should talk to them like they are a person first and an interviewer second. If the person you will be working under fails to match that energy then get outta there

And even if you do manage to find such a place, there is exactly zero guarantee that they won't hire someone above that _does_ ruin the better conditions you've enjoyed since you started. A successful company is persuaded by the board to grow the leadership team, and the number of sociopaths at that level means anyone that joins has a decent chance of being one.

I don’t know why you would think this exists. Top talent is picky talent. Places that don’t make money are also stingier.

In theory, yes. In practice, it only takes one or two bad hires and those trustworthy environments go bad surprisingly quickly.

I've had several jobs that were great for the first 12-18 months before the manager that hired me left. Then they sucked for another couple years but the pay didn't change.

I am seriously considering going into more lead/management role because of this, it is so demoralizing to feel I am doing work in a way I don't agree with.

Never thought I would say the day, when I joined this career all I wanted was to work on interesting problems and not work more than 40 hours per week. These days the interesting problems are always solved in the worse ways possible and I am often swamped with work that I don't even have the time to do any improvements out of my personally-assigned backlog.

I noticed everyone replied to your comment asking about which jobs on indeed to apply for.

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