Poll: What matters most when considering a job? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What matters most when considering a job?

26 pointsLukeG45 comments

Money, but until a certain treshold. After X per month other factors kick in, specially whom am I working with and what. Boring work can be made awesome with the right people, the opposite ain't true. People will crush you even if you're doing what you love.

Boring work can be made awesome with the right people, the opposite ain't true

You mean the opposite is true.

He means even fascinating work can't make working with the wrong people awesome.

He probably should have said "inverse".

Honestly I have no idea how I could have inverted the 3 adjectives (english isn't my primary language) and I confess I went too far trying. But this isn't the first time I am corrected, and hopefuly won't be the last, since it makes me learn :)

I guess that's why I put the phrase after "the opposite ain't true"... anyway thanks everyone.

Since English isn't your primary language, I'd suggest dropping "ain't" from your vocabulary. In the US, it's a word generally reserved for the ignorant and uneducated.

"Money, but until a certain threshold."

You're referring to backward-bending supply curve of labor[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_o...

There was a guest lecturer at my university who gave a talk on distributed development who claimed there's been studies that have shown developers don't tend to get happier the more they are payed as long as they aren't payed too little. Instead they seem to value things like training or just staying challenged as opposed to money.

I'm sorry I don't know exactly what studies he was referring too, but I'm highly inclined to believe what he was saying and it would agree with what you are saying.

I'd add commute. It's a big reason I took my current job.

All those are important, and any honest person will say that most of those things matter to a large extent. Who wants to work with great technology, compensation and responsibility, but with a lousy team and environment?

What you really want to do is to get people to order them, rather than just vote on them.

Right - hopefully the total vote volumes here end up as a decent proxy. We'll get more sophisticated with this later.

Why are you asking, btw, out of curiosity?

I'll post about it next week. Basically, many employers suck at communicating with potential hires. A large part of this may be because they don't really know what candidates are looking for.

It is really a flaw of me, but if it's not challenging I don't care about it and I am incapabable of doing a good job.

Luckily I am in a position wherein I can choose my jobs.

I dont think thats a flaw at all. Dude, look at the people who take boring jobs that pay the bills and see their excitement level towards life itself 10 years later. :\

I dont want things that are ALWAYS challenging, or so hard as to leave me frustrated an unaccomplished at the end of the day. But I dont want an endless monotony of crap.

Stability probably should be on the list. Not very important to me personally, but I know it's a huge consideration for a lot of the people I've worked with and interviewed over the years. The largest employers in the world (governments) have that as their main benefit.

I think the environment/atmosphere is key. If you're getting hassled all day, horrible coworkers, management issues, etc, it takes a really resilient personality to deal with that just for the money.

As such, it surprises me that compensation and challenging work go above it. Even if I were being paid $200,000 a year to do cool work, if I had to deal with mega social and management issues, if I had to stay there I'd be deeply unhappy.

(Of course, the flip side is if the perfect environment offered a salary of, say, $10000 a year, that might be just as useless.. which makes polls like these a bit pointless really).

which makes polls like these a bit pointless really

I think you need to look at it relatively. Given an average job, would you rather get an extra $10,000 a year or have a corner office? Would you rather have two of your friends in the team or work on Ruby-on-Rails rather than Java? (in your case, I believe it would be odd for you to accept a Java job in the first place...) Then again, you can argue that it depends on how much more money we're talking about.

But I don't think it makes the poll pointless. It still gives you an idea (vague, granted) of the community. (even though I'm surprised that compensation comes first so far)

Being in Canada, everything but health care/benefits.

Yeah it raised an eyebrow for me, it's an interesting cultural phenomenon. As a Sweed I've never had to think about healthcare, it's just there and I take it for granted. Maybe I should start appreciating it more. :)

Read this:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-gu-1.html

"Once you have picked an industry, get right to the center of it as fast as you possibly can."

"Every job, every role, every company you go to is an opportunity to learn how a business works and how an industry works."

When you're young, you should always trade income risk and get to the center of the action ASAP and decide which "businesses" you want to learn. For example, if you want to start a enterprise software company, you would work at SAP.

This is only for you're very ambitious. If you're not, focus on the compensation, challenging work, environment, etc that everyone talks about. The fact is if you're doing a startup, you learn about the business from being in a company in the space. (SAP spun out of IBM, Salesforce/PeopleSoft/Siebel from Oracle, YouTube/Slide/Geni/Yelp/Linkedin from Paypal (all consumer internet), etc).

You take a job for the compensation, the benefit and the technology.

You stay in that job for the team, the environment (not sure how those two are different) and the product (it's your baby by now).

You should leave when the work is no longer challenging.

Environment/Atmosphere and Team go hand in hand.

Oops - sorry, totally missed this comment when I posted mine. But agreed. :)

I would say that Atmosphere goes with Team but not necessarily Environment. I would see "environment" as the office, your equipment (computer, desk...), etc.

For example, Fog Creek's offices look awesome. But if you don't care much about Joel, the atmosphere might not work for you.

Looking at the rest of the options, that's what I think at least. If that's not the intent for "Environment/Atmosphere", something like that should be added then, because that can play a big role. A spacious office with views and Aeron chairs is always better than a small windowless room sitting on a pizza box, everything else being equal.

First to suggest that this is a horrible poll? Why: how would you answer this?

Accept = A x compensation + B x environment + C... + H x responsibility... + ... Z unknown factors + $alpha$ Hidden factor 1 + $beta$ Hidden factor 2

Step 1: Ignore all factors beyond H. Fair enough, given how you're framing the question with respect to only these variables.

Step 2: Compare several jobs and then what, minimize the errors, and find the largest coefficient, ignoring any and all covariates!?

From original thread: Team, Geographical location, Environment, Freedom to experiment, Impact, Size, Equity, Technology. Most important I think is personal belief in the product or result. Especially if working on a startup. For example, If I love all of the above, but we're building a silly twitter app, a new todo management app, or a POSN (plain old social network), no amount of cool people will make me like my job.

cool. thanks for porting it over, too.

Not being a nine-year-old girl forging lead hand tools in a communist sweatshop tops my list.

After that, challenging work is the idyllic and romantic answer. But damn, that compensation sure is alluring.

Waking up every morning and looking forward to the challenges instead of wishing you didn't have to go to work.

Oh, and lots of money. That'll take the edge off of horrible work any day of the week.

I'd put team as part of environment/atmosphere (or vice versa) - I know they arent perfectly matched, but dont the people you work with directly impact the atmosphere?

I'm with you and Matt King (for the most part), but there can be distinctions - physical environment, team skill, etc. The two are communicated differently, too.

(nods) Oh definitely true. I spent a summer with one of the BEST team's I have ever worked with (this I measured by their experience, the roughly equal ratio of seriousness to laidbackness and quiet time to social time, and the welcoming nature of the people there). And we worked in a small, windowless office with cement walls. Yuk.

But in that situation, team definitely won out. Sure, the environment itself sucked, but you hardly noticed because of the group atmosphere.

Results from my not so successful attempt: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128258

nice. hopefully we can get some significant volume with this one.

The most important thing is the team you are working with. Always try to get into a team where you are the most stupid team member.

Location is a huge one for me. I'm an outdoor fanatic, so living near good places for outdoor adventuring is a must.

One option not listed is 401k match. Next to base compensation, that is the metric I am most interested in.

It's better to consider total compensation. A $100k salary with up to 5% 401k matching is roughly the same as a $105k salary with no 401k matching.

The latter might be preferred since it gives you the choice of what to do with that extra $5k, but it gets tricky if you're nearing the contribution limits.

I completely agree that total compensation is paramount. That is why i said "Next to base compensation..."

I take both into consideration.

> A $100k salary with up to 5% 401k matching is roughly the same as a $105k salary with no 401k matching.

Not at all. The 5% match goes into the 401(k). The 5% extra salary doesn't.

Note that 401(k) match also isn't subject to SS or medicare.

Surprised that technology & tools didn't poll higher, I guess I'm just a brat

Personal Time (BIG time) & environment/atmosphere

who is going to be your boss/how many will you have.

What I'm going to learn from it. How I feel about the people. Ability to use functional languages.

Pay matters only as a signal.

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