[cactus2093]

This is a pet peeve of mine due to how common it is in all sorts of tech career advice, but I can never take a tech blogger/influencer seriously when they are so flippant about amounts of money that most people will never see in their entire lives.

If you look at salary info on a site like levels.fyi for top tech companies the difference between a senior vs staff vs principal engineer salary is pretty mind boggling. E.g. looking at Google right now, the annual total comp goes from $353k at senior level to $486k at staff level to $992k at the principal level. Just a cool million dollars a year on the table, and the author is saying things like "Nobody complains about a salary raise but optimize to career based on the salary is a quite bad idea if you are already covered." The whole piece is about how they just really like selflessly helping other engineers, and it's got nothing to do with pay or status.

It's not like we're just talking here about the difference between upgrading your car from a Toyota to a Lexus, or staying at a slightly nicer hotel when you go on a vacation. This is the ability to never worry amount money again for the rest of your life after just a couple of years in the role. It's the ability to retire 20 years younger or pay off your kid's 4 year ivy league education in just a year of savings or fund your own charity that helps thousands of people, or whatever else you might want to do in some of your wildest dreams.

I can't help but see it as anything other than a very obnoxious flex/virtue signal whenever people in elite tech roles make claims like this about how salary is so much less important than how much you're learning, and other things of that nature.