[JMTQp8lwXL]

I told myself I'd be fine at 300k. Now I'm there, and I've picked up more hobbies. Doesn't stop me from looking for new gigs, from time to time. Going super deep into optimizing for one thing might be a good short-term, but bad long-term proposition. A lot of getting to 700k, I imagine, is luck. So long as you're competent, it's right place, right time. You can't force that situation to happen, so it's wasted energy to invest further.

[gavinray]

You would abandon your company and current position for a slight pay increase?

Do you not actually care about the company you work for and you're just there for the pay?

You make so much money already -- what is the thought process here

Man imagine trying to hire people and knowing they would all leave in a heartbeat for a slight pay increase.

What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe in what you're building and the people you're around bring you joy?

[zinclozenge]

Is this a joke? No I don't care about the companies I work for in the slightest. A company is only as good to me as their last paycheck, to paraphrase from The Sopranos.

[gavinray]

Why do you work for a company you don't care about, instead of one you do?

Don't you feel hypocritical -- you're supposed to treat others the way you want to be treated.

I assume if you were hiring people, you wouldn't want them to do that to you.

So why do it to others?

[geofft]

Not the person you're replying to, but I think there's a whole lot of mistaken assumptions in this comment.

There is one employer in the world that will reliably give me work I care about and am happy to work on for its own sake, and that employer is myself. Unfortunately, I can't afford to hire myself full-time. I tried it once, and it turns out (unsurprisingly, given my career) that I'm interested in working on interesting infrastructure problems and not interested in building a product, let alone marketing or selling it. I got some PRs into an open source project and then I ran out of money.

So no matter what I do, I have to settle for an employer I care less about. At that point, the choice of employer is just negotiation.

Also, it turns out there are a handful of employers who pay really well - to the point where if I work a job I'm fairly happy with, I can then eventually save enough money that I can hire myself full-time for the things I care about.

There is no hypocrisy here, and bluntly you're being scammed by your employer if you've let them convince you there is. The way the employer wants to treat you is to pay you money in exchange for services. That's it. Would you feel hypocritical if you were an Uber driver who took rides from people you didn't care about? Would you feel hypocritical if you were a barber who cut one person's hair, and then the next day you cut a different person's hair?

I didn't make a vow of faithfulness to my employer, promising to be with them for richer or poorer, for better or worse. (And even that agreement is two-sided, and you can non-hypocritically break that agreement if the other party isn't holding up their end of the deal.) I signed an employment contract, promising them that I would do work for them and they would pay me, and that they could stop paying me at any time and I could in turn stop working for them at any time.

[the_only_law]

> Why do you work for a company you don't care about, instead of one you do?

Because they don’t exist?

[gavinray]

That's so bleak.

I think I'd sooner go back to drugs and homelessness than face the thought of waking up every day to give the majority of my waking hours to something I don't care about. For almost the rest of my life.

Or even worse, something I disliked/working for trash people.

I used to have panic attacks thinking about this when I worked mundane, dead-end jobs.

Pardon my language but: the fuck is the point even?

At least if you're high, in a park reading a book or papers on the internet you're enjoying life.

I'm being genuine and not trying to be antagonistic, I'm not sure I understand why you bother to work at all?

If you don't find anything in the world interesting, what gives you the will to live and not commit suicide?

[cowboysauce]

Here's another viewpoint: just because there's no job that I I would enjoy doing doesn't mean that I don't enjoy anything. There are so many things that I enjoy doing, but no company is going to pay me 100K a year to just do whatever I want.

Furthermore, what I enjoy changes radically from month to month. Earlier this month I was enthralled by geology and thought about how awesome it would be to be a geologist. Now, something else has captured my attention and I rarely think about geology. Soon, I'll move on to something else.

So, at best, a job can keep my interest for maybe 2 to 3 months, I'm burned out within a year and I can usually manage to stay for about two years total before my productivity abruptly drops to near zero. To me a job is solely a means to obtain money and time off so that I can go do what I actually enjoy.

To me, you're just as much as an enigma. How could you possibly enjoy doing the same thing for a long period of time? What do you do when you are consumed by the euphoria that comes when you finally find something new that finally scratches that insatiable itch inside of you? The indescribable joy and obsession that makes everything that's come before seem empty and jejune by comparison?

Though I have been diagnosed with pretty severe ADHD, so that probably explains a lot of it.

[the_only_law]

No issues, I get what you’re saying. Funny though, although it’s mostly a “rose colored glasses” sort of thing, I think fondly on my time working shit dead end jobs because I was at least working towards something better whereas now I have to constantly question whether I’ve peaked.

> Pardon my language but: the fuck is the point even?

When you find out let me know. Some people seem to get lucky enough to have all sorts of other, non work things to keep them going, family, etc. so I suppose if you have that it’s motivation.

> I'm not sure I understand why you bother to work at all?

Because the alternative is throwing away both my past and any potential for the future, even if it looks grim. As stupid as it is, I’ve thought about though, if not at least because it would give me a blank slate and something to work towards again. Though the few fleeting moments of content was I find are generally at times I wouldn’t be there if I wasn’t wageslaving the rest of the time.

> If you don't find anything in the world interesting, what gives you the will to live and not commit suicide?

There’s plenty of things I find interesting, just nothing that anyone would ever pay me to do. Maybe they aren’t commercially viable, maybe they’re not really career related things, or maybe I’m not smart/wealthy/educated enough to take them on.

[inreverse]

Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

In addition, work doesn't need to consume the majority of waking hours. If you have a high-paying job at a company with a nice culture you can spend ~4 hours a day or less working, with the rest of the time spent reading articles on the internet, browsing hacker news, occasionally replying to Slack messages etc.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

I wouldn't leave my job for a "slight" increase in pay, though that's subjective and we haven't defined concrete amounts, other than 300k and 700k in my previous comment, and such a jump (more than double) could not be characterized as slight-- it's substantial.

I need to be paid a risk premium for the new gig having potentially worse colleagues, poorer WLB, or whatever things I find after the interview process. With my current job, I know all of these things. So jumping from 300k, to say, 325k would be unwise and immaterial (8.3%). I might jump for 350, definitely for 400.

[tcbumperino]

Imagine caring about your employer who employs 100k+ other people and who would fire you without hesitation. (Or glee even.)

[gavinray]

Why would you ever work for a company that employs that many people and would treat you like shit?

For the (slightly more) money? Well then that's your own doing, innit?

The great thing about having any sort of skills is that you can pick and choose what you want to do with them.

If you choose to work for someone like that, you're willingly subjecting yourself to misery, and to (probably) wasting some of the best years of your life working on things you don't give a flying fuck about.

For people who also don't give a flying fuck. There are no fucks to be given -- the organization is, for lack of a better term, Fuckless.

Working in a Fuckless org does not, as Marie Kondo would say, "Spark Joy".

If you have to choose between:

  - $150k Salary @ small startup working on something you're passionate about with a close-knit team 
  - $250k Salary @ $BIGCO to be COG_IN_WHEEL_#3356

The tradeoff you're making there is pretty clear

I'm not a judgmental person and don't ride moral high-horses. Personally, I value happiness, mental wellbeing, and have a fulfilling life more than slightly more money.

If you don't and you choose to subject yourself to all that awful stuff for the money, that's well and good, but you also can't turn around and complain about it or act like it's the only/a normal choice.

[lovich]

> For the (slightly more) money?

Bud you said you make 110k and we’re originally responding to people talking about 300k, 500k, and more.

There is no reasonable way to look at ~300%+ increase in compensation as “slightly more”.

You’ve got a point about working for a company you believe in, but that’s part of your total comp. You chose a package that’s lower pay + fits your interests. When people drop the “fits your interests” requirement they are able to get more comp as part of the package

[voidfunc]

Been in both roles before at Small Fun Startup and BigCo and I'll take BigCo every time now because that extra $100K/yr (and its usually way way way more than that compared to the startup) get me closer to my life goals of total fiscal independence and retirement quicker.

So yea, I'll sell my soul and eat shit for enough $$$.

[pedrosorio]

> fiscal independence

Probably not since your government will most likely always require you to pay taxes, but you may be able to achieve financial independence for some definition of the expression.

[MathYouF]

How many companies are building something worth believing in?

The ones who are (few) defintiely don't worry about this problem as much. If a company is having problems with it it's probably that their estimation of their own moral self worth is what's incorrect, not the attitude of their employees.

[gavinray]

So, so many. The world is full of them.

I work at my current job because I used their OSS tool at a past position and felt like I had my life changed. Then wanted to share it with every other developer.

So I got in contact with them and told them how I felt, and now that's what I do.

If I ever feel like the tool doesn't represent the same quality as when I started or the company values have changed, welp, then it's quittin' time and on to the next thing I go I suppose. But I don't see that happening -- or at least I really hope so.

Nobody's integrity and happiness should be compromised or up for sale, unless that's what they want.

I've slept under bridges and I'll go back to it again before I sell myself out, tell lies, or pretend to be someone I'm not.

Here's some examples of things I think are genuinely valuable and jobs I would do:

- Software for addiction treatment centers and rehabilitation

- Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially making information accessible to regular people. Genomics for fitness/sports performance.

- Software reform in partnership with state/governmental agencies for criminal justice

- Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.

- GraalVM is fucking cool.

- Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins, education software to make music theory accessible

- Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba

I could go on and on. The world has so many serious issues, and interesting problems/challenges to work on -- just pick one you like and relentlessly hunt companies + people down + study (if you need to, to learn the domain) until you get a job.

If I can claw myself out of poverty, drug-addiction, and homelessness as a highschool dropout, into a white-collar career then I'm pretty sure most people with less disadvantaged life scenarios can too.

---

Not to pull the cliche, stupid "by-your-bootstraps" argument. But look, humans are driven and intelligent beings that drive the force of history.

Don't tell me that there's no company in the world doing something you believe in, and you can't get a job doing what you like, etc.

That's really pessimistic and defeatist.

[Apocryphon]

> Here's some examples of things I think are genuinely valuable and jobs I would do: - Software for addiction treatment centers and rehabilitation

Where's the money in that? San Francisco can't even scrounge enough funding and will to effectively treat its own addiction-afflicted citizens and homeless population, the local VCs are likely even less interested in that line of work.

> - Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially making information accessible to regular people. Genomics for fitness/sports performance.

23AndMe, Verily, etc. are in this big industry. Of course, a considerable of this is going to lead to people's medical data being resold to Big Pharma, which is where the big monetization in.

> - Software reform in partnership with state/governmental agencies for criminal justice

They do exist, but again where is that funding coming from?

> - Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.

Apple has that locked down, sure.

> - GraalVM is fucking cool.

That'd be Oracle's baby.

> - Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins, education software to make music theory accessible

That does exist, sure.

> - Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba

Plenty of projects like that exist, sure.

> That's really pessimistic and defeatist.

Any industry with the amount of dumb money and hype as tech is going to lead to these emotional consequences. Ask yourself how much world-changing prosocial visions are on Wall Street, how many sunny optimistic dreams left unscathed by Hollywood. Silicon Valley is just another face of the bleeding edge of capital generation.

[chillacy]

> What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe in what you're building and the people you're around bring you joy?

Sounds like capitalist propaganda, unless you work at some sort of co-op which is employee owned or something, ordinary rank-and-file employees are compensated with absolute pennies in terms of equity.

[dragonwriter]

> What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe in what you're building and the people you're around bring you joy?

Capitalism.