I would rather get paid less (still in top 99+% of US mind you) to do work that is meaningful to me, my coworkers, and the wider open source community-and then clock out at six pm to spend time with my partner and play games-than earn more and spend all of my time in meetings and design discussions and worrying about whether I'm having enough cross functional impact to meet performance expectations or whatever the new director's pet project of the month is.
Glad to hear this. I’ve hit this point in the past couple of years and I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I actually believe that management will be satisfied with my “no more climbing” attitude. Every time I get a new manager I have to have The Talk where I tell them that I’m happy with my level of impact and I don’t plan to spend my 1:1’s exploring what I need to tackle next on the leveling guidelines for the next promo. It’s a nice place to be, and I wonder when I’ll be able to really relax and stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. :D
Sure that makes sense, but it's irrelevant. We weren't talking about working more vs working less or working on meaningful stuff vs boring stuff.
We were talking about working on things that are good for the company vs good for the performance review process. The fact that there's a difference and that it's distinct from wellbeing is why at big companies some people with 5yoe make 3x as much as people with 30 yoe.
As someone who left one of these big companies to earn under $100k/yr doing something I absolutely love (and working a relaxed number of hours), making less money is not the only thing to strive for. At least, not for everyone.