[blue039]

> I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical

Like most engineers I didn't start out that way so perhaps you are right and a few grains of salt would make it better. However, I do not think the average HNer represents a weird aberration of happiness on the scale. I think most companies that hire on this site likely chronically underpay people. Not their fault most likely. HN caters to early stage startups.

However, I think my overarching message is clear. Happiness is entirely relative. At any rate, you should never prioritize happiness over financial security because you should be well compensated, first and foremost, for the time in your life you will never get back. Your compensation should be even better for dealing with a bad company. You might argue that spending those hours of your life in a relative happy state is healthier. I'd agree. But to me, that eventuality comes about after establishing good pay. I don't plan on retiring extremely wealthy but I think I'll be okay looking back at the sacrifices I've made sitting on the veranda with fewer financial worries. Perhaps this is a uniquely American perspective. I don't know.

Certainly, trading $100k and a good job for $150k and a job that gets you yelled at all the time is not a very good trade. Analyze the opportunity cost. The big point here is two things I think and I think you'd agree:

1. Analysis of opportunity cost is important. That means, to me, quantifying "happiness" with some dollar value. Is happiness worth $10k to you? $30k? I guess it depends. I'd actually quite enjoy a research position, for example, but I cannot take the make-ends-meet-and-no-retirement pay that most academic positions give.

2. People are often afraid to leap into a new position. To me, this is because they fail to quantify happiness with some dollar value. People often use qualitative metrics. Those are useful but only in the context of the quantitative reality.

[dan-robertson]

I mostly assume people here are above the threshold you describe but maybe that’s just wrong? I think the uniquely American perspective is software developers getting paid very well at plenty of big tech companies. That’s the kind of compensation that people who go into biglaw or investment banking would get without the poor working conditions or high barriers to entry. That sort of compensation is much less common in Europe, even from the same American tech companies. A thing people often say is that this compensates for high cost of living but plenty of European cities are expensive and cost of living adjustments for these companies in the US often aren’t so large relative to the compensation, presumably because people could threaten to move to a high-CoL area. Maybe this will stop being the case (software developers might get paid less in the US) at some point. And maybe that is already happening (stock prices no longer massively increasing making stock grants magically worth more) to a lesser extent.

Personally, I think most people don’t quit because of a lack of quantitative approaches but rather because they are afraid about losing what they have, ending somewhere else that’s worse, making big, irreversible-seeming decisions, etc.