[s0kr8s]

Caution: you might get paid 50% more to work at a company that is 500% worse managed, and therefore is hemorrhaging employees so fast that the only way they can maintain staffing levels is to offer a hefty premium above normal market wages to get new suckers to take a chance on them.

If you're nihilistic and believe all employers are rotten, then jumping ship every 2 years might be a decent game strategy, but I tend to believe that good employers do exist and are just somewhat rare. So if you find a unicorn, I would recommend holding onto it.

[AlotOfReading]

Perhaps this is just personal experience, but the worst jobs I've ever had also paid the worst. The places that are badly managed either don't know or can't afford market rates, so they try and hire cheap labor. Think body shops, game dev, government positions, etc.

By contrast, a place that has expensive employees is going to see their time as more valuable, so there's a direct monetary incentive not to waste it and the cash flow exists to do things. Doesn't always work, but it dramatically improves the odds.

[amarant]

I agree on all your points, but find it funny that you mention game-dev as a bad example. I know the industry has a bad reputation but some of my best gigs were at gaming companies(and, as per your suggestion, those were the best paid ones too!)

probably relevant detail is that I did contractor work for backend/server stuff for those gaming companies. And the two studios in question have each published the biggest games in their respective categories in the world(which basically means they both have infinite money)

[tombert]

> and, as per your suggestion, those were the best paid ones too!

I've never worked in game dev, but at least in NYC I was being interviewed by Rockstar Games for a pretty senior-level position a couple years ago, just to find out that it maxed out at considerably less than my previous job. I didn't continue the process and I just assumed that it was standard in the games industry.

[amarant]

It actually might be the standard. One of us has had an unusual experience in the gaming industry, and I'm not sure who.

We also live really far away from eachother, so that might be a factor as well. I'm based in Stockholm, which is _very_ different from NYC.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

It's probably more that non-game-dev-Swedes actually make significantly closer to what game-dev-Swedes make in general. Regular software engineering jobs have pretty inflated salaries in the States - Swedish take home salary for software engineers (and indeed, much of the rest of the Western world) is about 1/3 of the equivalent USA salary. Obviously there are other factors at play here, like the functioning healthcare system and social safety net, but all other factors aside the take home pay for non game dev engineers is significantly inflated in the States compared to the rest of the world.

[tombert]

I'm pretty sure that at least in the states, game dev jobs pay somewhat mediocre. Looking at Rockstar and Activision's job posting, even for senior level stuff they're paying considerably less than some of the more unsexy senior engineering jobs.

As I said, I've never worked game dev, but people who have here told me that they are pretty brutal, expecting you to work a lot of extra unpaid hours. It would not surprise me if Sweden has better labor protections in this regard.

[oarla]

The worse pay is what adds on to the feeling of the job being terrible. As much as many want to claim, its not very satisfying to slog away and ship an elegant product for peanuts. When the pay is lower than what is the standard, it's always going to make the job feel terrible.

[kerkeslager]

I'll add to this that low-paying companies tend to drastically overestimate the impact that other positive aspects of management can have on your life. I have friends. I don't need my employer to be my friend, I need my employer to pay me.

In recent years, I've worked for clients that didn't give me the information I needed to do my job and then were mad when the work was delayed. Every pay cycle I got paid and every night I went home and slept like a baby.

Contrast this with early in my career when I was at times struggling to make rent. My managers at that time weren't bad so much as unmemorable: what I remember is being unable to sleep because I was worried about how I was going to make ends meet.

The things employers do besides pay their employees usually just don't have the impact on workers' lives they sometimes think they do. Outside of egregious outliers like verbal, sexual, or physical abuse, there really isn't much a manager can do that's going to impact their workers as much as stable pay and benefits.

[amarant]

You're not wrong, but that's not the full story here tho, at least not in my experience.

Worst job I ever had paid about 60% of what I usually earn, and I was told of by the manager for pointing out that there were compilation errors in our master branch (at this place, anything pushed to master was automatically deployed into production, with zero testing. The only reason prod didn't burn that day was because the pipeline crashed when it couldn't produce the jar file)

(Well, prod did burn that day, it burned every day at this place, but none of those fires were because of the non-compiling commit in question)

There were a lot of other problems at this place, but that was the day I handed in my resignation.

[oarla]

Would you have tolerated that if you getting paid 1.5 or 2x instead of 0.6x? Maybe you wouldn't, but on average many would be ok with that environment for higher pay. One interesting data point is that places that pay higher than the market on average have much higher rate of retention as well. Barring some egregious conditions, many will tolerate an non-ideal environment for better than market pay.

[amarant]

I'm not sure if I would've tolerated it or not, I was in a tight spot financially when I took the job so I might have tolerated it for a bit longer at least if the pay was 2x my normal rate.

But I still would've hated every second of it. At 10x I definitely would've tolerated it for longer, but only by steeling myself with the thought that if I work 12 more months, I can basically retire afterwards.

[antisthenes]

> Worst job I ever had paid about 60% of what I usually earn, and I was told of by the manager for pointing out that there were compilation errors in our master branch (at this place, anything pushed to master was automatically deployed into production, with zero testing.

Out of curiosity, how long did it take from hiring day to resignation for this to become apparent?

[amarant]

I first started considering resigning after about 3 months, but I was in tight spot financially at the time so I stuck around for 6 months in the end. It was soul crushing and terrible.

[kerkeslager]

The primary reason for having an employer in your life at all is for them to pay you, so the primary measure of a good employer is good pay. Yes, there are other factors, but many of those factors (read: benefits) have known monetary values which are effectively equivalent to pay.

There is no such thing as a good employer who doesn't pay their workers competitively.

While this may not be your intent, your post sounds a lot like a manager narrative that "sure, our pay and benefits leave bit to be desired, but we have a great culture and we're well managed". That's not a thing. A great culture is one where everyone is paid enough to live comfortably, and when the company does well financially, workers do well financially. The primary measure of managing well is paying your workers well.

The things management does besides paying their workers simply do not have enough impact on workers' lives that they can "manage" well enough to make more difference in an employee's life than a 20% increase in pay, let alone a 50% increase in pay as you describe. Beyond behaving at all in an appropriate manner, i.e. not verbally, sexually, or physically abusing your employees, your actions as a manager simply don't impact workers' lives as much as that much money does.

And in fact, other attributes of management are correlated with pay in my experience. The company you describe, that pays well but is otherwise terribly managed, is not one I have experienced. In most cases, a company that pays well is great to work for in other ways, and a company that pays worse is terrible to work for in other ways. The management mindset that is stingy toward workers doesn't stop at pay.

[s0kr8s]

I never suggested that there are good employers who don't pay their workers competitively.

I instead suggested that there are bad employers who pay above market rates as a way to compensate for problems with employee retention. Sure, they'll run out of money doing that eventually, but you'd be surprised how long a business can cover up their mistakes with such a strategy, especially with the right funding partners behind them.

If you have not had the misfortune of working for such a business, that's great, but I believe there are plenty of comments here on HN to support the notion that such businesses not only exist but are fairly common in any industry touched by Venture Capital or Private Equity, and I have seen many even suggest that their higher financial compensation ends up not being worth it in light of the added psychological and physiological toll.

[kerkeslager]

> I never suggested that there are good employers who don't pay their workers competitively.

Agreed. I don't think I accused you of saying that--I just think that what you did say is easily twisted to support that narrative.

> I instead suggested that there are bad employers who pay above market rates as a way to compensate for problems with employee retention. Sure, they'll run out of money doing that eventually, but you'd be surprised how long a business can cover up their mistakes with such a strategy, especially with the right funding partners behind them.

> If you have not had the misfortune of working for such a business, that's great, but I believe there are plenty of comments here on HN to support the notion that such businesses not only exist but are fairly common in any industry touched by Venture Capital or Private Equity, and I have seen many even suggest that their higher financial compensation ends up not being worth it in light of the added psychological and physiological toll.

I'm not saying this situation doesn't exist. I'm saying it's far less common than the situation where you find a job that pays better because your current job is underpaying you.

A friend of mine did work for such a company. He stayed there for 9 months, and then quit without a job lined up, and it took him 4 months to find a job (partly because he was being much more selective about jobs). He a) still made more money in 9 months than in the previous year, and b) leveraged the higher pay history to obtain higher pay at all companies he worked for in the rest of his career. Having talked to him extensively about it at the time (and advising him to quit) I think he'd maybe work there a shorter period, but it doesn't seem like he regrets doing it.

So sure, these companies exist, but working for one is not necessarily a critical mistake as long as you keep your option to quit open (which I think is critical in any job, no matter how good--the ability of either party to walk away from the table is a key component of any free transaction in a free market).

[fire_lake]

This is true. The pool of companies hiring is biased towards companies with poor retention.

[giantg2]

In general I would agree. However, you could have many people retiring early from fat salaries, or high growth with low attrition.

[kstrauser]

Or you might double your comp in a much calmer role. That’s what happened to me within the last year.

[agent281]

This happened at my last job. There was literally drama every week. I stayed for a bit over two years, but it was absolutely awful.