[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.