It seems like a lot of HN readers are continually playing the "maximize salary" game and use like articles like this one to figure out how well they're doing. If you want to play that game, then good luck, have fun. I understand the desire.
But it's not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don't think there should be any shame in staying where you are. Don't feel like you have to chase every last dollar.
I'm also not into trying to maximize every dollar and care a lot about other factors like WLB. But these days I'm feeling a lot of pressure due to inflation. Everything is going up and I feel like I need to switch jobs and increase salary just to keep up. Yesterday, I read a news article that Social Security benefits are increasing by 5.9% next year due to inflation. And that's from Social Security which historically was under-adjusting for inflation (usually like 1.5% per year). So if the stingy SS program is going 5.9%, what does that say about the actual inflation?
And I've never seen anything close to 5.9% for COL from any company. Most companies don't give that even for top performers. I don't think companies are prepared to give 5.9% COL, most companies are already so short sighted they would rather lose their entire engineering department instead of give raises to keep up with the market rate (even though they would be willing to pay that market rate when hiring a replacement). That kind of short sighted thinking simply does not allow a massive COL increase, no matter how much data is out there.
Inflation is not a universal metric, it's individual. Every person, every household has their own inflation rate depending on spending profile. I would not use government figures to make decisions about my financial affairs.
Everything else being the same, it's better to make 300k than 175k/year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don't get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k).
So as far as general advice goes, it makes sense to recommend trying to get those FAANG jobs if you can.
i had to read this twice to make sure i was reading it correctly:
and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k
this really triggered me. you basically say its ok to do shady things as long as you give something to the poor. sounds so much like "indulgence" in Christian churches where you could pay off your sins. sad.
i'd say money is not a permission for you to do bad things, and it should not make you fell better about bad things you did (and continue to do) just by giving some of the money away.
Oh sorry I didn't mean it at all like that; not condoning doing shady things at all! Slightly more ethical !== the other one doing shady/bad things. What I wanted to point out is that, people normally overestimate the impact they can have in a social cause and underestimate the impact some $ well situated can have.
To put an example with Open Source, Amazon is pretty bad considered, while e.g. Red Hat is "one of the best".
But I don't mean those extremes, I mean more mundane companies. Let's compare say Apple (neutral-ish?) and Stripe (neutral-to-slightly positive) (note: about Open Source!!). What do you think would have better impact in the OSS ecosystem, to work at Apple for $300k and donating $125k to open source projects, or to work at Stripe getting paid $175k and not donate anything?
It sounds pretty much on par for American approach to everything. It's ok to have shitty healthcare for the poor and pay less taxes, as long as you donate from time to time. Student loans? Medical loans? Shitty care for vets? No worries, Americans are the highest donating people on Earth by capita - so it's all fine. That last argument I keep hearing all the time - Americans are such good donators that they don't need a robust social net, after all if you are really in need then someone would have donated to you already /s.
Way off base, we (I?) are not talking about paying taxes vs donations. In fact as an European myself now living in Japan yeah, tax the shit out of everyone, and stop bombing/gunning everyone and instead pay for healthcare+university with that money :)
Now since I'm not native I think I might have explained myself wrong; see sibling comment (to yours) I made clarifying what I meant.
I agree with you, but consider the possibility of donating the difference to a political organisation whose aim it is to eliminate shady behaviour by companies.
There's a broader spectrum to donation than just donating to the poor.
You could argue any profit-seeking endeavor is unethical. I look at every FAANG company, and they all do pretty nefarious things. One might be in the news now for particular reasons, but the others are equally bad for other reasons. Imagine factories overseas pushing people to suicide, warehouse workers without bathroom breaks to collect extra billions for the boss, or equivalent advertising businesses morphing the minds of the masses, as examples.
of course :) breaking system from within. I'm being sarcastic here. sure there are more charities than for the poor, but what triggered me is the reasoning that i can buy my self peace of mind for things i have done. and this is on paper. i suspect that when money are in hand, the question comes, "after all why should i not keep it" or "i already donated last year, this should be enough"
This is a very specific situation. Someone WILL fill that position at Evil Corp. and they will also get the 300k. The amount of evil done stays the same regardless of whether you take the position or not. But, if you take it and donate 100k to charity each year (especially one that works to undo harm done by your employer), more good is being done as well.
> Someone WILL fill that position at Evil Corp. and they will also get the 300k.
That’s not actually how it works. Maybe it’s 90% true, but the 10% matters, even if it is difficult to evaluate.
What is the impact of a position at Evil Corp staying open for 6 months longer than it would have otherwise if GP doesn’t take the job? I don’t know, that is a difficult question. But I know it isn’t zero impact.
The difference between the two options is saving 125 lives / year at GiveWell’s current estimate.
In ten years, you will have saved more than Oskar Schindler did during the entire Holocaust.
But of course you have taken one path to the Trolley problem and Schindler (who joined the Nazi party) has taken the other. Now it remains to be seen whether history remembers Oskar Schindler the Nazi Party member or user vincnetas who avoided FAANG as the more ethical.
i doubt that Schindler was weighting his options of joining nazi to be saving jews. it was after he joined he saw whats happening and acted in good faith. so he was saving lives not because he joined nazi, but because he mostly could not be not saving them.
this is tangential to slavery where slave owners where treating their slaves very well, but fundamentally they still were slavers.
Ultimately you don’t want to save the 125 kids a year. That’s fine. But that’s the active choice you’re making by choosing no FAANG over FAANG plus donate.
You might have better engineers in FAAnG but it’s not given that you love your work. Many of my colleagues in those places are bored out of their minds because of how silly or numbing the work is. Part of the reason why I’ve not tried the transition yet.
> This isn't true. Google allows you to "scale" your work (eg 80% pay for 80% time).
Well.. sort of. My partner was doing 80% for 80% at goog for many years, which sounds like a good deal. Except the demands were more like 40-50 hours/week, with management always saying that full-timers were working way more than 50 hours, so at 80% salary you better be working 40-50hrs/wk.
That reminds me of the old “120% time” problem at Google[0]. Sounds like your partner had a bad manager. Much easier to change managers than companies if your partner is/was otherwise happy with Google. Or, given the CV mojo of a Google job, to go to a different FAANG.
In Europe such scaling is generally guaranteed by law, and I don’t think any big company would be stupid enough to be caught cheating. And based solely on anecdata I think at least as many people are “phoning it in” at Google as at any other company regardless of salary.
Hope it worked out for your partner. Being exploited with lots of privilege is still being exploited.
[0]: Google famously used to let workers spend 20% of their time working on anything they wanted (for the company’s benefit) but bad managers, which turned out to be most managers, did not reduce the load of “normal” work, so it became known as 120% time.
Do you have a source for this? I know a lot of people at Google and have never heard of this. In fact, a few years ago I explicitly asked a Google recruiter about this, and they said it wasn't an option. Is it a more recent thing perhaps?
It was absolutely an option 5 years ago when I worked there. I knew lots of engineers who worked 80% and took every Friday off.
Not sure if your manager is forced to give you that option but it didn't seem to be hard to get at least. I think by default such requests gets accepted and your manager would need to give a good reason why you couldn't work part time.
I think it depends on the team and your role in it. I worked at one of the Google X moonshots and never heard of this. There were a couple engineers from other teams that were donating one day a week to helping us, which is a similar 80/20 split. These 20% were somewhat common at Google, I believe, but it was never to take time off work.
Okay in Google it's a official perk, bad example; my point still stands that you have more negotiation power with specific personal perks in smaller companies than in larger ones.
But everything else is _never_ the same. Once you're paid more, you move into a bigger house, have more needs, and without knowing it you're just as tight on money as you were before.
But then you just have more stress at work, and you just can't quit that easily bc there arent so many jobs that pay as much as this one...
Just to provide the other side of this general advice, that is really everywhere, but rarely delivers in regards to happiness.
>Once you're paid more, you move into a bigger house, have more needs, and without knowing it you're just as tight on money as you were before
This absolutely isn't a given. Lifestyle inflation to the extreme is in one's own hands first and foremost. Which is the most audacious part in this whole topic: yes your CoL is likely to be high if you earn such a giant income, but you are given options the majority of the west, let alone the world, will never have. As long as the percentage of one's income spent is roughly similar across all.
I've 4x my salary in the last 4 years and barely spend more than in the beginning, that's definitely up to every and each one of us (and TBF you would spend more at least to match the inflation even with no life changes, but in Japan there's almost none).
It's worth highlighting that this was the opposite device a decade ago when the large caps were IBM/MSFT/CISCO etc.
The marginal value of a good software engineer is very high when there is good cash flow. It's difficult to increase cash flow without engaging in some software activity. Organizations tend to find that growing a large software organization is counterproductive to effective development vs. growing a better software organization.
> Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year?
Most people can't live comfortably while holding a full-time job, esp. a demanding one. The job just eats too much time and energy.
The exceptions are people with very high energy levels and people for whom the job is their passion (but even for them, it's usually temporary - passions change over the duration of one's life).
I believe it’s good practice to think about your compensation not only as “what you get for what you do”, but also as “what you get for not doing what you would rather be doing”.
Some companies, some products, some teams, some (lower) level of stress, some amount of learning you are getting, some work/life flexibility - at some (temporary?) point in your life - might make a lot of sense to be considered together with the $ you get paid.
I am all up for maximizing what you get out of your job, but you might want to optimize for multiple factors, not just salary.
Also, this discussion is very centered on yearly comp.
It’s good practice to ask yourself how risk prone you are? That early stage startup equity comp might turn into much more than you will ever get paid at a large established company.
So when you are maximizing, ask yourself over what time horizon you want to maximize? One year?Three? Five? Ten years? It’s rare to get truly great things instantly.
That's both currently the amount I am getting per year towards my bank account and the amount I'm being granted per year * 4 + cash (I got promoted ~a year ago, meaning my new grants though missing the time value have a higher dollar value at grant time)
Actually I'm still there :-) Nothing against people trying to move and make more, but I just want to let people know that you don't _have_ to do that to be successful (plus refute people that might claim that it's the only way to do so in tech)
But it's not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don't think there should be any shame in staying where you are. Don't feel like you have to chase every last dollar.