> Anyone who's not "secure for life" and has to keep the salaries coming in will have to deal with bad people, bad decisions, bad culture, etc. and become unhappy.
This is the myth that keeps people trapped in bad jobs, but it’s not true.
Yes, most of us have to continue working. But no, that doesn’t mean your job must be miserable and you must be surrounded by miserable people. Look around. Try something different. There are a lot of good jobs and teams out there.
Too many people in tech approach their careers as a simple compensation maximization problem and disregard everything else. They end up in companies that are happy to pay them 10-100% more but then demand they work 20-200% harder and deal with bad behavior and unrealistic expectations because the company knows they’re not going to leave behind that sweet total compensation to go somewhere less stressful.
You can have good pay and good working conditions, but you have to work to find it and keep it. The big company recruiters desperate to give you high total comp just to get you in the door (often to replace employees who turned over) aren’t necessarily the path to finding that optimal point, though.
I’ve taken a few salary down-steps in my career that felt scary at the time but ended up being well worth it for the increased quality of life.
Too simplistic. Some people are trapped - the availability of even just one alternative job with chance of improvement is not a given. It's question of age(ism), ableness to move to another city / country, and luck.
Or put differently, we're not all around 30 anymore, live in the bay area, and might have family matters, e.hg. a wife that doesn't want to quit a job she loves so you can maybe improve your happiness by 10%.
Also, companies change over time. A great place can become hell with just one bad superior getting hired and poisoning everything.
Can't agree more. I've turned away from many a high paying gig (and even left a couple) for exactly this reason. With (much) more money comes much higher expectations. If they aren't reasonable, you're typically going to deal with a load of stress.
This can also happen with lower paying gigs, so you still have to qualify your jobs appropriately, but prioritizing quality of life over raw compensation is a great trade in my book. With the high salaries of the current tech market, it's not actually that hard to make a very comfortable living while still staying sane/happy and avoiding burnout.
The upside being that you can also take some time to learn new tech / get your head out of the weeds, and often make much more important and broad impacts. Like Kent Beck used to say: "program as if you had enough time".
> You can have good pay and good working conditions, but you have to work to find it and keep it
The existential unhappiness of work is from depending on it for your livelihood.
As PP described, he was perfectly happy with his job until he became dependent on it and no longer had the ability to walk away at any time without caring about the financial consequences.
Among other things, as you indicate, as soon as you become dependent on your job financially, you take on an additional, and unhappiness-inducing, maintenance burden of constantly working to keep your job and then working to find a replacement job when your job changes or vanishes due to business conditions or the economy.
(And, of course, the work becomes something that you have to do, which creates reactance, etc..)
This is the myth that keeps people trapped in bad jobs, but it’s not true.
Yes, most of us have to continue working. But no, that doesn’t mean your job must be miserable and you must be surrounded by miserable people. Look around. Try something different. There are a lot of good jobs and teams out there.
Too many people in tech approach their careers as a simple compensation maximization problem and disregard everything else. They end up in companies that are happy to pay them 10-100% more but then demand they work 20-200% harder and deal with bad behavior and unrealistic expectations because the company knows they’re not going to leave behind that sweet total compensation to go somewhere less stressful.
You can have good pay and good working conditions, but you have to work to find it and keep it. The big company recruiters desperate to give you high total comp just to get you in the door (often to replace employees who turned over) aren’t necessarily the path to finding that optimal point, though.
I’ve taken a few salary down-steps in my career that felt scary at the time but ended up being well worth it for the increased quality of life.