How is changing jobs like Russian Roulette? Since both salary compression and inversion are real phenomena, the statistically best way to provide better for your family is changing jobs.
From personal experience, and not living in Silicon Valley, I changed jobs 3 times in the last 4 years and made $45K more. I changed jobs 5 timed in the last 10 years and made $65K more. Before that, I stayed at one job 9 years and only made $7K more in year 9 than year 2 with measly 3% raises and bonuses being cut.
I generally try to stay at a job for 3 to 4 years, but my last job at HP, cut my knees off when the spun me over to DXC and our benefits costs tripled. To keep the same benefits would have amounted to a 10% pay cut. I probably would not have taken the job if it's benefits had been as offered post merger, so I had no qualms in quitting as soon as I could line something else up.
I can see this causing me an existential crisis in three years. Using my usual framework of basing jobs on technology, environment, and money, will I be able to move from an environment I like where I make “enough” to jump ship to stay on the technology train? Especially when we are at a point where more money won’t have any effect on our current lifestyle by much or will I get complacent? The next stage of my career to make any appreciable salary jump is going to require me to go into management (not happening) or work for a consulting company that will definitely be more stressful and more traveling.
The biggest problem I see is how different benefits can be and cost from company to company. From the simple (like comparing payroll deductions),
Yes that is simple. Because of the ACA, you can basically be guaranteed a minimum quality of coverage. Yes the cost can be more or less, but that’s just a number when you are comparing total comp.
In our case, there is a known upper bound in health care cost. If it’s too expensive on my job, we switch to my wife’s coverage - she works for the state.
to the complex; time spent in office, time spent working, commute time, coworkers, quality of health coverage, quality of work, vacation accrual.
Commute time is known up front, not really a risk. Adjust your required compensation accordingly. You can also gauge the type of technology they use up front.
I’m not saying everybody should stick it out in terrible situations but “you only live once” is not the reason you should be flipping the table if you have people depending on you.
This is backwards though.
Avoiding being selfish is exactly what makes the person turn alcoholic, suicidal, depressed etc. Else they could just say "fu" to their family, debts, responsibilities etc and go start a new life.
It's not like they enjoy being depressed or suicidal or abusing some substance etc and do that for selfish reasons. My point was about how trying not to be selfish and sticking to it that can end up making things worse (including for others).
But I don't think this stability actually exists. Lots of things can turn on you and your family at any moment, and then you are not ready, because you haven't been taking the necessary risks, haven't been taking care of yourself, out of a sense of duty.
I think people generally function best when they optimize for themselves compared to optimizing directly for others, because if you do not optimize for yourself, you rot, and then you cannot help said others anyway. Optimizing for others can be very difficult and inaccurate. Put on your mask before you put on your child's mask.
Optimizing yourself should already take care of unnecessarily rash YOLO decisions since you wouldn't want to be left without any money yourself, either. But holding on to awful positions out of a sense of duty, ehh, that seems to be how people get to a really bad place (i.e., depression, alcoholism, infidelity). And, ultimately, there's not just duty to your specific family, but also to society, and you can't change society when you are always just going with the flow.
It also creates a rather sad picture for said family.
I wonder if that's a better paradigm than the more individualistic one we have in the West.
Quitting your job if you have kids a wife and a mortgage is a much more complicated topic than just saying "F* this I'm going to raise cows in the Montana"
It's complicated to move internally in a corporation , so thinking as to moving to another company to another position when you have responsibilities it's pretty much like playing the Russian roulette with your finance and your situation.