One of my measures for whether a tech job is "good" is how it compares to the pizza place that I worked for in college. Ignoring the lower pay, the pizza place wins more often than you'd think.

And as for Google, no not terrible, but no longer good enough that I'd accept a position there.

> Ignoring the lower pay, the pizza place wins more often than you'd think.

It only wins because you're excluding some of the most important criteria. Stay at the pizza place for 12 years and see how you feel about what has happened to your life and well-being. Did you buy a house? No, you couldn't afford one. Did you get married and have a family? No, you couldn't afford one. Did you have amazing health insurance? No. Did you save anything for retirement? No, your bills are pretty close to your wages and the pizza place provides squat for benefits.

The only way the pizza place wins is if you work there for a short amount of time, otherwise entropy will particularly badly eat away at you (in every regard). Low paying jobs are brutal on people over long periods of time, living at the line of existence perpetually is very harsh. You can't fix things that break, you can't acquire values that you want.

What's sad is that if you are right, then some tech companies are only better than a restaurant because they give you more money. It's very, very sad when one's life and career are reduced to just making money.

It's also infuriating because you'd expect these large tech companies, with all their surplus resources, to be able to do better for their employees' happiness and well-being. Yet this would also be a money-focused way of looking at companies. I suspect employees' overall well-being has less to do with money and more with their bosses' attitude and the work environments they create. Many of these tech giants sound hellish to me, with their relationally-unenlightened, cutthroat, misanthropic corporate cultures. The maxim that "A players hire A players but B players hire C players" also applies to the human decency side, regarding the kind of managers a company's bosses hire or cultivate (as well as the policies they establish.) Some of these bosses may be A players on the technical/business side, but are B or C players on the human-decency scale (as with Steve Jobs, for example). Thus their company, though bursting at the seams with money, struggle to provide other things their employees need or want.

Employees who worship their company might be overjoyed that they're one of the chosen ones, but other employees who don't drink the Kool-Aid might not be as happy with the cult's toxic aspects, regardless of the money they're making.

Going back to In-n-Out instead of unknown-pizza-place which I can't look up and may not be on the list of good places to work:

"The typical In-N-Out Burger Store Manager salary is $84,315. Store Manager salaries at In-N-Out Burger can range from $55,134 - $130,157." — Glassdoor.com

That's pretty good for most of the US, particularly so outside of major cities, and especially if you've been making money — even just mediocre money — for 4 years, while skipping student debt.

"Ignoring the lower pay..."

I think it's just saying if both jobs paid the same, the pizza place would be a more rewarding, fulfilling and pleasant place to work.

How about if Google sweetens the pot with $350K/yr in sweet, sweet cash? Would you still prefer the "pizza place"? I mean, higher pay is pretty hard to "ignore" to folks without a trust fund. This is _five times_ what an European software engineer typically makes, and it's by no means the upper bound.

FWIW, I loved my years at Google, and I think of going back from time to time. Is it an ideal workplace? No. But it's the best I have worked at by quite a margin. Why do I think that? Because Google is able to offer competitive pay and the projects that don't make your eyes glaze over right from the start, with the potential for truly breathtaking pay and world-leading projects with a little bit of effort and moving around internally, if you have the chops. It's not the best paying place anymore (that'd be FB), but not far behind, and on the balance it more than compensates for that by offering more meaningful work and beyond state of the art dev infra.

Disclosure: I no longer work at Google, and hold no positions in its stock. They treated me well when I was there, so I wish them well.

'Best place to work' is different from 'place I chose to work'. Indeed, money sweetening the pot signals that a job isn't at a place that people want to work.

In theory, a place could be so great to work at that people would pay to be there. That would be negative pot sweetening with money.

The scientific world may disagree. I work in bioinformatics and take a pay cut to do interesting work. It's not negative, but I'm not making a lot of money. Supply and demand- people are willing to work in a low pay field because the pot is sweet. Academia is pretty sweet gig and pays crap to work on hairy problems. UPDATE- teachers spend money out of pocket on their classes, is that negative income?

When teachers spend money out of pocket on their classes, I would estimate they are doing so out of negative feelings, such as the feeling that it's such a shame for kids to fall due to lack of money; but I don't see that as a spiritually sweet place for a teacher to be. That is a response to pain.

Indeed, I think it was CS Lewis that said salary is often inversely proportional to the inherent value of work.

I think people are different, I work for money and it is such a motivator for me that if it is good enough I don't notice the downsides of a place. I agree in theory, but I think that theory is less likely to apply in my case than others. Maybe though I just don't care about most of the things that other people care about a workplace.

Doesn't work like that if you have a family to support and a mortgage. In fact, it doesn't work like that at all. The probability that you will find interesting work as an engineer at least is directly proportional to how much the employer (or client) is willing to pay. If you're paid half a million dollars a year, chances are you won't be doing something mind numbing that a $100K/yr fresh grad can do. You will be doing gnarly, interesting shit where there's disproportionate ROI. In fact in my current consulting gig, some of my clients insist that I offload bullshit work to their FTEs. I like that. I wish I could do that when I was an FTE. :-)

ROI is only half of the equation, though. It will tell you the maximum the employer is willing to pay.

But the wage is determined by the least amount a suitable employee is willing to accept, which is affected by how interesting the work is and how "good" the environment is.

Do you really think Google is "compensating" for its shortcomings as a workplace? I mean, if you do that's great, less competition drives up the wages, but from personal experience that's just not true. They're a great employer (both technically and in terms of quality of employee experience) who also happens to pay really well. That's how they're able to attract the kinds of people they're able to attract: by not sucking and paying well. In fact, if they did suck as an employer, they'd not be able to compensate for it with pay - that only works on poor people. When your brokerage account begins to look like a phone number, you're too far up on the Maslow's pyramid to tolerate such shenanigans.

Where/how do you find employers who pay for hairy problem solving and not just another piece of CRUD?

https://careers.google.com/jobs/ ?

> In theory, a place could be so great to work at that people would pay to be there. That would be negative pot sweetening with money.

Then it's no longer a job, it's an expensive hobby / education / retirement activity.

Most people work jobs to support themselves (or others) financially, you can't do that on negative income.

And having more income than you need means you can retire sooner and do more of your desired hobby then, so it absolutely is a pot sweetener.

Yeah, as an adult with responsibilities, that pizza place is unfortunately no longer a possibility. And I'm sure it seems better in memory than it actually was.

I've been in the $300s a couple of times, but my ability to get much useful done, joy of workmanship was completely washed out by the fairly nasty politics of the groups I was part of.

(I've never worked at Google, but after reading the internal message traffic surfaced in the Damore lawsuit, it's difficult to imagine enjoying it.)

Damore is the extreme case. There's a small clique of people there that do "social justice" activism on internal forums and little else. Damore pissed right into their punchbowl.

I'm not 100% sure why Google keeps those people around, but they are fairly easy to avoid: just don't engage, no matter how insane their ramblings are on any given week.

When it comes to things like threats of physical violence, threats to get someone fired, or even blacklisted at other companies, I expect to see offenders immediately dismissed. That's a basic workplace hygiene issue, and none of the companies I've ever worked for would tolerate it.

I agree with you on that one. But as much as this sucks, it doesn't have to suck _for you_. Just come in, do your work, leave, collect $12-20K (pretax) every 2 weeks depending on the level. Google is fine with that. You don't have to engage with this bullshit.

Can you explain why?

It'd differ by the job I'm comparing to, but in general, at the pizza place, the role and goals were pretty clear, my boss was outstanding, we were rarely idle and never given busywork, occasionally I got to save the day, and we made customers happy (in person!) many times every single day.

My highest-paying jobs generally lacked most or all of those qualities.

Thank you for sharing! Fulfillment at work is about many intangibles beyond pay.

Possibly the most thoughtful comment I've ever read on this site :)

Gosh, thanks for your kind words!

Simple part-time job, clear expectations, no pressure to innovate, working with a crew of like-minded individuals. Yeah, I can see how it’d be more fun than a high level professional job.

I'll have a shot : clear boundaries

So much this. With tech jobs I feel like I'm always on because of email and oncall.

With shift work, you have the luxury of turning your brain off work at the end of every shift.

Not just that, but even on breaks and during work there would be times where you can just turn off.

It could very well be age related, but I was never more relaxed than when I worked a retail-eqsue job. Even when on vacation.

No one worries that In and Out is eroding our democracy.

Here’s my shot: satisfaction of work performed and stress levels at the end of the day—even if considered relative to remuneration.

Another shot: at that time he / she was a college student. Totally different preferences and cretira now.

All of these people are responding talking about how it doesn't pay the same at Google yet this site is filled with miserable people making hundreds of thousands of dollars and constant threads about it. Perhaps greed isn't as fulfilling in life as actually enjoying one's self and performing a job that has perceived value.

...or maybe these people don't remember (or have never had the experience of) working a low-paid job. Or maybe people like to complain. Or maybe there's just a lot of selection bias in the commenter pool. Maybe all the people happily working at Google are just busy working and don't care about HN drama.

I don't think it's "greed" to want to work as a software developer instead of flipping burgers (I've done both). However it should probably raise some eyebrows in Google management (among others) that a company in an industry known for slim margins and low pay nonetheless manages to have happier employees overall.

1) Flexible working hours. I can WFH any time I like. No questions asked.

2) Free buffet style breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The quality is not as good as it was, but still better than anything in&out would give, no?

3) Clear ladder and career growth. While in in&out you would be lucky to move up to any job higher than $22/h

4) Much more interesting job. Say what you want to say about how bad Google is, I can't imagine how working in a burger shop would be more rewarding than working at your desk in Google, with all interesting challenges, good resources, and the smart people to learn from.

Google has problems, but this list is not a good list if it puts in&out over Google. It's misleading at best.

> 1) Flexible working hours. I can WFH any time I like. No questions asked.

How many of your team members are fully remote? If the answer is 0, it sounds like there are some "questions asked".

I think "questions asked" was referring to questions about why you WFH, not about conversations you missed.

> still better than anything in&out would give, no?

Blasphemy! I'd eat In-N-Out every day if I could.

Well, there's the small matter of a couple hundred thousand dollars difference in comp.

Maybe google has to pay more to make up for the being a bad place to work.

Which is a bit of hyperbole, but higher pay is one way to get people to accept years of schooling, and soul-crushing busywork. You’re not paid for virtue or happiness.

In-N-Out managers make more than the median salary of Californian software engineers ($160k vs $120k)

According to glassdoor the avg salary for In N Out managers is ~84k [0].

>The typical In-N-Out Burger Store Manager salary is $84,315. Store Manager salaries at In-N-Out Burger can range from $55,134 - $130,157. This estimate is based upon 11 In-N-Out Burger Store Manager salary report(s) provided by employees or estimated based upon statistical methods. When factoring in bonuses and additional compensation, a Store Manager at In-N-Out Burger can expect to make an average total pay of $114,271 .

Not sure what the "total pay" means exactly but that averages 114k. Still way below the 160k you quoted which I think was from this article: https://medium.californiasun.co/in-n-out-store-managers-earn...

The California Sun article gives no sources for the claims of an average salary for in-n-out managers of 160k. Which is amusing as the article does reference Indeed.com for the "architect" salary it compares to in-n-out. According to Indeed.com the average salary is 42.8k [1]. I also saw that the story was picked up by USA Today, so I'm sure most people will forever more think In-N-Out store managers are making 160k on average, truth be damned.

[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/In-N-Out-Burger-Store-Manag... [1] https://www.indeed.com/cmp/In--n--out-Burger/salaries/Manage...

According to that Glassdoor link, the average base salary is $84k and the average extra pay (bonuses?) just about doubles that. I'm not sure if I'm reading it right since like you said they describe the average total pay as $114k

Glassdoor says the salary average is based on 11 reports. 5 reports included a bonus averaging $82,701 (and 2 reports included profit sharing averaging $10,345). The question is why only 5 of the 11 reported a bonus; or more specifically, did the others receive bonuses that they didn't report? If Glassdoor assumes that the other six didn't receive bonuses, then the average total pay of $114K makes sense.

    84,315 + 82,701*5/11 + 10,345*2/11 = 123,787

The simple way I see to count these doesn't match the $114K, but it's close enough that I can buy that that's a big part of it. But the question is still whether the assumption (that nobody else received bonuses) is correct. It's plausible that many people fill out only the base salary figure, even if they have other compensation. If everybody gets a bonus, then the $160K figure reported in the other articles could be justified.

Sure, and that's a great salary, but the median Google engineer makes more than the median CA software engineer, and a much larger percentage of Google workers make the types of salaries we're talking about than In-n-Out workers.

It's weird to make a list flat out ranking In-n-Out as an overall better place to work.

It seems like you should at least compare software engineering managers.

Although I'm guessing that both may provide free meals.

Heh I wonder how long it'd take me to get completely sick of eating In-n-Out.

Are you comparing flipping burgers at one company to software engineering at the other?

Because I can't see how else you'd end up with that number.

Well, I'm pretty sure that's the median job at each. But even if you wanted to compare software engineering at the two, I'm guessing that the comp differential still holds.

Related, there was a really interesting article going around a few days back, on how Chick-fil-A provisions bare-metal K8s clusters to every single remote branch. Not all the innovation is happening in the FAANGs

https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at...

Oh, very cool!

It can, if you are comparing between similar positions. Comparing the environment of an In-N-Out engineer to a Google engineer is valid, and so is that of an In-N-Out cook to a Google cook. But I don't think that knowing whether life of an average Google employee is "better" or "worse" than that In-N-Out is gonna be useful or illustrative of anything at all to an average In-N-Out employee.

It's like making a lawyer compare his workplace to that of a surgeon at a private practice, you are comparing apples to oranges. In part, because the chosen field in itself affects the workplace environment, and there isn't really a good way to separate the effects of the field vs. the individual workplace environment for the purpose of that chart.

Because the burger place pays 1/10th as much.

At Google you get amazing benefits, giant salary, world-class talent as peers, luxurious offices around the globe, first-hand knowledge of unparalleled technical systems, flexible schedule, ability to work on innovative products from healthcare to drone delivery, and the most prestigious alumni network in the world should you leave it.

At In-and-out, you don't get any of those things. Not that I don't like I&O - their burgers are great, and I'm sure work environment is better than other fast food companies. But it's just not comparable to Google.