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.