Yeah. I left a good salary behind and went 1/2 time for a super small company this year. Great decision. Money isn’t everything.

That's easy to say after having had a high paying position for a while, which would give you the opportunity to build some financial stability. Never having had any stability, money plays a much larger role.

There was a comment a few weeks ago about someone saying how money doesn’t matter - his family doesn’t care if his networth aged 40 was $2m or $20m.

Many people on HN, after a decade or so of amazon salaries, seem to have no concept of the real world.

Well, yes. It wouldn't have been a good decision for me 20 years ago. But it was a good decision this year. Context is important. Money is important, obviously. But once you have a certain level of stability in your life, other priorities begin to overtake it.

At one place I've been, the engineers held this same view but would need to move somewhere far off or to the parent company across the country. Also, some might have jumped to more money only for the new employer to learn they aren't very good engineers. I was IT and often was setting up or resolving EE dev issues because they wrote code with a gui and didn't actually now how the hardware worked or connected to their PC reliably. Or it was all on the one offline XP laptop that dual boots to Win2000. They might have an $8k+ engineer dev station with secure VMs for Xp an 2k but still used the old laptop because it was familiar...

I always traded up.

I have the feeling, that i'm still having a similar amount of fun/happiness when i do my current job vs. my previous job but with more money.

More money means for me: less working later or nicer things now or faster/more stability & safety.

I have also seen enough people being afraid of quitting, people unable to quit, people who did not pull their weight, still complaining, still not quitting.

I have seen people not pulling their weight and being able to find a new/better job where they will still perform the same now just another company doesn't know what to do with them and just having them.

money matters a lot until you have "enough". after that, it only matters as much as you decide. it's a lot easier to have a healthy relationship with work when the possibility of losing your job is no big deal. as a young person, having 2-3 years runway for your current lifestyle is pretty good. once you have this, it's no big deal to take a lower paying job for a few years. as you get close to the point where you want to retire, you want to have enough saved to maintain your lifestyle indefinitely. if you're already there, great!. if not, you gotta make up the difference real quick. you need about ten times as much money to maintain a lifestyle indefinitely as you do to maintain it for two years.

that said, I think a lot of young people have a poor understanding of how much saving early on can impact your retirement.

Maybe you have worked at decent companies, but if someone is "meh" about their job, they will bounce before long.

Yep, that was my entire point.