It’s not selling your soul. It’s called being disillusioned with your impact on the world, a feeling that more and more people are feeling. Long gone are the days where you believed an individual could make a difference. At big corp, you are a small cog in the big machine. You are replaceable.
I’ve volunteered on political campaigns. I’ve volunteered for non profits as a developer. I’ve worked at startups that align closely with my moral views. Guess what? It’s all rotten. Nothing of meaning ever gets done, and the pay is pennies to boot. In the case of my volunteerism, pay equates to the pay of my full time colleagues that worked for those organizations.
So when faced with the choice of doing nothing on something you believe in for very little versus doing nothing on something you don’t for a lot, the choice is extremely easy. The choice is even easier if you factor in the level of privilege it takes to turn down generational money for someone else’s moral compass.
I’ve tried my best not to pass judgment onto you, but ask yourself — what kind of privilege affords you to think that the twenty year old second generation immigrants of today with no family wealth or financial lifeboat should give up their chance of securing generational (not even multigenerational) wealth in the richest country in the world just to achieve the same impact but feel better about themselves?
Are you under the impression the blog post author is?
Look if people need money I don’t think many of us are passing judgement on that. But if you’re privileged and your sole criteria for a new job is accruing capital, you bet I pass judgement on it. And honestly once you get over 200k a year I think the immigrant straw person everyone points out whether they are one or not can probably start getting picky too.
(If you wanna wait until after 300k/yr I’m cool with that too. But at some point you’re accruing enough capital that you can start thinking about what you spend your time on in your day job, and have a moral obligation to do so. When this kicks in is totally relative to a person’s situation.)
I agree there’s a point which that moral inflection point occurs, but I think the number is complex to come up to.
I’ll give an example. I make a pretty obscene salary that falls within your definition of “needing to care”.
But I live in a VHCOL city. I would love to move and work remote, but my partner has a career that’s in tech, but much less remote friendly.
I’m into personal finance, so here’s my projection. Assuming I want to own a home and have kids in this VHCOL region, I will need to work about 20-30 years to achieve this goal. And it’s 1 poorly timed recession from derailing. You know what I really wanted to do in life? Teach high school chemistry and own a cafe.
Am I better off than many many people? Yes. Do I have enough to take 30% pay cut to work at <arbitrary good place>? Are we saying I don’t deserve to live in the region I grew up in, and I should have to move to the Midwest, for the good of society? Force my partner to give up their dream career? Should I give up my dreams of an early retirement from tech into a field that “does good”?
My parents have nothing saved up. 2008 made sure of that. Should I sacrifice the planned war chest I want to build for my parents’ eventual long term care?
And finally, if I do all of this, how much does the world improve by me doing this? Will <evil corp> collapse because I’m not there? Will my wage be distributed to the service workers or Will they go to the next eager applicant? Will my CEO pay more taxes or lose money because I’m not there?
And I hope you consider doing it sooner rather than later, since you may find, as I have, that working on stuff you’re passionate about is one of the ways to do your best work, which often can result in comp increases faster than working on something you care less about. :)
Good luck out there!
That's fine, but you realize your judgement is no more valid than anyone else's right? And to think otherwise is quite arrogant?
Not even this, it's just seeing a job exactly and only for what it is. As opposed to having some pompous judgemental false self-image of "helping the world" when in reality you are way too lazy and selfish to actually do that, like most other people.
It's a common leftist agenda to push and impose this culture of covering up mediocracy with virtue signalling pretending that it's actually a conscious choice and really better to make less money, not just being mediocre. The fight against rationalism and meritocracy, lazy intellectual leftists grasping at straws now starting to sound religious about how your soul will go to hell if you work for google. Give me a break
Because it's not the only driver, it's the most important driver of the money making part of your life. Which is turn is just a means to another end, and that end is your family, hobbies, self actualisation, experiencing the world etc.
Let's ignore there is not much value coming out of education and that people mostly succeed despite having to go through the grind of an antiquated education methodology (which is the only way to certain professions). Let's ignore that better teachers can actually go to private education and get a higher salary.
Software developers can create software solutions that automatically do the work of tons of people (think about how much time is saved by an online checkout vs maintaining a physical store with employees). It's obvious that software is a great way for companies that want to multiply their revenue and that's the most efficient way to generate value for society at scale.
It's therefore obvious that people capable of delivering that solution have more value compared to a teacher.
You may not like Amazon, but people derive benefits from Amazon all the time. They can get stuff directly at home in a day. They can pay online without even seeing a store.
That's a lot of units of small value for the general public being created by the Amazon employees and Amazon itself.
You may not like where society is going, but people choose with their own wallets what they want or not. This is pure democracy.
As a teacher, this is absolutely not true in the way you’re describing it.
Better to go for the high salary which you know will be stable, and will always "work" in the sense of giving benefit to your life. And take any awesome colleagues as a random happy accident and a pure bonus.
If anyone wonders where the stereotype of the soulless immigrant IT drone comes from, it's from places like this board perpetuating it.
You do not need 'generational wealth' to live a decent life: nobody is forcing you to help Facebook earn ad revenue on genocide[0] - you are making that choice yourself.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Who's writing network drivers these days? Who's pushing streaming technologies to the max? Who's designing a cool iot framework/automated driving?
Some people are...but most are write a microservice type tasks.
Yes.
A distinction needs to be drawn between understanding an action and consequences/blame. You can understand why someone does something but still blame them for making the choice. Knowledge doesn’t obviate responsibility.
This is true, but the fact here is that you do not have any responsibility of choosing your employer according to some moral standard of "making the world a better place". This is just your random opinion, in the same way as I can believe that it's everyone's moral responsibility to only buy local produce. It's objectively a "good thing" to do, and you are free to make that choice if you want. But you can't just decide that it's "everyone's" responsibility to suddenly follow your arbitrary moral code. That is the definition of being arrogant and judgemental.
This idea of only working for companies that can be proven to not have any negative side effects of their business, is nothing but a virtue signalling trend, that is randomly and unfairly only applied to the tech industry, for some reason. You can choose to live your life according to maximising the virtue signalling points you can score on this trend, if you want, but this is not any responsibility, to act martyr for saving the world.
Big businesses have no ideology, even if some people would like to think otherwise. They will do everything they can to get more money. Anything resembling some kind of ideology or politics is done because it is helping the company to get more money.
Corporations aren't good or evil. They do good or evil (whatever someone might deem like so) as a side effect.
Corporations are just a group of people. Corporations do evil because some of the people in them are evil (and the rest are ambivalent).
The problem is we, as a society, tend to hand-wave away corporate malfeasance as some sort of unsolvable problem. It’s not - when a company does evil, we need to hold the leaders responsible. Yes, proving those individual actions/decisions is hard work, but it’s work that needs to be done.
This is one of the main points of Marx's Capital.
It’s basically working for the cigarette company of tech.
Facebook has been paying well since the start, to be able to poach from the "illegally reduced salary cartel members" (Apple, Google, Adobe, etc), 10-15 years ago.
And maybe some people say no, but they still get hundreds of people applying. There is an entire cottage industry built around preparing for their interviews.
This is the article I was vaguely referring to:
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire...
Since we’re on something of a tangent, it’s interesting to think about what Meta’s idea of the Metaverse actually is. It isn’t the Internet 3.0 or some kind of grand revolutionary vision.
No, it’s actually just Facebook’s only chance to control a hardware platform.
They can’t control smartphones, they can’t control web browsers, they can’t control smart TVs. It’s not feasible for them to start their own phone OS or web browser.
Apple, for example, made privacy policy changes that have cost Facebook $10 billion in lost revenue, and there nothing Facebook can do about it.
Facebook’s only chance is to hope VR is the next big social tool after text (blogs, Facebook), images (instagram), and video (TikTok, YouTube, Reels).
In my opinion, this won’t really work, unless they truly have some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve. VR will probably forever be a niche: as it stands it’s a sweaty motion sickness-inducing experience.
They just don’t have another avenue to explore to try and have a platform where they have full control over data collection. They’re out of options.
I give the idea of the metaverse a very slim chance of convincing potential customers that it’s better than hanging out with friends On Discord to play some “pancake games.”
I got a lot of these opinions from this video, which really changed my perspective on Meta’s vision for their future:
This is not the first time I've heard this at all and each time it is equally relevant. Unless meta gets everyone goggled up fast I think that there will be so much negative stigma nobody will want to be part of it.
Unless the VR experience is flawless, and I mean better than reality, people can't get hooked.
If the hardware lags even a bit, the headaches and dizziness become unbearable. Depth-of-field is another disorienting factor, and field-of-view yet another.
I believe we do not yet have the technology to offer such an experience, let alone cheaply. As such, Facebook is prematurely investing in it.
VR is Meta’s only chance to control a hardware platform. It’s really as simple as that. As long as they don’t control iOS or Android they’re at the mercy of Google and Apple, who have no interest in making life easy for Meta.
For Meta, VR has to work to stave off their decline. But unless they’ve got some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve, they’re working with a sweat and nausea-inducing niche.
If I am being paid a lot at one place, and very little at another place, I might feel more of my surplus labor time is expropriated from the lower paying place. If I program, and one place pays more, it is an indicator (although just one, and not a solid one) that they exploit their workforce once.
A handful of companies might be even more distasteful than the other ones, but I look at all of them as exploitive - so I may bypass a few companies, but all corporations employing people are exploitative, and I am a wage slave.
The concept of anything changing due to individual choice does not add up to me. Things happen due to mass action, not some individual choice with some liberal moral reasoning. Amazon exploits their factory workers, but the factory workers who organized and voted to join a union in Staten Island have improved the lot of all Amazon workers, and other workers by their organizing and mass action. Some individual moral liberal reasoning to not join Amazon would not have been better. I'm sure most joined because it was the best and highest paying job they could find.
Also, I don't see the work I do at a corporation as being something that is not causing harm in the world. It is inherently exploitative. The notion of a woke corporation doing good in the world is a contradiction. If I am doing something good it is when I am not working - organizing, educating and agitating. Primarily so that workers have more control over their labor.
However when one the pick of the litter, there's a spectrum between getting $1M for a company responsible for polarization, breeding hate, and damaging democracy...to living well comfortably on $200k+ (or even $300k+) to at least try to do something meaningful. It's 8 hours a day of your time, you vote with how you want it to affect the world
Just kidding. It shouldn’t need to be said, but don’t actually off yourself.
On the other hand, if someone is just trying to make the most money, they may end up causing harm. There are many jobs like that - but the scale is more at bigger companies.
I don’t think it makes sense to judge someone based on the company they work for if you don’t actually know whether that individual’s actions are making the world a better place or a worse place.
If you are, let’s say the boat mechanic of someone making a business of dumping toxic chemicals in the sea, then you are clearly doing evil.
Similarly, if you are doing “harm reduction” at Facebook, you are still enabling them to exist, thereby enabling them to get away with doing more harm overall.
You tipped your hand with the 'damaging democracy' phrase, which boils down to "my political opponents are allowed to speak on the platform". In pursuit of your quest to destroy the freedom of expression for your political opponents, you severely damage your retirement (in my opinion, deservedly).
Oh please.
I'm honest that I trade my time for money. There are many times when I'll prioritize other things like working with people I like or not working with people I dislike, the same thing for processes or schedules or whatever.
But I'm not going to sit around and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars so I can go play with the latest JS framework instead of the one that was cool 6 years ago or so I can be in a sexier sounding industry. I'm going to trade my time for money and work towards financial freedom so hopefully I can go work on stuff that's interesting to me on my terms at some point.
Corporate ego is ancient.
Anecdotally, the far majority of "we really love to work here!" people I met seemed to either stop caring very soon, were clearly faking it or were barely distinguishable from their more skeptical co-workers performance-wise, bar a few individuals with a savior complex.
Passion, though . . . aren't all startup founders issued a brand new Passionometer(TM)? I think that's in the rules or bylaws or somesuch.
There are certainly some minority of tech companies which do good in the world, but actually getting hired at them is not necessarily likely. They have limited roles available, and need specific skillsets. A large generic tech company needs just about any skillset, and so practically speaking you're likely to find a job there.
IMHO, making money IS providing something positive to the world. A lot of people are employed, and those people get to buy art or cookies or college for their kids or whatever.
A lot of customers are served, and presumably got something they wanted.
The question is how often you run into the broken window fallacy there. An arsonist makes money burning down houses. A real estate developer makes money since they can now get the land for cheaper. The arsonist also supports local restaurants and gives to charity. But the total economy is still down one house.
Yep, I think that's fair. I just mean that this is generally the good that a company does: not its stated "mission."
The real problem would be if the people making all this money just hoard it which often happens. The only way that gives back is by providing bigger balance sheets for banks to lend out more money which has a miniscule effect.
It’s not actually really possible to hoard money. A dollar is meaningless until you use it to convince someone to give you something.
If you just accumulated $1T in cash and hid it under your mattress, all those people wouldn’t just do $1T less stuff. They would just do a little more for $1 than they would’ve before. That adjustment might take a little while so the fed might (did) print $1T to speed things along.
Also, when some one like Jeff or Elon is worth $300b - it doesn’t mean he has $300b. It just means that other people are willing to purchase their shares in eg Amazon such that if were to sell all of them at that price, it would add up to $300b.
But that money didn’t change hands, it’s just indicative. And of course if Jeff were to say “I’m selling all my shares right now who wants em” the price would change dramatically because nobody actually wants to buy all that. So really he would get about half of the money or something.
Seems like this is a lot more than most companies have to offer, no?
That's called asking for permission.
Historically, that really is a big component of parenting. More children meant more money through additional hands being available to work the farm, etc.
Some parenting is fun but most is hard unforgiving work that might or might not reward you in the future.
Marketable work and childcare aren’t the only kinds of work done within a family.
Don't worry about it :-)
It was just surprising.
My thoughts exactly. Just seems...very odd.
What do you think would have been healthier?
It’s weird to me that you view it as “asking permission” and not “chatting about a thing before committing to it.”
You’re not alone in this thread. It feels like most men here view it through the lens of permission.
I don’t get it.
So..."Hey, I wanna do this thing. It'll mean cutting down on our time together/require more help from you in watching the kid(s), but it has the potential of increasing how much I bring home by (X)" "Huh, yeah, that makes sense. Okay"
I guess then, yes. My ethics are flexible, depending. I have also followed the two second rule, even though I find eating food off of the floor abhorrent =(
Your paygrade needs to be at least $100M/year to have a reasonable shot of changing the culture of a large company. Most likely, by the time you get up there you realize that companies are what they are for reasons, and if you try to change that you will end up changing yourself out of that $100M job rather than changing the world.
Last I heard, he was giving middle managers a hard time for perpetuating the sorts of bad behaviors that give Amazon its bad reputation as an employer.
Maybe Amazon is a lost cause, maybe it isn't, but you won't know if you can fix it unless you try. </two-cents>
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-highest-paid-ceos/
I did ask every person I met "How many hours, on average, do you work in a week?"
Ever single person gave me a non-answer that tried to change the topic. My favorite response to the question was "We are super flexible on where you work, like sometimes I like to work from a cafe". If that had been the only person I asked, I might have thought he misheard me. Since a pattern had been established at this point, I just moved on.
I know every team in a big company is going to be different, but my experience is that they churn and burn fresh coders and let the more ruthless, politic-y type rise up.
I went through the loop and made it to final round, despite my reservations just to see what it would be like. Of the 6 people I spoke to, I only had 1 positive experience. Everyone else was either being aggressive for no reason, or they were regurgitating words and had no value in the org. Hell, the “bar raiser” was the worst and asked follow up questions that were answered in the questions prior. On the design interview, another interviewer bragged about winning some AI award and was adamant that Kafka was the optimal solution for real-time doc editing- not my proposed web sockets… he was just downright rude about it.
Anyway, Amazon sucks for many reasons, but the biggest reason is that they are so successful brainwashing people inside and outside. You can see their success in all this by observing how quick we forget that their policies force employees to piss in bottles, die working in a tornado, and unethically hold a beauty contest to siphon tax payer dollars from the lowest bidder
Asking questions for follow up meant you were missing some core piece of the ‘Amazonian’ way of tackling the problem.
Not being able to take the hints or criticism and thinking about it for years is probably evidence that Amazon would not have been a good place for you. That’s not always a bad thing.
The ability to fit in isn’t rigid. Many people don’t examine data, the impact to their customers, or actually explore a problem. Hearing people’s work history is often a series of assumptions made with little to no care for alternatives.
But it’s important to remember that there are a ton of extremely happy people at Amazon (or at least AWS, where I worked) they just aren’t as vocal online - management, scope and culture were incredible in my experience (it’s a huge company where managers have a lot of flexibility, YMMV). And some of the biggest day-to-day issues you hear about like crappy offices or excessive frugality were a thing of the past when I was there. And in terms of PIP, I only had one experience with it - having a mechanism for identifying and getting rid of the people who are a drain on everyone else was very nice.
This is basically my perspective, although I factor in the value of my time doing the actual work as well. Even with great WLB and very high TC, if you're working 25 hours a week doing miserable stuff... thats 25 hours of your life spent in misery. Would rather that be enjoyable if possible if all other things can be kept constant.
Whether this is unhealthy when carried over into other parts of your life is an exercise for the reader to consider.
I can’t really find somewhere where I can work on somewhere I love because the Vern diagrams of jobs I would love to do, and jobs where I am an employee, are completely separate circles
If someone else is telling you what to do, you won't love it, no matter what. Freedom is a prerequisite for love.
Money is freedom to do what you want, it doesn't mean you have to stop working.
Primary isn’t sole, and even if it was, all jobs aren’t equal in other ways, so the tradeoff varies by more than just compensation. Particularly, for someone without a myopic view but whose sole concern is providing money is sustainability of working conditions, because burnout is a thing.
Nothing I said is about your need to help others, it's about the long-term viability of your own working arrangements for you.
Yes. And it’s a good one. Even from the point of view of job satisfaction. The more $ you are paid, the more expensive it is for the company to waste your time.
Also, it means you are working with other high-paid people, which means they are results-oriented - not there for some childish, naive crusade to change the world.
I went into a shoe store recently and the salesman showed me a shoe that had Bluetooth which I could hook into my phone. I guess this is the kind of innovation being spun out nowadays.
One sign someone is naive is if their crusade to change the world depends on what corporation they choose to work at.
>Even from the point of view of job satisfaction. The more $ you are paid, the more expensive it is for the company to waste your time.
Having the company not waste your time is not in the top 10 most important factors for job satisfaction. And anyway, that just means you have less down time and less personal time. It's not a good thing.
>it means you are working with other high-paid people, which means they are results-oriented - not there for some childish, naive crusade to change the world.
Yes, they have optimized for income (not "results", in any meaningful sense!) over other considerations. At the extreme you will be surrounded by talented psychopaths. That is not the path to a happy life.
Why did you leave?
If the answer is, "Live a meaningful and satisfying life." then... some people seek out work that gives them some of that while they are earning money.
Obviously, the idea that work can provide all of the meaning in your life is a toxic meme that leads to people being exploited. But the idea that work should provide no meaning is equally toxic. You're going to spend most of your waking hours during the healthiest stretch of your life at work. That is way too much to sacrifice for a job that is soulless surrounded by people you care nothing for.
Meaning is king, everything else is window dressing; only meaning gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. The sooner you start finding avenues for that in your life, the sooner you'll realize you don't need to focus completely on some distant exit strategy like financial independence.
Read more, improve my cooking skills, learn how to play chess, try out a month-long vacation, play video games, learn some art skills, exercise... I'm sure I'm missing some things. I can do a little bit of these a small amount of the time but it's not enough to enjoy, as long as I'm working.
Maybe there are jobs I'd enjoy but I kind of doubt it. I haven't found a job that I'd say I want to do until I'm in my 60s, that's for sure.
The problem is that meaning is undefined and this leads you down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what is the meaning of life, which will make you very disappointed and lead to constructing a psychological bubble of "beliefs" that you appoint as facts to find a way out of this burdensome brooding.
Not everyone wants to live a lie like that, and have that sort of pseudo religious lifestyle. It's much easier to just go for the highest paying job, then making sure to also do some good (if you feel like it's too "evil"), by for example donating some of your salary, or doing some volunteer work. Why is this better? Because it's clear practical actionable goals that you can rely on, and that you know will have the desired outcome.
But it's more work to do this, assigning some superficial "meaning" to your job that you demand of all people around to validate and support, it's a way to be more lazy, to turn your social circle into a mini-cult where you all tell each other that you really can have the cake and eat it too.
To be honest, this reads to me like "I haven't found meaning in life, therefore people who say they have are lying to themselves." You're free to believe what you want, and if that's what makes you happy more power to you, but don't assume your experience is universal. I assure you it isn't.
Only a few people can win that lottery. Then again, I suppose finding work that is personally satisfying and pays well enough is also like winning a lottery.
But do they find it in tech? I could understand if we were talking about doctors, firemen, artists, etc. But tech work is mostly just companies trying to push products. This isn't really evil or good, it's just economics. A lot of tech companies seem to attempt to adopt language which suggests they're doing good, but I couldn't name very many which do something other than push products. I can't remember what language they used years ago when I worked at the apple store, but it was something like "enriching lives." And a lot of the employees seemed to really believe it. Yes, if you just buy a mac rather than some other computer, your life will be "enriched."
I'm not trying to be cynical; I definitely think there are some tech companies which do objective good, but these companies are in the vast minority of the tech field. If most people in tech sought "meaning" then the field would suddenly become extremely crowded around the few companies which actually produce good for the world.
I've learned how to fix my own appliances from online videos, stayed connected with friends through email, found stuff to do and avoided getting lost in unfamiliar cities through navigation, unwound with games, discovered new music and shared my music with others. All of that was because of or mediated by software. Could I have done it without, maybe. But I did use software for it, and tech deserves credit for that.
Maybe we need antitrust action just so we can better separate the “good” software companies from the “bad” ones.
But I think that the problem is mostly orthogonal to technology. Monopolistic megacorporations in any area are rife with problems. Look at Walmart, Nestlé, Shell, Comcast, etc.
Tech companies are particularly prone to this because information naturally lends itself to economies of scale, and economies of scale are fundamentally anti-competitive.
But it's the consolidation that's the problem, not the tech itself.
This question is a pet pieve of mine. The number of good answers is endless, and its sad that you would even ask it. Working is slavery, however you want to slice it.
So why wait until retirement to start seeking them?
> Working is slavery, however you want to slice it.
This is a thought-terminating cliche. Slavery is slavery. Working is an arrangement you enter into voluntarily with a series of pros and cons for all participants. Is the CEO if a company a slave? The researcher who finds a cure for a disease a family member died from? A musician in a touring band? An author with a book deal?
It's your life and I respect your choice to live it how you want, but if you have an idea that work is a thing to be suffered for as little as possible until you reach payday and then you retire and your real life starts... you are almost certainly on track for a completely miserable life both before and after your retirement.
Take a look at the kind of people who have the greatest life satisfaction. How many of them went down the FIRE path versus building their entire life in a meaningful way?
And as with such industries or industry scenes where big amounts of money involved, as in Wall Street or Hollywood, people who get into Silicon Valley tend to view things through a purely transactional lens after a while. After all, that’s how these workplaces view them- not as repositories of higher meaning, but as interchange economic producers. Such is the nature of dumb money.
Time is king, and the closest thing we have right now (until a time machine is invented if ever) to banking time is money. More money equates to more time to do whatever it is you want.
Personally, I'd rather find a job I don't hate and interleave enjoyable use of my time throughout my life.
> … instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/316215-not-long-since-a-str...
Just look at how many older, senior employees you find at established, larger companies where the stock has risen so much in the past that you just know they are in all likelihood millionaires (and not "just" single digit ones). And even in the (rather rare, I guess) cases that they mismanaged their finances so badly that they are not, those people are prominent and established enough that another company would take them for more comp in a heartbeat. And yet they stay.
Your opinion is not universal. Don't pretend that it is in order to justify yourself.
In fact, it's doubly effective. If you can learn to reduce your expenses by $10k and live happily, not only do you have an additional $10k to save/invest, but you need less each year to live independently.
I "retired" at 33 (still doing other things, but without steady cash paycheck). Lived cheaply, worked hard, saved up a ton of money. I went back to work in 2020, right after interest rates were dropped to zero and the pandemic stimulus went out, because I figured that every single retiree, no matter how old, was about to get reamed by inflation. Have been right so far, and IMHO it's only going to get worse. Living cheaply works when the basic necessities of life are cheap. The basic necessities of life are about to get very expensive, if they haven't already.
I am older than you, but one issue that I need to contend with is being in a demographic that will contain a lot of other retirees, so I believe I need to financially be better off than other retirees of my age to have a reasonable lifestyle (and I am unsure how to avoid thundering crowd effects for my generation). Reasonable = comfortable (e.g. could choose to have a small fizzboat, but not a megayacht).
Problem is that inflation is rarely steady. Typically you get stops and starts. Inflation will rise, and the Fed will try to contain it by raising rates. Then the raised rates create a recession, all asset prices fall, the Fed flinches and drops rates. Inflation takes off again. Repeat for a decade or more.
In an environment like this, you can't lever up too heavily, and you need to actively manage. Otherwise you'll get reamed by the busts. Optimal strategy is to buy surviving high-growth stocks right as the recession gets to its peak, as everyone feels like everything's going bankrupt, and then hold them as rates drop and the economy recovers. Then sell right as the Fed signals it's going to get tough on inflation again.
Optimal strategy is pretty hard to execute. Failing that, it's often best just to buy & hold profitable, low-competition businesses.
The demographic time-bomb of everybody retiring at once and trying to cash out of the market at the same time is another issue. There's no real fix for this: living standards are going to have to drop, for retirees or workers or both (and more likely retirees). The way to profit from it is to look for companies that are successfully automating parts of elder care, and then invest hard in them.
Run hard, every hour you work is an hour you’ll never get back, so max the comp for each of those hours. Your future self will thank you.
(Huge mmm fan btw)
Another way to view it: say you get a pay boost 90k -> 190k. The custodial parent will request the imputed income to be recalculated. You now owe an extra 20k PER YEAR. That's your new imputed income, even if you don't get a job like this again and it only lasts a year. Eventually you lose that job and can't find one like it again -- fast forward 10 years. You've paid an extra $200k, just to make an extra 50 or 60k net in one year. You lost $200k by working a higher paid job for a year.
One year of raise followed by 17 years of a slightly more relaxed job at your original income means you LOSE money. In this example, falling from 190k back to your 90k income means child support went from 1/3 of your net check to 2/3 of your net check. A brutal risk to take if you don't think you'll be making the high wage for life.
Strictly no, but this is basically what imputed income does. It's saying you have the capability to earn it. If you actually HAVE earned that amount, it can be extremely difficult to convince a judge that the certainty that you HAVE earned that amount is countered by some vague uncertainty you may not be able to again. Fighting against a known factual salary history with some hand waving about not being able to do it anymore is a hell of a hill to climb. Plenty of anecdotes show people having extreme difficulties lowering child support.
1. This is crazy to me. I could maybe cut $3K by taking a huge hit to quality of life (that would probably not be sustainable with a full time job anyways). Getting the other $7K would involve either homelessness or cutting back on eating and visiting family. How do salary earners manage to rack up $10K per year of purely unnecessary expenses?
2. That number is still way too small to be a better strategy than income maximization in tech. Of course "and" is always better, but given the choice between an extra >$100K/yr in savings or $10K less in life expenses the choice is pretty obvious.
12 years ago, my food budget was $3/day, and the only reason it wasn't less than even that was because I worked at a Subway and could get 1, sometimes 2 meals a day free if I was working a long shift. Going to Taco Bell was considered splurging.
I caught Mono and had to miss 3 days of work. I had to get an advance on my paycheck to pay the rent. At least my boss was cool about it.
> Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’
Cleaning services, vacations, picking the fancy and nice daycare using some trendy educational system (Montessori, unschooling, whatever) instead of the one run out of someone's house in a scary part of town, ordering food delivery, monthly subscription services for all kinds of crap, new car every 2 years instead of a used one every 5 years... the list goes on and on.
No one’s saying it’s completely free from trade-offs , but a lot of people have leaks in their bucket that they mindlessly assume are “required” when, in fact, they’re small luxuries and should be considered that way. It doesn’t mean you can’t do them, but rather just means you should consciously determine if they’re actually worth the tradeoff to you.
The first option often isn't available to folks.
Agree with your second point though.
You learn to spend what’s in your pocket.
I like networks, multiple servers, interesting deployments. The actual stuff that is being executed upon those systems is a little interesting, but also a little irrelevant.
There are fields I'd never touch, and technologies which are more interesting to me, but when it comes to looking for a job I'll just google "sysadmin helsinki" and apply to those companies that come top - or to places that friends have recommended.
So honestly? Ordering companies by salary seems like a reasonable enough approach to me.
Think of how many people don't switch jobs at least every 5 years and how many change for a job paying the same or less.
I'm the odd one out having been with my current employer for >5 years. I've been getting healthy raises every year, but many of my friends have averaged a 40% pay increase every hop...
I guess it depends on what you want. Do you want your job to be something you're excited about doing every weekday? Or is it a means to provide for the things you'd rather be doing?
You're only approaching it the wrong way if money is your highest value too and you don't act on that.
Saving the world is not something you do as an employee of a corporation. That's more suited to a government or NGO position.
And if you care about saving the world, you can do it better in your free time.
There's no reason business should be impacted by ideology. And before having duties to others, you have duties to yourself and your family.
I wouldn't say that. Everyone views things differently. You may place more value on product/industry/global impact, whereas others don't care, they just want the cash.
- distance from home
- work-life balance
- tech stack
- smaller project size <50 ppl
- smaller office rooms <5 ppl
In the end I picked the highest paying that fit all the criteria above and so far I'm happy with my choice.
10% more money might be sort of in the noise of a bunch of other factors.
In the unlikely event it's 10x for whatever oddball reason, assuming it's nothing illegal/dangerous/etc., that would be hard not to give it a shot for a couple years and see how it goes.
I felt bad for a really nice, hard working recruiter last year because, although i had 2 offers on the table through opportunities found through him, the companies just felt wrong. I ended up going with a company who head-hunted me directly on LinkedIn.
I can't imagine eliminating how I feel about what I do from the equation.
I'll retire at 35 and then do what I want. But for now, optimizing.
It is hard for a financially poor company to have good products/impact.
You optimize your job hunting for these criteria and he did his chiefly for $$$, as you put it.
If you want to be a mercenary, read these blog posts.
If you want a job you like working on stuff you care about, avoid this stuff like the plague.
Will you make more in the end? Unclear, but I like to assume that people who work on stuff they care about eventually win under capitalism too. But even if not, I feel like I do fine.