Off the top of my head:

1. More money means less time till I hit FU money and can choose work without any consideration of pay

2. 200k/yr is not as much as it seems if you're in the bay area and have kids

3. Bigger title -> more input on core design decisions. Hate some idea coming from the higher ups? You're in a position to do something about it.

4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems to work on. People trust you to say "this should be a priority"

> 4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems to work on. People trust you to say "this should be a priority"

This is probably one of the most dominant non-financial factor for engineers. Because if you want to make a visible, critical design decisions for billion-user products you usually want to be at least L6~L7, the level where you're now an owner of a non-trivial product/system spanning across teams.

Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money? Personally I'd rather work half time for twice as many years than try to race to retire.

A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas, which is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you want to be a moderately checked out person, living in a smaller city and stretching your giant bay area salary is the way to go. If you want to be aggressively careerist, you have to be face-to-face in the bay networking.

More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp, imo, which might be appealing for some people but is anathema to me. The people higher up got there by being more argumentative, or backstabbing, or ingratiating themselves, and instead of going along with them now you get to fight them. No thanks.

My todo list will keep me busy until I'm 3000 years old. I might not be hit by a bus, but I have no reason to think I will ever get to the end of that list. Money can buy things required for the list that are not on the list, but I have to work to get them. In many cases I spend less time working then I would just doing it. I could make a canoe from scrap wood and row to New Zealand, but in a week at work I get enough money to pay for a plane ticket, while paddling across the ocean would take months (people have taking canoes across the ocean so I know it is possible - though I'm not sure how risky it is)

I’d rather work twice as many hours per year for half as many years. It’s not that one choice is obviously dominant over the other across all people.

Yes, given "getting hit by a bus" is a probabilistic event that is independent of my working hours, I would rather make 2x for half as many years, all other things being equal. I'd also rather make 3x for a third as many years, and so on, if it were possible. Given time value of money and compounding interest, it's always better to front load your working time and make Nx for 1/N as much calendar time worked.

And for the controversial part: The above is why I think it's insane to, for example, take 1-2 years of not working, early in your 20s, to go see the world and "find yourself." Those 1-2 years, if spent earning, could mean retiring an extra 3-6 years earlier.

I agree with your conclusion, but I think there’s a fair argument to say that an extra week of leisure in your 20s is worth more than an extra week of leisure in your 50s or 60s. That is even more true if you’re working 48 weeks/year in your 20s and zero weeks in your 60s.

I think it's insane to, for example, work at an office early in your 20s, to put a couple grand in your 401(k). Those 1-2 years, if spent exploring, could mean finding a happier and more thoughtful way to progress through the latter 70% of your life.

I think this points out a difference in viewing everything in life as an efficiency problem focused on retirement age and overall wealth. Makes sense for a forum of engineers to see it this way I suppose.

Early on the money is probably the least important part. Momentum seems like a lot more important.

If you finish uni and take 1-2yrs off, that puts you wayyy behind someone who goes straight into a job. If you take 1-2yrs off your knowledge won't be fresh and you'll not really be a new grad anymore.

"getting hit for a bus" is a hyperbolic example meant to stand in for a catastrophic event. It really means you (or a family member like a parent, partner or child) has a major health event, for instance. Some things are random, some things tend to become more likely with age. Even just chronic pain or other health issues might make retirement less fun than travelling in your 20s (speaking as someone with chronic pain from surgical implants).

Besides health there's a lot of reasons why being certain about doing something now might be preferable to putting it off for 10+ years.

> Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money?

No. I don't work that hard, and my work is generally enjoyable, I've made a lot of good friends, and get to live in the area I grew up in near my family.

> A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas

Well, my response was to a poster asking "why do you care about making more if you make 200k?" and the answer for some people making that amount of money is that they are only able to find work paying 200k+ in a high COL area.

> More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp

The thing driving more interesting problems and more input is a title bump, which in my neck of the woods means a 50% or greater pay bump, so I would say that's not for the same comp. Whether it's more responsibility is variable, but I know engineers two levels above senior who more or less have the same responsibilities as a senior engineer except their project is "harder" and more important to the company (this does not mean the more senior engineer is actually working more hours though).

Perhaps a meta point here is also useful. Once you're senior, most engineering work available is not interesting and does not help you grow as an engineer. Engineering work that helps you grow as an engineer often makes you more valuable. Companies usually give interesting work to their best engineers. If you can quickly climb the ladder to where your job feeds you interesting work you can enter into a "winners-win-more" sort of feedback loop. This is a strong incentive to front-load your career growth by working really hard for your first decade in industry (or at least years 5-10).

In general I agree. It's just that I don't know if salaried job lead to FU money. The only person I had or will be able to say FU is to myself sitting alone in living room.

You'd be able to reach FIRE money as a SWE. Possibly FU money if you get to vp level at a FAANG and then work for 10 years.

Depends on who you are and what your growth potential is. I know SWEs getting offers in the 7-8 figure range. That's not in any way typical but if you're smart enough, hardworking, and get the right breaks hitting a 7 figure income isn't something I'd consider weird and is definitely FU money.

At Google specifically, even being promoted to staff is a huge undertaking. And until recently, there was an expectation of forward career trajectory built into the lower ranks, i.e. every engineer was functionally multi-year probationary. If you found something valuable to do but you weren't progressing your career (because, say, the work was necessary but boring, like micro-optimizations, feature polish on a mature product, or documentation / example creation), you'd start to have talks with your manager about your future at the company.

I believe they relaxed that process when someone at the top took a look at their org-chart and realized they've become a big company where they need a critical mass of not-actually-interested-in-progressing engineers to keep the lights on and if they actually followed their policy, they risked churning those reliable workhorses out of the company because they couldn't actually afford to find a slot to promote them all.

I don't know because the change was decided way above my pay grade, but I always assumed that the reason was HR legal.

It is hard to look at people who are objectively doing as well as each other, and rate some lower only because they have been at that job grade "too long".

The fig leaf was always that the ladders encourages keeping up with technology and the company, which meant people couldn't tread water at the lower grades.

But if the "new technology" isn't necessary for the job duties, labor lawyers can have a field day.

Performance reviews in corporate culture often have a "what have you done for me lately?" mindset.

If you're senior or staff and haven't launched anything exciting lately, middle management might become less interested in whether the service is running well and more interested in having "career" conversations about how your role description says you're supposed to be launching cross-functional projects more frequently.

If you aspire to be a homeowner, 200k in the Bay Area will be difficult.

As of 2022, it's now difficult anywhere in most US metropolitan areas.

"Most of the US" != the five places you'd be willing to live. Outside of the HN bubble, a $200k salary _easily_ affords a home in most markets.

https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-...

Okay, but the important part is "the five places you'd be willing to live". There are significant reasons most of us aren't moving to the middle of nowhere to be able to afford a home.

I meant to say 'major metropolitan' - Thanks for the clarification

My main motivation for work at this point is to provide for my children and buy my retirement. More money via promotion helps me achieve those goals.

Try having a family as a sole earner on 200k in the bay area. Or new york.

Is this a joke? What is median household income for families in both of these cities? Fairly sure it's below 100k.

In San Francisco, the median household income was $120k. That’s 2 years ago mind you, and a lot of inflation has occurred since then.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia

Doesn’t account for the fact that many are under rent control, own houses from decades ago, etc.

It’s better to look at the average incomes of people who are buying houses in SF.

The median household only has 2 people so presumably the median income for a family is higher.

Do their budgets balance or do they take on credit card and other debt to manage the deficit ? I am not claiming its one way or the other as I do not know the answer.

I'm going to guess that software developers, especially ones at FAANG, aren't aiming for a median household lifestyle. 200k post tax is easily ~140k a year. A san francisco mortgage is easily 4-5k a month for 30 years. And if their kids don't get lucky on the school lottery, they're going to be sending them to private school. And then there's college savings to account for.

But you need a house with a backyard, two teslas, a wine cellar and a college fund or you aren't really living /s

> What is median household income for families in both of these cities?

What is the median credit card debt for them in these cities?

What is the median annual savings for them in these cities?

A promotion (pre-director in CA/NYC) can easily be an increase of 50k (~25%) in comp so it's pretty meaningful.

I understand the perspective of people who view their profession as solely a job, checking out after their 9-5 and doing other things with their life. This isn't me. I enjoy the work. Idealistically, I think I can make a large impact on people with my knowledge and experience. Shave off a seconds on a workflow in Google Docs end-to-end, that's a net good to humanity. It's not all about compensation. At some point it's almost only about impact, and impact often requires higher titles and putting in hours due to systems that govern these large companies.

Because coasting costs me mentally. I want more than that. I coasted for a year and it was disastrous to me, mentally.

You are counting on that job to always be there for one thing.

In the boom time there's an unending appetite for mediocre engineers to inflate headcount, making managers look good (more reports) and companies look good (to investors). In the bust time, I don't think even the smartest people will be safe, and the top of the ladder may well be pruned more aggressively because they're expensive. Having positive reviews may protect you, but being high in the org won't.

Depends on how high. You don't want to be in the "off in the corner" research group which is usually comprised of very high level engineers (senior or staff level or higher). You definitely don't want to be high up in the middle tier either. What you want is to be known to your Vice Presidents and above. That's when you reached "high enough" to avoid the great cull.

I witnessed this more times than I can count.

Otherwise its all balance sheet calculations and maybe your manager can pull a punch or two if the product area is critical enough.

To be clear, your question is why do people want to grow? Or why do they want to make more money? Or why do they want more status/power/recognition?