It's funny how fast and profoundly "perspective" will hit you. When I was a young programmer I always dreamed of that promotion and comp adjustment. Constantly looking for that next step. That's not inherently bad, per se, but once you reach a particular place you come to find out what the commensurate responsibility looks like. Sometimes -- dare I say, often? -- it's just not fun. That's what they pay you for, though, right?

The friends and colleagues in my cohort, the ones NOW with larger financial and familial responsibilities, curse their former selves for not knowing how good they had it.

I guess all that is to say, as cliche as it is, "be careful what you wish for".

Grass is greener etc.

Other peoples situations always seem better/easier. We don’t have enough data and are just too poor at objective evaluation.

>> Grass is greener etc.

This is so true.

After spending a decade in software development, I'm finally staying put where I am. So many times as a developer you hate something about your job. So you go out and interview, build some stuff for show on GitHub, and then finally land that job that's going to take away all your worries and grievances you have with your current employer.

Only to find out all you did was swap one set of problems for another, totally different set of problems which weren't an issue at your former employer.

You either accept this stuff as just something every company has, or you'll go crazy trying to find a perfect company/startup/agency to work at and you'll never get any further in your career.

Is everyone just making lateral moves? New job should mean new money, that's the only reason to move jobs, unless you really want to build your resume in an area in order to... make more money in the long run.

Some of us have motives other than acquiring money. What is that money for? Work takes up a larger share of your time and energy than anything else in your life. If your job makes you unhappy, how much additional money will it take to make up for that?

I try to maximize my earnings during my working hours (M-F, 9-5ish) so I can enjoy things outside my working hours. Most of my work related unhappiness comes from the idea that "I should be making more money." I'm finally at a spot, where if the market rebounds a little, I'm in the top 10-15% of pay for an individual contributor, I think. Full time remote for the last 5 years, low cost of living state, and my annual income is somewhere between $350-$450k depending on how the market does (or much higher if things really turn around). I'm on year 1 at this new gig, so I won't feel that amount until bonus time comes around early next year, but man, it's bringing me a lot of joy, I can tell you that.

The only question is, do I buy a boat, a beach house, or a lake house? I live near a lake and already have a jetski and a friend with a boat, maybe I should just buy a tract of land to drive my jeep and some ATVs. I mean, maybe people get a lot of happiness out of work, I certainly don't. I like to have fun.

Ah, well! Congratulations on finding a life that works for you.

There is nothing I can spend any amount of money on which will make my free time happy enough to make up for the misery of a job I do not care about. It cannot be done. If a better job means I have to take a pay cut, no matter; it's worth it for a happier life. Any job I could possibly take at this point in my career will pay enough to live well, anyway, so I don't see much point in trying to maximize income. Hedonic treadmill, diminishing marginal utility, etc.

> Any job I could possibly take at this point in my career will pay enough to live well, anyway

I mean, we all hope that, but that could change without a moment's notice. For people outside the tech field, the last year's inflation, gas prices, and skyrocketing rents, their lifestyle went from 'enough to live' to 'short about $1k a month.'

If you live in a major western European city, yeah, you don't have to worry too much about money, there's a lot of social services available for you to fall back. Elsewhere, it's much more competitive.

As the adage goes, "Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have"

The grass is never greener, it's just a different shade of brown.

I think if I were homeless, a FAANG SWE job would definitely be greener.

Ah except it doesnt go directly from brown -> (supposed) green in one step :) It is a whole bunch of slightly browner shade transforms. (Missing a few intermediate steps and no dissing on any of the stages) it might be something like:

Homeless -> Volunteer worker -> Govt job -> Non Faang -> Faang -> Enlightened that you missing out on life.

A lack of ability to imagine something shouldn't cause someone to believe it can't happen. There are any number of ways someone can go homeless including under the conditions of having the skills to program. I've been able to program since I was 12 and definitely could've gone homeless any time between now and around 3 years ago (which is nearly 2 decades of time).

You are spot on. The "progression" I gave an example is (mean to be) fully free of any judgement or superiority etc. Any of us can go homeless in an instant (eg FAANG eng buys a crazy expensive house on a H1B, suddenly looses job in a bad market). My point was that when someone is going through those stages, assuming you had never been in a advanced stage etc, a linear path means you are incrementally loosing a part of yourself and you dont realize it until the end. Does that make sense?

I remember when homeless employees working for Google made headlines. People had good paying jobs, couldn't afford housing - or at least didn't desire to put the entirety of their income into housing. Looks like things may be headed back that way again.

I caught this perspective early, and would be very clear in interviews that I didn't ever want to be a manager. I had a lot of interviewers ask, "Don't you have any ambition?"

My answer was always that I did, I got to where I wanted to be, and I intend to stay there. I'm a programmer. I program. Ambition realized.

And with the money that programmers make, it seems even more ridiculous to suggest that I had no ambition while applying for a job as "senior developer" or "lead developer".

Management and engineering require two completely different skillsets and are two completely separate jobs.

Just because someone is a great engineer doesn't mean they'd be a good manager. I'd be scared to work under a manager that doesn't acknowledge and believe this.

I’m in this position as well, but over time I’m becoming more concerned about getting pushed out of independent contribution by ageism.

Learn and do things other people say are hard, and that you find interesting.

That's why I've never gone into management. It's not an honor to be a manager, it's a skill - and that's not a skill I want to develop. Better to work for a company that recognizes technical talent is a skill that's at least as-important as management and will financially compensate accordingly for that skill.

Being more successful younger makes it easier to handle financial responsibilities later.

Partying when you are young isn't something always looked back on fondly. Fun is good now and in future expectation.

Those are wise words.

100%. In big tech, as you get more senior, the job becomes miserable. I wouldn’t want to be a Director, or even a Senior Staff engineer. At a certain point you sacrifice your sanity to be in that many meetings.

My career trajectory was Dev -> Senior -> Lead -> Director -> Senior. I left a company and purposefully looked for my next job further down the ladder, after having profound burnout that made me question whether I wanted to keep working in the industry at all. I decided I like making software, I just didn't like the amount of stress, anxiety, uncertainty, politics, and bickering I was experiencing. In my experience, these things grew exponentially at each level, while the salary only grew linearly. So, I'm fine making merely "way more money than I need" while not crying in my car in the garage before work, which is something that actually happened many times at my old job.

Thanks for sharing. Sorry to hear you had to go through all that.

What I've realized is the corporate ladder is a fiction that serves to keep people working harder and harder without significant pay bumps. It is an artificial status game that has real ramifications; however, since it is a zero-sum game, it ends up bringing out the worst in everyone.

What are your goals now around your career?

> My career trajectory was Dev -> Senior -> Lead -> Director -> Senior. I left a company and purposefully looked for my next job further down the ladder, after having profound burnout that made me question whether I wanted to keep working in the industry at all

Any chance you had terrible, even substandard leadership where you were Director (assuming that's where you had the profound burnout) and you would absolutely have loved it otherwise?

the more places I work the more I realize that the standard is bad leadership.

> the more places I work the more I realize that the standard is bad leadership.

True!

Why is that, though?

Like - do the great leaders retire quick?

Or is it that we are just an unlucky bunch who get exposed to bad leadership?

How do you find a job at a lower level? I was trying to do this and no one would hire me. I guess I could lie about my experience.

I stepped back from a lead to a senior dev this year. I was open about it to recruiters, saying my intent was to get back into being an IC.

No one was even slightly put off by my resume or career direction. I'm not sure what "no one would hire me" means, precisely, but I didn't have an easy time – it took many months and near 100 applications to find the right spot.

Yeah, BUT its the easiest job market in IT history to get hired right now ..

I spent some time in middle management (first as a lead, then as a manager of a small team of devs) and I refuse to do that again. You're 100% right, as you move up, it gets more miserable. As a lead, I was constantly doing adult daycare and counseling for the developers. At the same time, upper management was constantly breathing down my back to improve my teams analytics and performance - regardless of how well the team was doing.

The worst part of the two gigs I had was the director who was in the position above me? Not moving. In both companies. I spent almost six years between two companies trying to find a way out of middle management. I finally realized a lot of companies structure gets flat very quickly because a lot of the upper level executives are not moving, or not getting promoted, so then you have another set of issues you're dealing with.

Its just not worth it unless you can get in and get out of middle management in less than 2 years.

Being a line engineer can also have bad micromanagement and bad priorities, while also paying less.

It's funny to say you don't like "constantly doing adult daycare" and conclude that it is better to be the one being adult daycares for instead.

I think it really depends on the type of big tech you’re talking about.

Being senior staff often means $800k+ comp. I’d gladly take that over the $400k senior ranges. Directors are past $1m.

It’s a huge pay bump - not just 20% to go into management and more managerial roles. It pays.

I'd even say you need a degree of sociopathy to reach upper management. I can't imagine being responsible for 1000 other people and keep them working in sync. At some point those people become a faceless resource in a spreadsheet.

Unless have strong social anxiety and can't habdle being around people, meetings are much better than coding on something that will never work because the meetings people are making terrible decisions.

What people don't realize is the job that pays 30% or so more than your current job requires alot more work and a ton more stress, and for me that is not worth the extra money - which by the way most of which goes to taxes anyway. I really feel like it doesn't "pay" to move up in an org mainly due to the extremely high tax hit along with stress the title comes with.

Anecdotally, I don't think any of the moves I made with over 20% pay increase really came with an increase of responsibility. Some businesses just have better margin so they can pay more.

To clarify, I just mean I always moved horizontally between businesses and not diagonally. Although at a business I may have also moved vertically (w/ more responsibility) but that's moot.

I really think you are narrowly looking at things from near the peak of earning potential and an established career track. That's fine for some and this _is_ a tech oriented site, but still seems rather narrowly focused.

Sample size of 1:

- Job 1 -> Job 2: Neither in tech; 80% raise; even in terms of stress / work

- Job 2 -> Job 3: Move to a Support group in a tech company; 11% raise; much higher stress / work

- Job 2 -> Job 3: Support to Technical Sales; 70% raise (after 5 raises at job 2); less work / higher peak stress (maybe) but lower average stress

I'm not a developer but when my last job paid half of what I make now and I have even less responsibility than I did at the previous job.

this is literally what my dad told me (when I asked him why he didn't go for his boss's job). The marginal effort was large compared to the marginal revenue, and that would eat into quality of life for him.

There isn't a tax bracket in the US where most of any income goes to taxes. There should be though!

Not quite right: California + Federal tops out over 50%. Not by a lot and it obviously won't hit most people but it's an interesting benchmark.

Yeah and thats online income taxes!

Then with less than half left theres countless taxes built into the things you spend on (e.g. sales taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, import tariffs, etc etc etc etc and oh yeah more etc)

In California the top marginal tax rate can be over 50%. 37% federal tax, 12% state tax, 3.8% net investment tax.

Not sure what the net investment tax is, but just the normal Medicare tax (2.35%) is enough to get over 50% with federal and state income taxed there

That's on income over ~$500K AGI (which after deducting 401(k) )

So in California we were losing about half of our money to taxes, its always fun to make estimated tax payments when you received your quarterly RSUs(~40% of the RSU money goes to taxes when you get them) and then with the rest putting half of that towards a quarterly tax payment, we left the state to avoid the stranglehold of taxes and will probably go to 1 income as two high earners just isn't worth it, but if you like higher taxes move to Europe, you may love it there.

I'm not sure about tech salaries, but based on several surveys, it would appear that effective tax rate for most workers is about the same between european countries and united states. They just spend less on defense, and more on social programs (although some countries have very recently increased defense spending). California taxes are extremely high though, I agree.

>They just spend less on defense

Because the US takes up the slack. Something we need to seriously STOP doing :p

In CA it’s 13.3% for incomes over 1 million

Hourly is meaningless if you can’t choose more hours. If you had a job that paid $1000/hr but you only work 1 hr/week that is not enough for many people to live on.

So if you need a lot of money for your lifestyle the high hours/high pay job might be your only option.

There's always the chance you discover frugality, when you stand back, account for the expenses in time and money, and what you've gotten in exchange.

Maybe you'll see how that $20k car is twice as expensive to maintain as the $10k car. Or maybe you'll get a taste of life in a city with public transit that is faster than walking. Or maybe you just move to a cabin in the woods with satellite Internet and grow your own food.

But you'd have time to do another $1000/hr job elsewhere.

Depending how you come into the job a lot of places won't let you work 2 jobs, especially if you're salaried.

I was denied a promotion to a level that had unlimited vacation. I have a set number of days. I’m much happier without the promotion. But I won’t stay forever.