A barrier is that situation doesn't occur often. I think it could, but not many companies seem to be run that way. The stereotypical tech company, for example, seems to be driven by growth at all costs, and there's a kind of mercenary thinking by both company and employees, towards each other. Which is intertwined with the weird dynamic in which folk wisdom is that companies will pay more to hire someone than they will to retain.

Another barrier is that a worker opting out of this -- to go to a mythical modest little oasis company run by a CEO with a heart of gold who will live forever -- can be difficult, due to the large number of high-TC other workers in the field. In the US, if a worker is making relatively a lot less than others, they're at a disadvantage for housing, healthy living in various ways, opportunities for their children, etc.

So even lifer-inclined people will be motivated to play along with our current situation of chasing FAANGs, hierarchies of people all targeting promo criteria and metrics rather than company and team success, job-hopping whenever the right bump of TC and title comes along, rehearsing for fratbro interview rituals, etc. (Maybe with a bust cycle of a lot of VC exit schemes, we'll start to get better, but a lot of workers and companies have known nothing else, and there's a lot to unlearn.)

Not to get too mopey but I went through the phase of "sell out and do things that make me unhappy and stressed for more money" a few years ago and while it put me in the position I am today financially, it came at great personal expense. I lost friends and partners by moving, lost years of close contact with family late in their lives, and the stress put a physical toll on my body and mental toll on my psyche.

I think we're quite naive at a young age - our eyes glaze over at the massive amount of money we can make but don't value the non-monetary cost. Your youth is finite and you don't know what you've missed until it's gone.

I would like to add something original instead: the act of selling out, and shifting one's focus towards money is an irreversible change in one's soul. I can feel it in myself, and I can plainly see it in others. It deadens the spirit, if only ever so slightly; but what is lost here is lost for good. And the more time is spent in that headspace, the more likely it is one will never be able to leave it.

I don't know what it is or how it works: I just notice it happens. Why does forsaking the more nuanced joys of life lead one to losing all nuance oneself?

Perhaps it's a comfort thing. Where you shed away all strong emotion in exchange for a consistent tranquility -- you also lose the very things that gave life depth. The opulence leads one's material needs to always being fulfilled, as if in a perfect bubble; where any sort of stimulus that could push one's emotions one way or the other are completely cut off.

And then once you start down this path... perhaps you become complacent. The bubble is comfortable, unvulgar, pleasant, unprovocative: why would you leave? All the things which spur one's emotions are quite the opposite. And it reinforces itself. The more you get a taste for this tranquility -- this unchanging homeostasis of comfort -- the more effort (consciously and unconsciously) you will put into maintaining it; and the more strongly its grip takes hold of you.

Until you lose all appetite for the things that enliven. You become boring, insular to life.

    Where you shed away all strong emotion in 
    exchange for a consistent tranquility

    I would like to add something original instead: 
    the act of selling out, and shifting one's focus 
    towards money is an irreversible change in one's soul.

Even without partners and dependents to consider, a lot of basic capitalist "facts" push us toward this stultified complacency. We need places to live. To be a renter is to subject one's self to all kinds of... crap. Owning a home is marginally better in many ways for many people so many of us are incentivized to chase that, but for most people this means chasing a certain amount of money and committing to a mortgage. There are alternatives (van living?) but they're compromised or impractical for many people in various ways.

I'm now in the "dreamer" mode (I switch back and forth every few years, depending on circumstance & financial situation) and am enjoying running my own company despite paying myself 60% of what I used to earn (a few years ago, so would have probably be even a bigger difference today) and having a lot more stress as a business owner that has to worry about finances and payroll etc.

But I hope my career is still mostly ahead of me (I'm 39 years old) and fully expect at some point for the pendulum to swing back to "selling out" when the situation changes (and then maybe back again when it changes again!).

I actually know people in our profession (working actively as individual contributors) that still do very "in the trenches" development work in their 60s and enjoy what they're doing (and are very much in demand). I think even when accounting for agism if you're good and keep active/up to date/learning you can work as a developer your entire career.

If okay compensation in a low cost of living area gets you a home that’s a bit different. But for people who live in places like the Bay Area, NYC, Vancouver or Toronto the comp has to be there and it’s a very big deal.

I think there is a lot of merit to at least trying moving to the Bay Area once in your career as a developer if you get the offer. As much as I hated it I don’t regret it because my resume has been dramatically better which has opened tons of doors when I moved back and the extra savings were extremely valuable too.

I lived fairly frugally in Cupertino paying a small amount of rent compared to the region or SF rents. When your job is designed to pay a $6500/month rent in SF and your rent is $2200 that’s $51,600 in savings on top of what the person in SF was supposed to save. My stock options performed about averagely but I still banked roughly $300k CDN ($230,800 USD) from that 2.5 years.

On the other hand if you can find a job that doesn’t adjust salaries regionally but still pays top of market you can live in rural Washington for 2 years and make bank paying an effective income tax rate close to 25% because of no state tax. You also get to enjoy a relatively low cost of living with a salary designed to pay for a very high one. So that can be a great way to make money for a few years. At Staff Engineer levels it’s possible to bank an entire house in 3-4 years of saving aggressively. I’d definitely be willing to put up with a fair amount of crap for a few years to not have to worry about a mortgage for almost the rest of my working life.

Maybe in Europe where rents are controlled it's a different story. But in US HCOL cities, a high salary is an absolute MUST, and unfortunately health and other considerations go second. That is assuming long commutes or roommates are off the list, which they are for many of us.

It's also easy to overestimate how much happiness you'll get from buying expensive things. Quite a lot of people who buy boats or mountain/lake/beach houses (typical objects of wealthy lifestyle fantasy) go on to sell them later with gratitude that they're gone.

I would say that "good" compensation is an important component of a long-term job, but it does not necessarily have to be "amazingly great" to have a very comfortable, fun life. This is on top of the potential benefits of having good work-life balance when you're young.

My most stressful job was my first, and it required a lot of late nights of crunch time and writing proposals which I hated. Now at a big tech company, I am making 3-5x more than before, more opportunities to lead projects, more respect from management, and more interesting and impactful work.

There are not enough developers, and especially senior developers with experience in other FAANG (the skillset is different from your regular service IT company).

It's painfully true very often.

I worked on a team where I was one of the most proactive people on the team and was one of the top performers (well, at least IMO).

I joined the company with an already relatively low salary because in the middle of covid shutdowns, the the startup I worked for didn't look stable enough, so I joined the bigger company even if their offer was the same as my previous salary.

After almost two years later, I asked what can I do and what's the process for salary increase, they told me that "sure, we can raise your salary"...

BUT:

* the company only raises salaries once a year, and that comes next year April, so I'll have to wait 7 months

* usual increase is 5%, if I'm very lucky, I might get 10%

* this increase is not given every year, so if I get it this time, I'll have to wait two more years for my next 5-10% raise

* I'll have to go through a long evaluation process with HR, which means lots of extra meetings spent begging and explaining that I'm actually pretty good

They think this is all acceptable while I had multiple offers with very little negotiation, all offering me 20%+ increase.

In the end, I got a 50% increase and on top of that a significant amount of stock options from a company that really has a potential to grow and go public.

Yeah, I can't be a lifer with those conditions.

Unless your current house is on fire, ALWAYS negotiate super high.

NEVER give out current salary info, wait for the end of the interviews.

When you pass all of them, ask for a double digit raise over your current salary. Early you are in your career, the first digit should be at worst 2 and ideally 4-5.

Once you pass all the interviews, your market value for the new company skyrockets. You're no longer a potential candidate, just a CV, you're actually someone who made it through the interviews.

Most companies will not turn you down, just make you the highest offer they can, and then you decide if it's good enough.

* * *

I've been exactly in your position in 2008, but I was stuck for about 18 months at the start. I missed the first raise round because I was too new, then they froze salary raises. And then I had to constantly pressure them to get what I should have gotten 3 years earlier (by the time my salary reached a level somewhat equivalent to what I had realized my market value was).

I twice stayed in a specific company for more than ten years (11 and 13 respectively). In both cases I left (retired in the second example) because the company concerned had changed around me. I'd also gone native with the customers, and was seen internally as a domain expert. I enjoyed this, but it meant that I began to be firewalled away from internal strategic decision making to avoid conflicts of interest. This in turn reduced my visibility to senior decision makers, and thus promotability.

Sales and customers loved me, but I ran afoul of a manager and quit rather than be fired. Now trying to update my skills.

Good luck!

Exactly. I think I could be a lifer in the right circumstances, but I'm not and probably never will be. I think I could have been a lifer at my second job; it was in many ways a great place, but eventually I realised I didn't like the content of my work much, I was constantly doing the exact same thing for a new customer, and all the interesting stuff was being done by new hires. It was time to leave.

48 now, and I'm currently at a project where I think I might stick around for a while, but it's undoubtedly going to end some day, and then I'll find something else again.

Do you feel confident about that? I'm a couple years younger than yourself and before starting this gig about a year ago I was considering doing something else (anything ... Apple Store, "IT guy" for a small 10 person company) but always got turned away for "too qualified". No desire at all to get in to management / team lead stuff.

Thankfully this job is pretty cool but I'm quite worried about what to do after, when that time comes.

Also, unfortunately, that "this, too, shall pass". At one point in my life I was in a situation where I would consider staying, if not for life, at least a very long time. Then for external reasons, much of management was replaced and while at first it seemed fine, eventually I ended up going somewhere else.

(I might have to read Goethes Faust again)

Some of the others seem to have had a relative ruthlessness baked into their founding DNA, and I wouldn't bet on them working out long-term. (Because leadership shapes lasting culture; and someone who's nice to you, but nasty to others, will eventually be nasty to you.) Also, for any duration at those places, I'd also need to vet whomever I'd be reporting to, for whether they'd have my back if/when daggers started flying around internally.

Another one seemed to have good founding DNA, but I know less about that one.

I couldn't imagine staying at the company I'm at forever, but equally, I'm not particularly drawn to any other company right now.

I cannot imagine wanting to stay at any company forever, but Intel was a pleasant place to be. If they hadn't bombed the "fulfilling work" and "room for growth" parts of the equation I might still be there.

I joined my first FAANG as a staff engineer working remotely about a year ago and will stay as long as they will have me! Even with the location adjustment and market downturn I am making a great income for the Midwest and get to lead some interesting projects in embedded engineering.

I am also too old and tired to interview again!

I think of total compensation (TC) as salary, plus stock, plus bonuses. (The eventual actual value of the stock and bonuses can vary, but there's typical/expected numbers. And then usually the employer also contributes to health insurance and 401k.)

Some examples of TC are on the excellent `levels.fyi` site:

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook,Amazon,Google&track...

I can't stress how much #6 impacts what makes someone a 'lifer'. By the time you are in 35+ and you've been in tech your entire career, you lean a few important life lessons that you witness the less experienced (both career and life) do all the time.

The bar of compensation is almost always goes up as you progress early in your career. You get used to your standard of living. Next thing you know, you want more money. Getting a promotion or new job that bumps your income, that standard of living naturally goes up. It's hard NOT to go on fancier vacations, upgrade your Honda to a Porsche, hire landscaper/housekeeper/dog walker, buy a bigger house, etc. Eventually, you run into a situation that throws a wrench in disposable income and you have to lower that bar. Then you realize money isn't the most important thing in your career. You learn that the difference between a total comp of $150k to $250k isn't as life changing compared to going from $75k to $150k, so what is the purpose of fighting for more?

When you are 35+, job stability is super important. You might have a family, a hefty savings/retirement account, etc. Whats most important is that work/life balance and not that RSU grant next quarter. Once you find a company that makes you comfortable, and you reach a level of seniority that isn't overwhelming/stressful, stay.

From what I hear of the corporate world, companies are always waiting to do this to everyone. The moment they're confident you're a lifer, you'll never see another market-matching raise or bonus. Maybe never see a raise again.

Any older workers have thoughts on how to manage this? I suspect there may be nothing for it but being prepared to leave if I feel my comp is falling too far behind.

(Or maybe I should just give in, call the $$$ good enough, semi-retire and chill... there's more to life, I hear...)

I was like most people in IT when I started here, I had done a lot of job hopping, made good money and was a temporary millionaire at some bullshit startup. What I didn't expect was to stick around. When I started half the team had been at the company for over 20 years and I thought that they had to be nuts -a few people never worked for any other company 45+ years of service. Then one day I realized I had been here for a decade and then 20 years and now I have 9 years left before I'm sitting on a beach drinking Imperial and being bitten by mosquitos so I figure if I can do it here I might as well.

Very well put. With work, it's often better the devil you know

I work at a FAANG and I will never afford a home. Who is this list for? My senior engineer coworkers live in condos unless they move 2 hours away or have a very high earning spouse

Is the situation any better in other big IT-cities in the States (Seattle, NYC) or in Europe (London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Munich)? Some of these are slightly better than SF and some are even worse IMO.

Yes, housing in the core downtowns is pricey, but get outside the city and there are decent options. This is true of a lot of places. The Bay Area makes it unusually hard to escape high pricing.

This is still wild to me.

I’m well into my career (coming close to 25 years):

— I do well when looking for work in that I interview well and get most gigs I go for.

- I trade stability for higher rates working shorter gigs without any of the usual safety net / benefits.

- Comp is top end of the range offered in a relatively well off part of the world.

And yet with all that said, $200k is still an utter pipe dream.

I’m not saying I’m necessarily jealous (I’m sure there’s the downsides I don’t see) but man-oh-man that’s a lot of money.

I’m almost reluctant to ask but what is FAANG comp typically?

The going contract dev rate is 150/hr (Java/Python).

Citation needed.

There are also roles where you just get paid way more than other roles without a need for particularly difficult expertise. People who manage very 'important' stuff for example.

Would be really curious to hear what’s out there.

Could I reach out to you separately so as not to run out of thread depth on here?

(The big question I have on this is if you have a link discussing implications for tax etc. on taking a role from the USA while based in the UK - which is an easier option for me at this time).

The amount of stock is locked in based on how many shares the dollar amount you’re offered would buy when you start, so if the share price goes up over time then that’s going to be worth more when it vests (which I guess mostly happened in the last decade), but if it drops from when you started it’s worth less (as happened in the last year, so if you started this time last year and the company stock is down 50%, that compensation is worth a lot less now).

I definitely think it’s good to be aware of what compensation at these places looks like, I wasn’t really aware of how significant the stock thing is until recently (but I had a fun career up to now so not to worry!). I guess one of the downsides is that these are often huge companies there’s a reasonable chance you’ll end up maintaining some boring internal system or whatever, so it depends what motivates you.

It's disappointing, but it's the reality for a lot of people I'm sure.

The alternative to that is contracting - London is a great place to look for that.

FWIW a random survey on the internet lists Austin TX, Miami FL, and San Diego CA as the 'most stressful commutes'

If you are making Faang money you can choose a shorter commute. 30 miles is 1-2 hours in silicon valley. My limit is 10 miles/40 mins

I was in a similar situation a few years ago, working at FAANG and living in SCV. Wanted a house more than anything.

Eventually, got relocated to a lower COL area and finally accomplished my dream of owning a home.

Inspector didn’t catch a few things, also bought at the peak of housing mania and now we are both underwater and have sunk a large chunk of our savings into making the house safe and livable for our kids.

If we would have stayed in SCV and rented we’d be in a better financial position. However, overall we are happy with our choices given we don’t have to stress about things like keeping a 3yo quiet for the neighbors who live below us.

Not saying a house won’t make you happy, just saying houses are not a complete measure of financial success.

I generally see it abbreviated as SV.

You could afford a home in most other US cities even with a pay cut from the typical FAANG salary.

And even in those areas, you can find two-unit condos in that range.

The solution is easy, don’t live in an expensive city. Or inherit property from relatives who lived there 50 years ago. Or have a rich spouse.

These two sentances seem contradictory. If you have a large savings / retirement, don't you have a LARGER parachute / less stress looking for a job? I mean unless yeah you've gone so far on the hedonistic treadmill that you can barely afford your month to month bills.

I don't know, I've never been out of a job for more than like 2 months of actively looking, I think software developers are way to paranoid about job hunting.

Are you in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s?

I agree. I also think there's less naivete when you have heard for the fifth time how revolutionary this new tech or business will be.

I don't know about you, but the first few times I heard that, I believed the speaker.

But eventually I figured out that while there are exciting new revolutions (the first time I saw a lyft it was magical), there are far more interesting or boring ideas that don't require extraordinary effort, just regular, sustained focus.

My wife doesn't have a good job, and I don't have rich parents, have to travel a couple of times per year to see them, pay for them to see me, etc.

My work life balance is much better now working at $BigTech than it was being the de facto dev lead at a company that was on an acquisition spree where I was responsible for leading integration efforts or at a 60 person startup where I was responsible for making them “cloud native” and introducing AWS to the company as they were pivoting to selling access to micro services to large health care companies especially right after Covid hit.

WLB being worse as pay increases is more of a myth than anything else. I haven’t gotten paid more Obed the years because I was expected to work harder.

I got paid more because of the value I bought to the company.

I felt a lot more “stable” after 35 no matter where I worked because I knew I had the skillset and the network to throw my resume up in the air and get another job quickly when things went sideways and I did change jobs six times over those years.

Before 35, I had been at a job for nine years and let my skills atrophy.

I also had a decent “oh shit”/“go to hell fund”

> Then you realize money isn't the most important thing in your career. You learn that the difference between a total comp of $150k to $250k

This is definitely not true. I bumped around as your standard corporate dev until I was 46.

I stayed at my second job for a decade until 2008 and became your stereotypical expert beginner. I job hopped 5 times by 2020 and I was making $150K and seeing offers locally for about $165k - $170K based on my experience with leading projects, “cloud”, and just regular old C# development.

But I liked my job and my wife and I had “enough” with her working part time making $25K in the school system.

Then I fell into a remote job at $BigTech in the cloud consulting department making in the $200s in mid 2020. The difference is night and day. There are a lot more ands than an ors.

I can now “retire my wife” at 46, rent my house to my son and a couple of his friends who we have known for years at below market cost to help them get started while we travel the country staying in mid range extended stay hotels, flying everywhere, afford a winter home/investment property (more of a lifestyle choice than an investment), max out my 401K (including catch up contributions in a year and a half when I turn 50), max out my “after tax 401k at 10% of my base salary, and still have a decent amount of fun money.

Even if I were living a normal life, it would have meant the difference between having to choose whether we wanted to refinance to a 15 year mortgage (we did in 2021), go on multiple vacations, cash flow our son’s (my step son since he was 10) college education, or maximize retirement savings. We could have done all of those things and not choose.

Above all, the thing that makes me stay is having creative control and freedom over how I do my job. I've done enough things to know how rare that is, and how frustrating it is not to have it, and what a blessing it is to have the trust of the people I work for and with. It's so important to me that I feel it as a different baseline state in my body.

But hey, thanks for all the great work here!

The answer to that is probably just "attachment disorder'. There's nothing wrong with stable relationships, and the way you describe your preferences sounds completely healthy to me. It definitely does happen in practice, even if it's not the default, so don't give up!

(I post not-a-mod comments semi-regularly, but they drown in the ocean of "if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd sure appreciate it ̶g̶r̶r̶r̶r̶r̶r̶r̶r̶r̶r̶r̶r̶̶".)

Don't worry about labels. If you like something, do it.

If you're doing it too much or if it's harming anyone, review it.

I do understand your feeling though, even the funnest situation can at some point stop letting you grow as a person, which is why a job you can also grow in is crucial. That and the creative control / independence you mentioned are both very important IMO.

Side note: many people seem to misunderstand why tech companies tend to seek growth. One of the reasons, even in non-startup companies, is that companies that grow mean growth opportunities for employees, which means better employees and keeping your good employees. Companies that don't grow tend to eventually lose their best employees, because there's literally no room for growth in their job.

Great that you are happy where you are but my advice is to keep your skills fresh and push yourself to learn and experiment with things in your personal time - if you do not the opportunity to do so at work.

I just finished interviewing people for an SRE position and it was just staggering the number of people who could be described as having been in the room when someone else did something but could not talk about any aspect of what was done in detail. Several people I interviewed had gotten into Java coding in the 90s but had done nothing to grow their skillset since. One person spent three years manually making S3 buckets in the AWS GUI - no effort to learn the cli, cloudformation, or terraform - just came in every day and waited for Jira tickets telling him to make buckets. You don’t want to be any of those people when the time comes.

This is depressingly common. I've worked with a few developers like this in the past. It's like that phrase "repeating their first year over and over for the last ten years" meaning they haven't expanded their skills ands knowledge since then. They often don't even start being curious about anything, it's full blinker mode. Reminds me a lot of this recent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33787857

Some of the ones I've worked with have managed to be promoted to senior or even lead type positions not from knowledge or abilities, but just by repeating their first year over and over at a small business that doesn't have any other developers to help them level up. Management is usually non-technical at these small organisations so they don't even see the problem, even if a solution took 100x times longer than it would have in any other situation. Those developers wouldn't be considered even mid-level at literally any other job. Scary some of the code and systems they've come up with in my experience.

Being in company where is a lot of long term employees and me being halfway there. One property it has is that if miserable person joins, there are often ways to change the team or otherwise work around that person. You can say "no" to positions and tasks too fairly often.

It is not always possible for everybody, of course. But the stable people are the ones whose "I dont want to work under that manager anymore" was respected and not punished. Basically, you have a sense of controlling what happens to you at least partially.

The changing direction is then also less of problem in general.

You can observe this as a manager, when you can see the salaries of people and watch the pay inequity get worse and worse to punish people who have been there a while.

I don't know what mechanism causes this, but it's likely related to leverage: when you don't work there, you have leverage to ask for more. Now that you're there, especially if you are loyal, they have the leverage unless another offer comes along.

This is one reason that co-workers should absolutely talk about their salaries. Especially when management tells them not to. This is one of those problems that has a known solution, which is collective bargaining. It's just that every programmer thinks they're a special 10x snowflake and that they're going to lose out on their good-boy treats if they don't compete with their co-workers.

I absolutely agree with unions. When an employee quits a company of 100, the company loses 1% of their productivity. But when an employee is fired, they lose 100% of their income.

Barring unions, employees should constantly be looking for a workplace, and change them regularly. There is no other way to capture their work's productivity.

The proportion of money captured by workers has been going down for decades, at least in the US.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

I’d rather advocate for better work laws on federal level. Employees are treated like cheap labor, especially in the right to work states, where unions don’t have a grip anyway. There should not be need for unions to begin with.

There’s a reason Tom Brady is part of the NFL players association.

There’s a reason Tom Cruise is in the Screen Actors Guild.

These superstars join unions but engineers think they have’s negotiation power because they practiced leetcode.

Doctors have the American medical association. Lawyers have the ABA. Meanwhile the ACM releases some academic guidance.

Your comment says “we don’t need collective bargaining or organized labor” then says “we need society wide change that organized labor is most effective at implementing “.

Most programmers are convinced collective bargaining is a bad thing because of repeated propaganda from corporate America that highlights the worst parts of collective bargaining while ignoring that it’s virtually the only tool for advancing any sort of labor rights in any industry.

In a free money bull market perhaps it didn’t matter. But watching how Elon can turn Twitter into squid games and YCombinator can coach all their companies to discard you the second investors demand it should be a wakeup call. They don’t care if you are “default alive” in a recession. A union would.

In our line of work, sometimes, productivity is not an OR function. It's an AND function.

If I quit my team of 8 today my project wouldn't ship on time with 1/8 of the features missing. It will not ship. The money to locate and train a new resource would probably cost them five figures and impact revenue for months. The cascading effects would run even more than this.

Nobody does this math until it's too late.

Err.... that doesn't seem to check out on first glance. What makes you say that?

It's the fundamental asymmetry in power that underlies a lot of labor law and unionization.

I've been... OK to let my salary rot a little. I think it's an implicit part of the lifer "bargain."

I've found, though, that you can sometimes get a correction by talking to management about market rates and where your salary stands (without making any implied threats or anything, just raising the concern).

The HN mindset is that, if you want more money, you need to switch jobs. But you can't get what you don't ask for, and if you're a strong contributor, you might be surprised at how responsive your management can be. A long term employee brings their own form of value that management may well recognize.

A disclaimer here is that I work in higher ed, where programmer salaries will never be competitive with for-profit tech companies. This is kind of a given. But I have observed that I can at least keep my salary commensurate with jobs at other institutions.

Smooth operations do too, if your group is running like a top and doesn’t need a lot of attention, then it typically doesn’t get the attention. Good managers will point that out and try to reward that but it fades.

IBM, Microsoft, Google, etc.. have all come up with different strategies to rank people, they tend to be disliked by many and often create incentives to be less than the best teammates. It’s hard. It’s very hard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F

There's also an aspect of the "Dead Sea Effect". The people who stay and settle for the below market salary also tend to be the less talented and/or motivated. I've seen this and done this. In low performance teams and organizations it's easy to "rest and vest" and keep a good work life balance.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

Any developer should have a plan for this and it has to involve keeping one's skills reasonably current. In my experience this has been extremely difficult to do while sticking with a single company for an extended amount of time. Though certainly it can be possible, I don't think it's the norm.

Compensation is a Huge lever on earnings. There would certainly be a consequence on the stock price if margins diminished due to overly extravagant raises, which they most certainly would in a most if not all cases.

If they focus on those, it wouldn't be "overly extravagant raises", just... "staying up to date".

IME, people are a lot more sensitive to lowered stock prices than meager annual increases. The latter doesn’t feel emotionally like a loss.

We are a very loss averse species.

salary increase on average by 30,000$ to 10,000 employees = 300 million

vs

hiring new employees to backfill that left with higher salary 30,000$ * 1000 = 30 million + cost of replacement 70000$*1000 = 70 million. total 100 million.

200 million difference is not a small change, that can be given as a bonus to executives.

But I think the math ended up being superfluous. It's about the rich getting richer. Which makes sense to me, unfortunately.

Just look at baseball teams. Could the Cleveland Guardians have paid Francisco Lindor what his market rate was? Maybe, but it would have blown up the budget for the rest of the team. So he was traded to New York for some cheaper, younger (and less skilled at present) players which fit the team's plan. Win-win in this case, obviously there are many bad examples too!

If you’re the manager… do you let this happen intentionally? Why not fight it?

I constantly hear how people want to retain their employees since it’s cheaper than new hires. Why not take actions to reward the loyalty?

1. Usually, policies around max % pay raises are set the organization level. In the name of equity, the right battle to fight is having a higher cap for everyone which a middle manager is ill-equipped to do well.

2. Yearly budgets are set early partly based in the above formula, you'll need to be in a room with the C-suite to make the case that costs should be higher than they are next year to right-size everyone.

3. Sometimes, you requests for outsized adjustments get rejected. "Hey we're paying Senior XYZ less than New Hire XYZ, can we increase Senior XYZ's comp by 20% to match the market rate?". Some answers: A. "No, it's against policy and needs an excalation. Sr XYZ isn't critical enough to the business to change the rules. B. "Sure, but you still have $ABC budget for the year. That raise will mean reduced budget for person G's promotion or we give up headcount next year and Project U is at risk, etc etc".

I'm sure others here can add even more examples.

I've come to the conclusion that any policy that is not "We will automatically raise you to top of market"* like Netflix will have this problem.

For the C-Suite, that means costs are a bit harder to predict and it also means that in some world, you should be ready to accept your salary going _down_ if the market moves downwards and you're well above the pay to hire a new person.

Heck, I don't get the incentive to really work all that hard for your employer because of it. You are leaving anyway.

It's not like it is hard for employees to check their salaries against the market these days. Aside from the websites and local communities that exist for this purpose, you can apply and interview at other jobs to see where the offers come in.

How do I know this? Because when I interviewed and moved position I got the promotion easily off of the back of explaining what I was doing day to day.

I guess the summary was I haven't worked at places that actually promote at pace.

I'd also never started with a high salary for example my first programming job was in a big famous city at £15k ($18k) per year salary. Couple that with very low yearly pay increases that meant the only way to get a reasonable pay increase was to move jobs often.

I've now got into this as a habit to move jobs more often.

That's not to say I haven't been at a single job for a good amount of time, I've managed to stay at 2 jobs almost 5 years each. I also don't job hop every year my average tenure is just under 3 years.

Although I do admit I now enjoy moving:

“A person needs new experiences. It jars something deep inside, allowing them to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

Plus, people who move more are more adaptive to new environments because (1) experience from different org and (2) forced to adapt to new org. The lifers in my experience are mostly comfortable, (somewhat) coasting, trying to navigate the politics. I have no issue with lifers. Most are focused on the good life outside work (family, friends, etc.) I respect that. Each time I change jobs, I try to find one lifer/long-termer, so I can get the "house view" when I need it. Then I can better judge if "that hill is worth dying over". :)

I appreciate that it's a task that actually has real customers and revenues, in a firm that's about 20 years old and showing profitability and growth. It doesn't look like there's signs of "oh, the acquisition we were building towards vanished and we ran out of runway, kthxbai, grab a few logo T-shirts on the way out." In particular, I like the spot I'm currently at because it's sort of the firm's core competence, so I'm in the centre of real value generation.

It also keeps me well away from front end, which I should not be allowed near due to a personal design sense that is, at best, Soviet.

I could probably make more money elsewhere, but I hate interviewing and tooting my own horn. I only grudgingly left my last position (10 years on) when it became abundantly obvious the firm was in terminal death throes. They were clearly in a "how much do you need electricity" phase of operations. I brought in a pizza for lunch for my team, and there was a distinct "I haven't eaten in three days" vibe coming from some of them. When I left, they had shorted me at least 9000 USD in unpaid salary.

I've worked at a place that literally got to that state: the offices power was cut off by the electricity company.

I pretty much stayed until near the bitter end, when I started trying to lay out the facts of life to the founder - there was no recovering from this, and he was at the point where he had dumped all his personal savings into the company to try keep it alive.

He seemed to get wrapped in this relationship with an advertiser where he wanted to sell a $49 product, but was expected to pay $80 cost-per-conversion to get customers to it. He seemed to hope that designing the site correctly would push enough upsells and multi-unit sales to make the math work out.

I sort of wonder what spell that advertiser had over him in that regard; I'm pretty sure you could literally hire people to go around and sell his product door-to-door for less.

I prioritize personal investment and social engagement over raw salary income. I could find a better paying job tomorrow, within my current company. I like being up to my elbows in the business problem, and the best way to get a seat at the table is to have been around long enough to earn it.

My spouse and I both work at the same company, which greatly increases the sticky-ness of it for me. I can book family meetings with them from within my work calendar. That's worth a lot.

I've spend 15 years ingratiating myself across multiple teams, and multiple larger organizational slices. I have a lot of contacts to fall back on. If I needed a new job tomorrow, I could find one within the company, without having to go outside.

A lot of your items are "of the moment" and could change tomorrow. I wouldn't bank on them remaining stable.

You're talking about kids? I would think kids require less work over time. I would think a 30-year-old employee with a 1-year-old kid would have more home obligations than a 55-year-old employee with a 26-year-old kid.

If you can (and will) do the job, you should be welcomed, respected, and rewarded without regard to age, race, gender, degree, veteran status, parenthood, height, weight, or any of 100 other irrelevant characteristics.

> If you can (and will) do the job, you should be welcomed, respected, and rewarded without regard to age, race, gender, degree, veteran status, parenthood, height, weight, or any of 100 other irrelevant characteristics.

I used to think in this way, that everything should be pure merit. Unfortunately reality doesn't work that way, inputs and rewards are hard to quantify, and the pareto principle exists. Eg. Your work powering millions, yet you're only paid a month's salary and have to meet next month's expense. Furthermore, if things are left to pure meritocracy you'd have more and more in-groups and imbalance. So in some sense you'll be doing society a favor by uplifting others that are not part of the in-group of meritocracy purists.

But the wrinkle is @sokoloff is mid/late-50s and @like-oreally is mid/late-30s. Who should earn more pay? Who should be promoted to lead the next major initiative to drive the company forward?

Deciding to pay me the same or more for less value certainly makes things better and more convenient/comfortable for me. It does exactly the opposite for @like-oreally. Should they continue to over-contribute relative to their compensation in hopes that they’ll one day be in a position to receive more for contributing less? Does that provide the right incentives?

Does promoting me to lead that major new initiative put the company in the best position to succeed in the market and, via that success, continue to provide income for all employees?

> Deciding to pay me the same or more for less value certainly makes things better and more convenient/comfortable for me.

Of course it's going to feel better just looking at the numbers. But then we get back to the same old problem - how do you define value and contributions and say A goes over B?

Sure, I'll admit that it doesn't create the best incentives for people who want to optimize their paycheck and standing, ie. ambitious people. However, this is fine in some circumstances when you're aiming to create a self-sustaining team.

> Does promoting me to lead that major new initiative put the company in the best position to succeed in the market and, via that success, continue to provide income for all employees?

'Best' is an ill defined, extremist term. For many tasks at hand, there are checkboxes that they have to tick, and for all you know, they might need not to be the best, but just at sufficient level to check those boxes. And that is enough.

Take an example where a dungeon boss needs a certain amount of damage dealt to it within a certain period of time to beat him. There are many class specialties, some doing more damage than others, but these are rare, and all of them meet the requirements. Are you going to spend extra time trying to grab that rare class specialty or take one of the abundant ones? Of course not.

BTW did you know the above are the number 2, 3 & 4 largest software companies in the world respectively[0]? Also I suspect "doing nothing" is a bit of an exaggeration and/or OP isn't 100% privy to what these people actually do. It's probably a relaxed pace but not literally "nothing" & their experience and knowledge still make that valuable for the company.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_c...

Politics, knowing where bodies are buried and entrenched bureaucracy can be just as much "tenure" but for staff.

It can be pretty bad, and often is.

If you want to get rid of them or take advantage of their expertise, raise the bar. Require more work in some way so that the jobs they do 6 months from now isn’t something that could be done by a new grad.

If they follow you, great. Everyone wins. If they do not, here’s options to exit, take a pick, have a good life.

Unless, all you read all day is the same crap that everyone else reads all day, then yes, you would be led to beleive that 'the end is nigh' for software engineers.

Great site tracking all the layoffs: https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

Edit: to clarify; I'm mostly advocating people look at upgrading via specialty into areas where there's clear demand, not trying to undermine marcinzm's point.

Are you paying market rate? What roles were you hiring for? How many top quality candidates applied for your position?

I run a very small startup, and I too was hiring, albeit prior to this market correction. Even then, there was a plethora of candidates, and while most did not meet the hiring bar, one did.

I personally went from 5-10 recruiter pings per week (our team just closed $___m and we need a founding iOS engineer!) to 1-2. The sky isn't falling, you're right, but I can definitely still see how this round of layoffs would be affecting a current job seeker.

There is still hiring happening between US Thanksgiving and the New Year but so many people are off (and some companies have time-off mandates!) that all internal processes slow to a crawl.

> As it turns out. Humans love meeting other humans in real live way more than meeting people online.

That's one way of putting it.

But the economic implications is way more severe. This reasoning about constant economic growth has had the world fooled for way too long.

Salary isn't great in global terms, but puts us within the top 20% national household incomes. Enough no not really care about money.

We work 35 hours per week, pretty flexible schedule, about half from home and have more vacation days than we know what to do with.

The work is a bit monotonous and the office politics terrible, to the point of giving us depressing "golden cage" feelings sometimes, but when we take a peek outside, it doesn't look better than what we have. So we'll probably stay for the next 20 years.

> The work is a bit monotonous and the office politics terrible

> but when we take a peek outside, it doesn't look better than what we have. So we'll probably stay for the next 20 years.

Hello fellow university employee! :)

is this a university?

I was thinking of the Order of Malta but they are a bit older.

IYKYK...

No one's getting payslips with "Knights Templar" on them.

I'm a lifer at Netflix (coming up on 8 years), and I have a lot of the same lack of negatives (remote, good work/life balance, early 50s, etc). But more than any of those, I stay because Netflix gives me an opportunity to work on things I'm passionate about (network performance and CPU efficiency) and allows me to work on them in the open source OS that I love (FreeBSD), and allows me to contribute that work to the community. I like and respect my colleagues, and I feel like I'm liked and respected as well. Its the best job I've ever had, by far and I feel incredibly lucky. So I just can't imagine leaving until / unless something changes.

I'm not wearing blinders, so I do talk to recruiters regularly. But either the jobs just don't interest me, or they can't match the Netflix top of market, or they don't allow remote, etc.

Then I moved into a local telco and spent a few more years there until it was acquired by a buy-and-hack operation that is still trying to sell the pieces, and I moved to my current employer.

It has been seven years now, and every couple of years something major happens and I end up moving internally, sometimes on my own but lately because I'm asked to follow someone into a new org to rebuild it.

I'm in my 50s now, am fully remote, match most of your list (except I have a 4-6 hour offset from most of my team), and yet I don't really feel like a lifer because I want to do stuff that I find _gratifying_, and most of the tech industry is just running around after shiny things without considering the outcomes.

So every now and then I sit down and talk to people to assess what I should be doing next.

Right now, _everyone_ is telling me to stick it out given the current situation, but the engineer in me is itching to do different things - stuff that I might not be able to do in the current context, no matter how "comfortable" it is.

But the main point I would like to make is that you should be aware the world moves without you, and the situation may change drastically in only a few weeks.

What are you talking about? Unemployment is at historic lows, the job market hasn't been this good in a long time. Sure, some ad-revenue based companies are laying off some workers, but the market is great.

Untrue; the headline unemployment figure is those in the labor force, not employed, and actively seeking work (they may be recieiving benefits, have exhausted benefits, or have not qualified for benefits because of the nature of their prior employment or their departure from it, or because they were never previously employed.)

The headline unemployment figure (and the alternative measures) come by way of the monthly Current Population Survey [0], not data fron unemployment benefit programs. The idea that the unemployment rate is, either definitionally or methodologically, restricted to only include benefit recipients is simply false. It's a popular lie by political propagandists who know the truth and want to push the myth of systematic distortion, and I guess your argument is a natural way for someone who has internalized that propaganda, doesn’t know the methodology, but has seen thr definition to try to rationalize what they have internalized, but its just not true.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/

Sometimes I think about getting a new job for a pay bump, but I'm not sure I could compete at a "real" tech company anyway, I'm just a regular/average dev and I almost left the field entirely after I burned out from my previous job.

So, that said, I might end up a lifer (already in my 40s). I love my job but I know the circumstances can change at any point if I get a new boss or the work climate changes.

I don't think I'd want to stay until retirement at a regular ol' company or corporation where I'm making someone else rich.

Just my 2c.

I have been working here for the past 14 years, and hope to be lifer.

Practically, there are many reasons that this may stop - I don't get paid and may need more working hours elsewhere, they may suggest I retire (am already a grandfather), etc.

I also have been programming part time for longer than that and hope that continues as well.

I recommend that anyone who could, to take on a do-good project and consider it your main occupation [even if it only gets an hour a day], and then go lifer on that.

The merger went surprisingly well and they brought in some good processes (and some bad), but mostly we were left alone to do our thing.

At a point I saw that they didn't have a big enough support organisation personnel-wise. I had to organise team events, manage sick leaves, do 1:1's with my team, be an architect, a salesman and a software developer in one.

In short, eventually the compensation didn't match the stress of the job.

I found a job through a friend in a multi-national mobile games company and left on good terms.

The gaming company spent what equaled to a "large project" in my old company just for audience testing unreleased games. Marketing budgets amounted to the yearly turnover of my old company. My pay doubled from what I used to have in a few years and my first bonus was bigger than all the bonuses I received in the past 10 years in my previous job put together. And I got actual stock options for the first time.

Money doesn't make you happy, but hoo boy it's nice to get it - and it makes the tiny inconveniences easier to take (like having early morning/late evening calls to the other side of the planet).

Like the OP I'm embarking on my 40s. I'm into my sixth year at a FAANG. Staying at the same company probably made me miss out on some of the career and salary growth of the last several years, but I work in a specialized technical niche that I really enjoy and have a good manager and team.

Part of my motivation for staying is the economy, but the other part is just being a senior team member with a significant amount of subject matter expertise, trust and autonomy. Being able to set boundaries around work/life balance and role scope is super valuable to me.

My spouse and I joke that FAANG life is as hard as we want to work, so we might just stick it out until we are ready to semi-retire and then work on something more low key.

It's not just the skills you learn with their platforms and products, it's the super secret tribal knowledge on how to get stuff done. It's easy to see how people make the decision that "this here is enough, let's ride it out".

In those 14 years, I've moved continents, changed citizenship, changed dramatically as a person (I hope for the good). So far I've managed to keep the freshness at work (modulo the difficult times). Red Hat's engineering culture fits me like a glove.

The ability to give direction to my own work and the culture are the big factors that keep me in. I'm sure I'm losing out on some better compensation elsewhere, but there are other variables that matter to me. Also, I've been a remotee for the last 8 years.

So far I've been responding to recruiters with "Thank you for reaching out. I'm gainfully employed, I wish you best of luck in your search." As a wonderful colleague of mine once said, "but my umbilical cord isn't tied to Red Hat, though". :-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33797196

It's experiences like this that make me question the wisdom of staying in a place for a decade. It's hard to see things you enjoyed wither away and die.

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? You could do everything right, and the environment changes, or financial issues hit, or you get bad managers.

I worked at a company for 22 years. In the early 2010's I transitioned to full-time WFH and did that for 7 years. Then new management came in, they rebuilt the office as open-plan, a bunch of Agile cultists took over, and they summarily cancelled all WFH. Then the organization ground to a halt, crushed into immobility by Agile. Then they laid off my entire division, new hires to senior managers, about 300 people.

So, in the space of just a few years, it went from a fantastic place to work, to a miserable place to work, to not wanting me around. Absurdly, they paid (and are still paying) a huge amount of money to go away because 22 years got a great severance package, and I'd been there long enough that they're on the hook for "retiree" benefits.

I’ve been in too many situations where my role was changed overnight because of the above.

Currently at the most sought-after (by many) FAANG but I’m always fully prepared to leave/be laid off and don’t let my mind think it could be long term.

What is long term is instead a dense network of professional relationships with ex-bosses and coworkers to whom I would fully entrust my life and certainly my career, and I typically jump ship by moving closer to them every few years. Corporations are just a soulless random entity.