Wrong question, wrong perspective. Even the very best jobs where everything seems to be perfect still have significant setbacks because of the nature of a job:
- Employees suffer from one single dependency which can make their live miserable—their manager; just compare: Entrepreneurs should be independent and build as many options as possible (e.g. not just one client but many)
- A job locks you in, means all side activities are forbidden or made complicated (because of IP, time, etc.) which again harms you because you are not able to build options outside the company
- The urge to stay employable + get high compensations, means: seamless job transitions with no gaps, min 2 years at one job, steady growth re titles, headcount, responsibilities—all to show that you are a good hire and it doesn't matter if your current employer is a pile of s* and you just have 7 months and need stay some more months
Getting jobs and being an employee has opportunities, it's easy for many in our industry to get 200K+ salaries but the price is high: reducing your options until you hit a depression.
"Getting jobs and being an employee has opportunities, it's easy for many in our industry to get 200K+ salaries"
I wish we would stop repeating this, like it is some kind of universal truth.
It might be easy for tech workers living in specific parts of the US, it is simply not true for the vast majority of their collegues in other parts of the world.
Translate the "200K+ salary" to "a salary that allows you to live an upper middle class lifestyle in many parts of the country".
I've participated in a few threads where software developers who were living in a poorer country in the EU weren't willing to move to a country with more opportunities in the EU because they wanted to be close to their extended families. Some basically admitted that they could move.
I would slightly amend that to say that it's easy for tech workers willing to live in specific parts of the US. Nobody is tying you down to where you live currently except yourself, and probably more commonly, your own obligations and preferences regarding family/friends/lifestyle
Again, this only applies to US workers. If you’re from another country it’s not straightforward to move to the US and even if you do you’re most likely tied to a employer who isn’t going to pay 200k
> seamless job transitions with no gaps, min 2 years at one job, steady growth re titles, headcount, responsibilities
> Getting jobs and being an employee has opportunities, it's easy for many in our industry to get 200K+ salaries but the price is high: reducing your options until you hit a depression.
This is not how it works in most of the EU, in particular DE/IT/AT/CH. There they value loyalty the most and they assume something is wrong with person changing an employer after couple of years. Frequent job hopping? Even worse. At some point one hits salary ceiling (70-80k EUR in some regions, 30-40k EUR in most of the EU) and that's it - changing job means the same salary or even lower with the risk the new place will be full of assholes and going through, humiliating at times for an experienced professional, vetting period as a new employee. Sometimes I wonder perhaps there is some non-competing agreement between companies? I have hard time understanding this deadlock situation.
> Sometimes I wonder perhaps there is some non-competing agreement between companies?
I doubt there are formal or explicit agreements, but informally or implicitly... Yes. One of my last employers bent himself backwards to avoid even contacting anyone who ever worked for certain competitors just to avoid the idea he was going after their staff.
It sounds to me like the first part you describe(strong social pressure against job hopping) leads to drastically reduced worker mobility (swinging the balance of power in favour of the employers), and thence to the second part (relatively low salary ceiling).
I am not sure how well this generalises over the entire EU. My experience in the Netherlands is that job hopping occurs frequently and is a great way to get on a higher salary. However, I do agree that there is a salary cap around 70-80k for software engineers. If you want to earn more than that you either need to go into management or move to a better paying region (US/Ireland/UK).
Oh for sure! But those numbers will be difficult to find in The Netherlands. Switzerland has the highest paying software engineering jobs in Europe AFAIK.
Lack of economical education in the culture?
Capitalism: Buy as cheap as possible, sell as expensive as possible. In the battle of this two intents, 'fair' market price emerges. If business tells you otherwise, if it frowns upon chasing your market value (including job hopping), is it a big fraud?
You are responding to comments in this thread by saying, "This is not how it works", but the comments you are responding to are making multiple points. You never clarify what the "This" you are referring to is. I am having a hard time understanding what you are talking about.
American culture seems to be incredibly bad for living a fulfilling life. Intelligent people on hacker news would do good to look at Sweden for a good balance between capitalism and socialism that actually works very well. Of course lately our politicians have allowed millions of immegrants to come in without having any sort of plan to give them jobs, so I expect Sweden to become pretty crap in the next 10 years. :)
Would intelligent people from HN do good in looking in Sweden for the sun, female partner, or an apartment for rent (in regions where there are professional opportunities)?
Sun? No, although summer here is amazing and bright and beautiful you'll have to live 3 months with the darkness (even here in Stockholm, wake up in the dark, go to work with the sun rising and get out of work in pitch dark when there's no snow).
Female partner? You can be lucky, sex is easy to come but relationships are much harder, there's a reason why "The Swedish Theory of Love" exists, people here are very autonomous, partnership is something very fluid and can crumble for things you'd probably linger more in other societies.
Apartment for rent... Well... I can definitely say this is not easy nor cheap.
Do you think the salary level reflects the high cost of living? 45k SEK pre-tax seems like a common figure, but appartments e.g. in Stockholm are around 12k SEK.
The rental market has crazy prices. You would be a lot better off to get a loan and buy an apartment in the outskirts of Stockholm. You need 15% cash to get a loan for an apartment, so if you buy a small one for 2 million Swedish SEK, you need to have 300 000 Swedish SEK to get the loan. That's about 30 000 dollars. But I'm not sure if foreign people can get loans from Swedish banks, need to check that out.
I make 3700 dollars per month after Swedish taxes, live in a big house 45 mins from work surrounded by beautiful nature, and pay about 400 dollars every month for the loan on the house. For me, that's a perfect life. More money than I need, and a great life / work balance since swedish culture is very relaxed and nobody counts hours at work. People work maybe 7 to 8 hours.
I should put up a web page with more and better info perhaps. You guys don't know what you are missing and there is a huge amount of tech jobs here. Stockholm is very hot in tech.
45k SEK monthly is 54k EUR annually (what a beautiful exchange rate!) - not far from salary ceiling in other EU countries. Hitting it so hard my head spins. Salary fixing alarm!
> all side activities are forbidden or made complicated
I know many places try to make this true, but not all do. If that is an issue that you consider to be a deal-breaker, then by all means, break the deal if they ask you to sign contracts that would stifle you.
> get high compensations
This isn't a priority for everyone. "high enough" is... enough. There certainly is a minimum that everyone needs. But lowering the expectations of your lifestyle means you can lower your compensation needs, and be picky about everything else. If the personal cost of gaining a 200K salary is too much... then it isn't worth the 200K you are receiving. You need to approach your salary as a business transaction -- you are giving up a chunk of your life and freedom in exchange for money. Be sure that exchange is a good match for you.
> Wrong question, wrong perspective. Even the very best jobs where everything seems to be perfect still have significant setbacks because of the nature of a job
This is a strawman. The article isn't about how jobs are perfect and magical, it's about how to deal with the fact that jobs aren't those things, and how to maximise your advantage from the job you do take.
The thing is, jobs exist and are part of reality for practically everybody. Thinking about how to act to get the most out of them is perfectly reasonable and actionable for most people.
Incidentally, the advise in the article substantially mitigates the impact of the "nature of a job" problems as you list them, so even accepting your premise, this is a worthwhile article.
Any non-startup tech company in the Bay Area should be paying at least this much if they're serious about hiring "top talent". That is the going rate these days for engineers / devops / sometimes designers / sometimes PMs.
Any big 4 if you have experience, most unicorns and established "prestigious" tech companies too. Keep in mind you'll most likely have to live in an area with a high CoL
I think one important factor to consider, that is not mentioned explicity in the post, is: Manager.
Your immediate manager can have a lot of impact on job satisfaction. A good manager would follow a bottom-up approach where he asks the team members what they need (time, equipment, etc.) and would try to get those things so that the team can succeed. This creates an overall higher job satisfaction.
An ineffective manager may enforce ridiculous deadlines coming from upper management on his team or hog all the credit of the good work done by the team or not be supportive which would lead to stressed, overworked, and unhappy work life.
> A good manager would follow a bottom-up approach where he asks the team members what they need
> An ineffective manager may enforce ridiculous deadlines coming from upper management
This is not how it works in modern workplace. In large companies the pressure mechanism is delegated to a whole group of employees in the same place in the hierarchy - POs, PMs, Scrum masters, various process lunatics. In case of problems they feed the line manager with negative feedback thus creating an image of bad team player, the line manager itself is a divine being rising concerns at most during friendly one-to-one conversations. Once it's clear you are not a good team player, it's better for everyone if you'll be let go. Ideally this process should be catalyzed during the trial period.
Do you mean managers are not effective in a modern workplace, or do you mean managers are effective in a modern workplace?
What is the "This" you are referring to when you say "This is not how it works".
Also what kind of modern workplace are you talking about? I am working in a place that is developing software in the year 2018. I guess that is fairly modern. I see both effective and ineffective managers in this same workplace. What exactly is your point?
You could have stopped right there. In large companies the politics have firmly taken their place at the top of everything. And if you don't enjoy politics, they are terrible places to work and you should avoid them like the plague.
There are too many places in Europe (e.g. Dublin, Prague, Warsaw, smaller cities with job market dominated by one company/industry) where local branches of global companies are the only viable places to work in.
My local home town (20,000) had several small software vendors 15 years ago, so not buying you on that one. I also then lived 30-45 minutes from a large town (might be called city in the US, 200,000+) which had tons of them. I now live in a city smaller than the ones you list, Nottingham, and work with 3 different local companies as clients, 2 of them are 5 minutes walk from me. And I haven't tried to get a new client for like 2 years. Our job market is "dominated" by global companies like Capital One and Equifax, but I personally know of a bunch of local software companies crying out for devs, who ask me every time I meet them at a meetup if I know anyone.
There are also tons of digital agencies these days in every locality, which employ lots of programmers.
On top of that, a lot of businesses now need software internally, whether these are shitty positions is entirely dependant on how good the company is.
Honestly, it's just turning up to dev meetups for a year. A lot of local CEOs or CTOs will go to the meetups to try and meet new devs, as well as you meet a bunch of other devs and they'll never be resentful if you ask if there are any jobs going. Lots of companies do internal referral bonuses of a few hundred £/$/€ if an existing employee refers someone, so they're often keen to refer you!
I actually got my first client at the first meetup I ever attended with virtually the first words I said to anyone. I sat down next to someone and the conversation went, "Hi, I'm Matt, I'm a C# dev looking to start freelancing", "Oh, hi, I'm Jon, we need a C# freelancer".
Like I could list 5 local companies right now I know of off the top of my head that are always looking for devs and I personally haven't even been to a networking event for like 2 years.
I've had some great nights too, some long interesting chats. One that always sticks in my mind is someone who'd just setup his own ML cluster on AWS and him telling me all about Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, which had just come out (wow, 4 years already). Or sometimes just having fun and a few drinks.
I've worked in places with 50 employees and places with 15k employees. The amount of politics was no different, and if anything where probably worse in the smaller companies.
People romanticize small workplaces. Cliques (e.g. most of the team transferred from a different company), little dictatorships, blurry private-professional life border, etc. - so many ways the things can go wrong and they oftentimes indeed do.
I've had a lot of managers over the years but they usually fall into two buckets:
1. Very technical with no political skills. They are great to work for as mentors but they have no power in the organization to get their teams resources, raises, or promotions. They weren't career motivated because they made enough to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle and don't understand why you care so much about money.
2. The overly political. They will throw you under the bus in a heart beat to make themselves look good. They are very good with managing up. If you make them look good though and no how to play the game, you can get ahead. I was never good before recently at playing the game.
It's a rare manager that's good at both - they are like a unicorn. But they are great to work with. They can manage up well enough to communicate both the technical needs of their teams and get resources and compensation for their teams and they can help you on the technical level. I would have never been able to transistion from developer to dev lead without them.
this so much. I have had terrible micromanagers these are anxiety inducing. Also fake bro-managers, fakely imposing a friendship where there is none and trying to get more over time just by being friendly.
I prefer my manager to be professionally friendly, not a neck breather and treat me as an adult. Currently very happy with my manager :)
I particularly like the "anti-priorities" section. You can't optimise for everything, and it's refreshing to see someone be upfront about the things which they're prepared to let be sub-optimal.
Of course, it's important to read that section as "what I don't prioritise", not "what you shouldn't prioritise".
Love the fact and the way that the topic presented. I find it hard to apply to other lines of work though, especially classic working class jobs and for example healthcare and teaching. How would you guys modify the list? I for one would rate the security much higher even tough I understand that it's not as important for everyone. For physically demanding jobs (practical nurses, nurses, construction workers etc.) I'd also rate long term health very high
It's not hard to get a job, by to get a job that you can be sure to still have tomorrow when you wake up is another cup of tea. Working on day to day contracts and filling in for ordinaries does not grant you and your family a stable income. The physically demanding aspect of nursing for example often lead to premature retirement due to injuries or worn out joints and backs. The security aspect for me reflects the ability to stay healthy and being able to continue working in the long run. It also reflects the need for a job that doesn't disappear over night or cease to exist - family matters you could say
- Employees suffer from one single dependency which can make their live miserable—their manager; just compare: Entrepreneurs should be independent and build as many options as possible (e.g. not just one client but many)
- A job locks you in, means all side activities are forbidden or made complicated (because of IP, time, etc.) which again harms you because you are not able to build options outside the company
- The urge to stay employable + get high compensations, means: seamless job transitions with no gaps, min 2 years at one job, steady growth re titles, headcount, responsibilities—all to show that you are a good hire and it doesn't matter if your current employer is a pile of s* and you just have 7 months and need stay some more months
Getting jobs and being an employee has opportunities, it's easy for many in our industry to get 200K+ salaries but the price is high: reducing your options until you hit a depression.