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> "Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is bec

> "Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I'm good, I will be paid a massive premium for it." And it's one of the unfair things in life that jobs that pay more often get other benefits as well. Making $40k/year? Chances are you get 2 weeks vacation, inflexible work hours, inferior equipment. Making $200K/year? I'll be you also have top of the line equipment, no one keeping close tabs on your hours, 4 weeks or more vacation, money to go to conferences, etc. A mentor of mine once told me that I should seek to make more money, even if that's not my motivation. He said that more money is always nice to have, but also that when someone pays you more, they respect you more, so you get all the benefits that come along with that.

logifail 7y ago
> when someone pays you more, they respect you more The counter-example to that could be that once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation. If enough goes wrong, you will get called back to work.
- mattwad 7y ago
  > If enough goes wrong, you will get called back to work. True, but if you're good at your job, then this should be a very rare occurrence! It's still well worth the trade-off.
- natefox 7y ago
  I give my boss/coworkers my wife's phone number when I go on vacation. I tell them you have to talk to her to get to me. I then put my phone in airplane mode 95% of the time and use it as a camera. I'll occasionally undo airplane mode to upload photos or check the internets for something, but vacation for me is usually unplugging as well. I've yet to be called with this strategy.
  - RussianCow 7y ago
    Funny, I tried this once when I was on call and I still got called. And for a while after that, whenever someone couldn't reach me on my phone, they would call my wife. So really, it was a lose-lose.
    - chucksmash 7y ago
      That strikes me as wildly out of bounds. I imagine your wife has a job too, and her own work issues to deal with. I'd be very upset with the individual bothering my spouse because I hadn't returned their call fast enough for their tastes.
      - RussianCow 7y ago
        People in desperation tend not to think things through, especially when customers are the ones telling them that there's an issue. After the second occurrence, I explained to the relevant parties that my wife's phone cannot be used as a secondary contact for myself, and it didn't happen again after that, so I chalked it up to a misunderstanding. It was annoying, yes, but no one was pestering my wife on purpose.
        bigiain 7y ago
        You're somewhat more generous than I am. I'd have told my wife to just block that number, and waited until I got back from vacation to explain that it'll happen to anyone else who calls my wife for anything other than an existential emergency as well.
        viscanti 7y ago
        He also knew he was on-call and went somewhere where he didn't have reception. It sounds like he knew that might be an issue so gave his wife's number as a backup. That's basically training the person who has to escalate to use his wife's number as it's the one he responded on. I don't think he's being generous at all, it seems like an obvious outcome of being on call and not responding on his own phone.
- hoov 7y ago
  Or even nothing goes wrong suddenly. Once, I had a vacation planned for six months and had to spend the long weekend cooped up in my hotel room overseeing a complicated migration.
  - komali2 7y ago
    To play devil's advocate, why was a migration so complicated that your engineers couldn't do it without you if it failed, being done on a vacation that everyone knew about for six months?
    - Ma8ee 7y ago
      I won’t say anything the planning, but I’ve learned that migrations are usually hard, in the sense that you have to deal with poorly understood, seldom documented and, almost always inconsistent data. And at the same time critical since you usually can’t afford much downtime between the shutting down the old system and start using the new.
  - asark 7y ago
    Planning something over your vacation and expecting you to work on it is just your manager being a dick. If they can do it without you, they should. If they can't do it without you, guess it can wait 'till you get back. Not like you dropped it on them last minute.
- bcyn 7y ago
  That has nothing to do with seniority, it's 100% about how you draw personal boundaries between work hours and personal hours. You can make it clear that you will be completely unplugged during vacation.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    Once you are an executive, you often have contractual obligations. You are the key decision maker people escalate to. If time sensitive things that need a decision to be made the buck stops with you, no matter where you are. To give an extreme example, the President (of the US) is never truly unplugged. In the cases where the president is truly unplugged, SoP is for that person to temporarily stop being the President.
    - taurath 7y ago
      Delegation of authority is key here. If not for the commander in chief role of the president it’s conceivable they could just delegate decision making to the cabinet.
  - Bootvis 7y ago
    That depends on the position, I believe it is easy for a software engineer in a big corp. For senior management or an engineer in a small corp with lots of domain knowledge: a lot harder. The second set of people can try but when shit hits the fan they will have to explain what happened and why it couldn’t be prevented.
  - opportune 7y ago
    You can absolutely do that, but then you will not get promoted past a certain stage at most companies. I do this because I'm not yet in a very senior position but if I were managing 100 people and in charge of an entire product I doubt I could do that
    - wolco 7y ago
      This makes a lot of sense but goes against the article. Making more doesn't always give you more freedom. If you want power you have to pay for it. In your case why would you push for a higher role knowing the tradeoffs?
- watwut 7y ago
  That is more of mark of desorganized workplace then something inherent to senior role.
  - nsxwolf 7y ago
    I don't know anyone that hasn't worked in a disorganized workplace then.
    - watwut 7y ago
      I definitely did. Once in three years project senior being acutely needed during his vacation? Sure. Every time senior is in vacation? No. There being once a week release that needs senior involvement each time it happens so it surely hits also vacation? Badly organized.
  - yazan94 7y ago
    I disagree. For reference, I work in a big bank and all the high level people are always on call when fecal matter hits the rotating turbines. Often times, theres an issue with this or that feature in production or we are having an issue with a release and we need an emergency signoff. The process stipulates that a high level person is required to give this emergency signoff, and they often want to know what happened, what are our options, which one we chose so there's usually a lot of time spent chasing down answers or people who can answer those questions.
    - Jach 7y ago
      This sounds like a disorganized workplace to me. The standard thought experiment is: what happens if <supposedly important person> gets hit by a bus and dies? What if they're just in a coma for a few weeks? The response to the first satisfies a sudden "I'm quitting" and the response to the second satisfies a sudden "I'm going on vacation". Business is more forgiving of course, since both quitting and vacation planning typically have a time delay. The simplest response for both is to delegate: "<person y> now has temporary or permanent authority in the decisions <person x> used to have". That means you need to have a person y for each person x and there needs to be enough trust that person y will make decisions that x would approve of (even if sometimes different). If you're a single-person startup, there is no person y, but then these questions aren't really relevant. As the Pinboard FAQ says, the answer to what happens is the bus will be fine.
- tracker1 7y ago
  I go on road trips... I'm largely out of range of decent reception on the road.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Tsagadai 7y ago
  Only if you are not good at process. If you have solid practices, documentation and system design skills you can make yourself removable, then you can go on leave whenever and things will be fine. A good way to measure this is look at how long it takes to do handover when someone leaves a project. If it is more than half an hour of showing someone where the repo is and a brief explanation then you have a problem that can be fixed with better processes. Ideally, someone should be able to pick up a project or a product very quickly as all the information they need should be in a simple, easily navigable format that they can consume and understand. I realise that is an ideal case but if you are senior enough to lead you can be senior enough to never make yourself a dependency and that callback never comes because it is never required. Ensuring management above you understands your value is another problem (anyone who can code themselves out of a job is worth keeping around and giving harder jobs to and good managers will understand that).
- distantaidenn 7y ago
  Definitely. Called back to work from a holiday on a Thai island. CEO was near frothing at the mouth over my absence when shit hit the fan.
  - selestify 7y ago
    What the hell? Did you accept the call back to work? > CEO was near frothing at the mouth over my absence when shit hit the fan. I'd be the one offended for having my vacation interrupted.
  - bigred100 7y ago
    Sometimes I wonder how such emotionally immature people become so successful. I know it’s common, but if I knew someone who started throwing a fit over something incredibly minor and predictable (an employee took a vacation) I’d think they were unfit for any leadership role.
- sagichmal 7y ago
  > once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation This has not been my experience either personally or by proxy to my more-senior colleagues. But it may be I have found myself in a particular niche which is non-representative.
- chadash 7y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, but I don't think this is quite a "counter-example". The fact that someone gives you a lot of responsibility is definitely a sign that they respect you more. But yeah, along with more pay and responsibility comes the expectation that you take the blame when things go wrong. And if they go wrong during your vacation, it's up to you to fix them. This can definitely be true in lower level positions as well, but I agree with the sentiment that this tends to be _more_ true with upper level management.
m0zg 7y ago
A nice side effect of this is, if you're making multiple six figures, your chances of being asked to work on bullshit projects that don't matter is much lower, and you can basically pick and choose what to do, and _tell your boss_ what to do as well. Money is not just compensation, it's also a powerful signaling mechanism. People just assume that if your time costs a lot, you must be super good. This is _mostly_ true, but not always. Some people get paid a lot for no apparent reason at all. The inverse, however, is often not true (yet the pricing signal is interpreted exactly as you'd expect): there are lots and lots of great people who are severely underpaid. Some are victims of circumstance, some just consider pursuing top dollar to be "beneath their dignity", majority (anecdotally, I don't have data) are just too lazy to do anything about it and change jobs once every 2 years as they should.
- artsyca 7y ago
  There's another thread that recently rose to prominence about ascertaining the quality of clothing and something along the same lines popped up: expensive clothes are not always high quality, but high quality clothes are generally more expensive -- the cost is a signalling mechanism aka heuristic and like any heuristic it can be gamed
puranjay 7y ago
> when someone pays you more, they respect you more I can't stress this enough. The more I charged as a consultant, the more my clients would shut up and heed my advice.
- sharkweek 7y ago
  The lesson every consultant, including me, seems to have to learn on their own. When I went out on my own a few years back, it was a rush to sign any client at an hourly rate not that much higher than my previous salary rate. Those first clients were rough. As you’re saying, I’ve also seen first hand the more I charge the more people take my suggestions seriously, and overall the better the clients are for my business. Go figure.
- Iv 7y ago
  My first boss started to respect me after we had a shouting negotiation with him over my work contract. The employer-employee relationship is weird and toxic as hell. Work long hours? Develop additional tool during your free time? Help clients more than your job requires? You are a sucker. Manage to shout enough to get a raise? Now you are a champion.
  - repomies691 7y ago
    > The employer-employee relationship is weird and toxic as hell. Doesn't need to be in my experience, both the employee and employer can respect each other even when they don't get along well on personal level. However it is actually quite interesting that it is a relationship that can be weird and toxic, while still providing (economical) value for both parties.
    - Iv 7y ago
      I had some healthy relationships with bosses, but every employer I had who was a decent human ended up being fired by shareholders. And yes, the strength of free market and capitalism is to transform greed and all the behaviors that come with it into a fuel that helps the economy for everyone. It does not transform these into virtues though...
jshowa3 7y ago
This rarely has anything to do with salary and more so to do with what your company can afford. I've made 60k/yr at jobs where I've had awesome equipment and flexible hours. People respect you more if you get things done and solve problems. Not because you have a big salary. How often do you think people respect management? Just geography alone determines salary. I could make double if I simply moved to San Francisco for the same job. Doesn't mean I'm "more respected".
- tylerhou 7y ago
  > People respect you more if you get things done and solve problems. Not because you have a big salary. How often do you think people respect management? That's not what the person you replied to is saying. The above person is saying that companies which pay well also tend to respect their employees more, so seek out a higher salary because those companies also tend to offer better benefits/culture.
  - jshowa3 7y ago
    That isn't necessarily true. There's a difference between respect and benefits/culture. Some would say that Google, in all its free lunch glory, doesn't respect its employees that well consider they've had employees go on strike due to their policies.
    - tylerhou 7y ago
      > Some would say that Google, in all its free lunch glory, doesn't respect its employees that well consider they've had employees go on strike due to their policies. The protests were mostly against sexual abusers/harassers and the arbitration policies. Are you implying that most other tech companies haven't had any executive-level sexual harassers? That most other tech companies don't have forced-arbitration policies? How many other companies openly allow their employees to organize protests through company emails and forums? Not many. The open culture is what allows people to protest. Disclaimer: I work at Google.
      - 7y ago
matt-snider 7y ago
20 days is the legal minimum in Germany. I think a lot of other countries have similar rules. It's kind of sad that in the US and Canada, 4 weeks vacation is special, and 2 weeks vacation is legal.
- travbrack 7y ago
  There's no minimum in the US
- conanbatt 7y ago
  I think the exact opposite way. I wish there were no legally paid time off ever. Just pay people when they work and not when they don't.
BurningFrog 7y ago
With $200k/year also comes accountability. No one keeps tabs on your hours, but you better get stuff done!
- autotune 7y ago
  As long as it’s mostly fun stuff with proper checks and balances hell yeah!
PeterStuer 7y ago
You observe a correlation but not necessarily causation. Technical jobs that are well payed and well respected are found more often in companies that produce a product or service that is sold rather than in companies that sell your time, whether directly or under the guise of 'projects'. If your time-sheet impacts the bill to the customer, you are the product being sold. The reason to avoid the latter is that all benefits to you, either salary or equipment/working conditions, are seen as expenses that impact the margin on the rate, while in a product company they are far more likely to written of as investments into the IP producing engine.

logifail 7y ago

> when someone pays you more, they respect you more The counter-example to that could be that once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation. If enough goes wrong, you will get called back to work.

mattwad 7y ago
> If enough goes wrong, you will get called back to work. True, but if you're good at your job, then this should be a very rare occurrence! It's still well worth the trade-off.
natefox 7y ago
I give my boss/coworkers my wife's phone number when I go on vacation. I tell them you have to talk to her to get to me. I then put my phone in airplane mode 95% of the time and use it as a camera. I'll occasionally undo airplane mode to upload photos or check the internets for something, but vacation for me is usually unplugging as well. I've yet to be called with this strategy.
- RussianCow 7y ago
  Funny, I tried this once when I was on call and I still got called. And for a while after that, whenever someone couldn't reach me on my phone, they would call my wife. So really, it was a lose-lose.
  - chucksmash 7y ago
    That strikes me as wildly out of bounds. I imagine your wife has a job too, and her own work issues to deal with. I'd be very upset with the individual bothering my spouse because I hadn't returned their call fast enough for their tastes.
    - RussianCow 7y ago
      People in desperation tend not to think things through, especially when customers are the ones telling them that there's an issue. After the second occurrence, I explained to the relevant parties that my wife's phone cannot be used as a secondary contact for myself, and it didn't happen again after that, so I chalked it up to a misunderstanding. It was annoying, yes, but no one was pestering my wife on purpose.
      - bigiain 7y ago
        You're somewhat more generous than I am. I'd have told my wife to just block that number, and waited until I got back from vacation to explain that it'll happen to anyone else who calls my wife for anything other than an existential emergency as well.
        viscanti 7y ago
        He also knew he was on-call and went somewhere where he didn't have reception. It sounds like he knew that might be an issue so gave his wife's number as a backup. That's basically training the person who has to escalate to use his wife's number as it's the one he responded on. I don't think he's being generous at all, it seems like an obvious outcome of being on call and not responding on his own phone.
hoov 7y ago
Or even nothing goes wrong suddenly. Once, I had a vacation planned for six months and had to spend the long weekend cooped up in my hotel room overseeing a complicated migration.
- komali2 7y ago
  To play devil's advocate, why was a migration so complicated that your engineers couldn't do it without you if it failed, being done on a vacation that everyone knew about for six months?
  - Ma8ee 7y ago
    I won’t say anything the planning, but I’ve learned that migrations are usually hard, in the sense that you have to deal with poorly understood, seldom documented and, almost always inconsistent data. And at the same time critical since you usually can’t afford much downtime between the shutting down the old system and start using the new.
- asark 7y ago
  Planning something over your vacation and expecting you to work on it is just your manager being a dick. If they can do it without you, they should. If they can't do it without you, guess it can wait 'till you get back. Not like you dropped it on them last minute.
bcyn 7y ago
That has nothing to do with seniority, it's 100% about how you draw personal boundaries between work hours and personal hours. You can make it clear that you will be completely unplugged during vacation.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Once you are an executive, you often have contractual obligations. You are the key decision maker people escalate to. If time sensitive things that need a decision to be made the buck stops with you, no matter where you are. To give an extreme example, the President (of the US) is never truly unplugged. In the cases where the president is truly unplugged, SoP is for that person to temporarily stop being the President.
  - taurath 7y ago
    Delegation of authority is key here. If not for the commander in chief role of the president it’s conceivable they could just delegate decision making to the cabinet.
- Bootvis 7y ago
  That depends on the position, I believe it is easy for a software engineer in a big corp. For senior management or an engineer in a small corp with lots of domain knowledge: a lot harder. The second set of people can try but when shit hits the fan they will have to explain what happened and why it couldn’t be prevented.
- opportune 7y ago
  You can absolutely do that, but then you will not get promoted past a certain stage at most companies. I do this because I'm not yet in a very senior position but if I were managing 100 people and in charge of an entire product I doubt I could do that
  - wolco 7y ago
    This makes a lot of sense but goes against the article. Making more doesn't always give you more freedom. If you want power you have to pay for it. In your case why would you push for a higher role knowing the tradeoffs?
watwut 7y ago
That is more of mark of desorganized workplace then something inherent to senior role.
- nsxwolf 7y ago
  I don't know anyone that hasn't worked in a disorganized workplace then.
  - watwut 7y ago
    I definitely did. Once in three years project senior being acutely needed during his vacation? Sure. Every time senior is in vacation? No. There being once a week release that needs senior involvement each time it happens so it surely hits also vacation? Badly organized.
- yazan94 7y ago
  I disagree. For reference, I work in a big bank and all the high level people are always on call when fecal matter hits the rotating turbines. Often times, theres an issue with this or that feature in production or we are having an issue with a release and we need an emergency signoff. The process stipulates that a high level person is required to give this emergency signoff, and they often want to know what happened, what are our options, which one we chose so there's usually a lot of time spent chasing down answers or people who can answer those questions.
  - Jach 7y ago
    This sounds like a disorganized workplace to me. The standard thought experiment is: what happens if <supposedly important person> gets hit by a bus and dies? What if they're just in a coma for a few weeks? The response to the first satisfies a sudden "I'm quitting" and the response to the second satisfies a sudden "I'm going on vacation". Business is more forgiving of course, since both quitting and vacation planning typically have a time delay. The simplest response for both is to delegate: "<person y> now has temporary or permanent authority in the decisions <person x> used to have". That means you need to have a person y for each person x and there needs to be enough trust that person y will make decisions that x would approve of (even if sometimes different). If you're a single-person startup, there is no person y, but then these questions aren't really relevant. As the Pinboard FAQ says, the answer to what happens is the bus will be fine.
tracker1 7y ago
I go on road trips... I'm largely out of range of decent reception on the road.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Tsagadai 7y ago
Only if you are not good at process. If you have solid practices, documentation and system design skills you can make yourself removable, then you can go on leave whenever and things will be fine. A good way to measure this is look at how long it takes to do handover when someone leaves a project. If it is more than half an hour of showing someone where the repo is and a brief explanation then you have a problem that can be fixed with better processes. Ideally, someone should be able to pick up a project or a product very quickly as all the information they need should be in a simple, easily navigable format that they can consume and understand. I realise that is an ideal case but if you are senior enough to lead you can be senior enough to never make yourself a dependency and that callback never comes because it is never required. Ensuring management above you understands your value is another problem (anyone who can code themselves out of a job is worth keeping around and giving harder jobs to and good managers will understand that).
distantaidenn 7y ago
Definitely. Called back to work from a holiday on a Thai island. CEO was near frothing at the mouth over my absence when shit hit the fan.
- selestify 7y ago
  What the hell? Did you accept the call back to work? > CEO was near frothing at the mouth over my absence when shit hit the fan. I'd be the one offended for having my vacation interrupted.
- bigred100 7y ago
  Sometimes I wonder how such emotionally immature people become so successful. I know it’s common, but if I knew someone who started throwing a fit over something incredibly minor and predictable (an employee took a vacation) I’d think they were unfit for any leadership role.
sagichmal 7y ago
> once you're senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation This has not been my experience either personally or by proxy to my more-senior colleagues. But it may be I have found myself in a particular niche which is non-representative.
chadash 7y ago
I agree with your sentiment, but I don't think this is quite a "counter-example". The fact that someone gives you a lot of responsibility is definitely a sign that they respect you more. But yeah, along with more pay and responsibility comes the expectation that you take the blame when things go wrong. And if they go wrong during your vacation, it's up to you to fix them. This can definitely be true in lower level positions as well, but I agree with the sentiment that this tends to be _more_ true with upper level management.

m0zg 7y ago

A nice side effect of this is, if you're making multiple six figures, your chances of being asked to work on bullshit projects that don't matter is much lower, and you can basically pick and choose what to do, and _tell your boss_ what to do as well. Money is not just compensation, it's also a powerful signaling mechanism. People just assume that if your time costs a lot, you must be super good. This is _mostly_ true, but not always. Some people get paid a lot for no apparent reason at all. The inverse, however, is often not true (yet the pricing signal is interpreted exactly as you'd expect): there are lots and lots of great people who are severely underpaid. Some are victims of circumstance, some just consider pursuing top dollar to be "beneath their dignity", majority (anecdotally, I don't have data) are just too lazy to do anything about it and change jobs once every 2 years as they should.

artsyca 7y ago
There's another thread that recently rose to prominence about ascertaining the quality of clothing and something along the same lines popped up: expensive clothes are not always high quality, but high quality clothes are generally more expensive -- the cost is a signalling mechanism aka heuristic and like any heuristic it can be gamed

puranjay 7y ago

> when someone pays you more, they respect you more I can't stress this enough. The more I charged as a consultant, the more my clients would shut up and heed my advice.

sharkweek 7y ago
The lesson every consultant, including me, seems to have to learn on their own. When I went out on my own a few years back, it was a rush to sign any client at an hourly rate not that much higher than my previous salary rate. Those first clients were rough. As you’re saying, I’ve also seen first hand the more I charge the more people take my suggestions seriously, and overall the better the clients are for my business. Go figure.
Iv 7y ago
My first boss started to respect me after we had a shouting negotiation with him over my work contract. The employer-employee relationship is weird and toxic as hell. Work long hours? Develop additional tool during your free time? Help clients more than your job requires? You are a sucker. Manage to shout enough to get a raise? Now you are a champion.
- repomies691 7y ago
  > The employer-employee relationship is weird and toxic as hell. Doesn't need to be in my experience, both the employee and employer can respect each other even when they don't get along well on personal level. However it is actually quite interesting that it is a relationship that can be weird and toxic, while still providing (economical) value for both parties.
  - Iv 7y ago
    I had some healthy relationships with bosses, but every employer I had who was a decent human ended up being fired by shareholders. And yes, the strength of free market and capitalism is to transform greed and all the behaviors that come with it into a fuel that helps the economy for everyone. It does not transform these into virtues though...

jshowa3 7y ago

This rarely has anything to do with salary and more so to do with what your company can afford. I've made 60k/yr at jobs where I've had awesome equipment and flexible hours. People respect you more if you get things done and solve problems. Not because you have a big salary. How often do you think people respect management? Just geography alone determines salary. I could make double if I simply moved to San Francisco for the same job. Doesn't mean I'm "more respected".

tylerhou 7y ago
> People respect you more if you get things done and solve problems. Not because you have a big salary. How often do you think people respect management? That's not what the person you replied to is saying. The above person is saying that companies which pay well also tend to respect their employees more, so seek out a higher salary because those companies also tend to offer better benefits/culture.
- jshowa3 7y ago
  That isn't necessarily true. There's a difference between respect and benefits/culture. Some would say that Google, in all its free lunch glory, doesn't respect its employees that well consider they've had employees go on strike due to their policies.
  - tylerhou 7y ago
    > Some would say that Google, in all its free lunch glory, doesn't respect its employees that well consider they've had employees go on strike due to their policies. The protests were mostly against sexual abusers/harassers and the arbitration policies. Are you implying that most other tech companies haven't had any executive-level sexual harassers? That most other tech companies don't have forced-arbitration policies? How many other companies openly allow their employees to organize protests through company emails and forums? Not many. The open culture is what allows people to protest. Disclaimer: I work at Google.
    - 7y ago

matt-snider 7y ago

20 days is the legal minimum in Germany. I think a lot of other countries have similar rules. It's kind of sad that in the US and Canada, 4 weeks vacation is special, and 2 weeks vacation is legal.

travbrack 7y ago
There's no minimum in the US
conanbatt 7y ago
I think the exact opposite way. I wish there were no legally paid time off ever. Just pay people when they work and not when they don't.

BurningFrog 7y ago

With $200k/year also comes accountability. No one keeps tabs on your hours, but you better get stuff done!

autotune 7y ago
As long as it’s mostly fun stuff with proper checks and balances hell yeah!

PeterStuer 7y ago

You observe a correlation but not necessarily causation. Technical jobs that are well payed and well respected are found more often in companies that produce a product or service that is sold rather than in companies that sell your time, whether directly or under the guise of 'projects'. If your time-sheet impacts the bill to the customer, you are the product being sold. The reason to avoid the latter is that all benefits to you, either salary or equipment/working conditions, are seen as expenses that impact the margin on the rate, while in a product company they are far more likely to written of as investments into the IP producing engine.