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Not all big tech companies are the same. My understanding is that Google is much less stressful with similar pay.
by daveFNbuck 7y ago
Not all big tech companies are the same. My understanding is that Google is much less stressful with similar pay.
- DVassallo 7y agoI’m sure they are differences, but I doubt any high-paying big tech job is going to be low-stress. I don’t mean necessarily working long hours, but you get the kind of work where you need to be figuring out ambiguous problems, always convincing other stakeholders, dealing with some level of drama, etc. Things that require expending a lot of energy. It’s unlikely you’d be just converting Jira tasks to code at these levels. (That would be my definition of a low-stress job).
- Redoubts 7y agoI wouldn't call that stressful, just interesting.
- leoh 7y agoIt depends on the person I guess. Sometimes you're stuck with a poorly defined project that you don't believe in and there's no one to really validate your work. Leads to a feeling of meaninglessness and purposelessness and that your time and energy could be offered in a much more meaningful way. Can happen at companies of any size.
- virgilp 7y agoYou need to make decisions in a high-uncertainty environment. If you care about your work... it's much more stressful to have actual decision power than to have none and just vent with your colleagues about how bad the top-level decisions are.
- Redoubts 7y agoSorry, that just sounds like the opposite of boring to me.
- ctvo 7y agoWhat would you call stressful? Impact (on others, on myself permanently) correlates very well to stress for me. High impact decisions cause more stress: getting a project defunded, letting go of people, critical mistakes in execution that cause the company reputation or finance damages, etc.. At the very far end are life and death decisions that impact others and the very low end day-to-day decisions that only impact you (what tasks to complete, what shoes to wear). With the above framework, it's unlikely highly paid Googlers made low impact and thus low stress decisions.
- Redoubts 7y agoImpact matters but I think stress comes into play when you feel like things are going more wrong than right. And I wouldn’t say that most high paying tech responsibilities are anywhere near life or death decisions. But are much closer to comfortably fun and compelling challenges.
- singron 7y agoLow impact can also be stressful for me (I might be unusual). First, there is guilt that you are being paid all this money to twiddle your thumbs. After you stop feeling guilty for the wealthy corporation, you realize that you aren't fulfilled if you aren't achieving anything meaningful, which causes you to go on a stressful hunt to scratch any real impact out of the available work. Then after still achieving nothing, you get nice ratings on your performance reviews, and then you realize that barely anyone is actually having any real impact. There is an enormous organ you are attached to that absorbs money to write fluffy annual performance reviews. Then you eat ice cream in the nap pod hoping that you can feel content with your extreme comfort, but the most meaningful change in your mental state is a mild brain freeze.
- daveFNbuck 7y agoI know many ex-Googlers who consider working there to be low enough stress that they joke that they'll retire one day to go work at Google. That's probably an exaggeration, and they may have just had particularly easy jobs, but everything I know about these two companies tells me that Google would be much less stressful to work at than Amazon.