7 ms·

Ask HN: 2x50K Jobs vs. 1x100K

11 points by sdevonoes 5y ago

It's crazy, but this seems to be accurate from my limited experience: 1. Senior backend developer (~10 years of experience) trying to find a 100K Euro/year job in Western Europe: quite hard if all you want to be is a simple "individual contributor" (employee, not contractor) writing $PROGRAMMING_LANG code without having to deal with k8s, the cloud, mentoring, or on-call paging. Besides, I'm not specially bright, just average, so I cannot pass tricky tech interviews. I'm currently making 85K Euro/year (around 4600 Euro/month after taxes) which is nice, but I cannot deal with the stress my current role (tech lead?) implies: I'm supposed to be on-call, to mentor junior engineers, to "own" our products, to learn more about devops/infra topics, to bring and introduce new topics to my team, to be an example to engineers with less experience. All I want to do is to be part of a team pushing useful features for our customers: I don't want to be on-call; I like to teach and learn from others but I don't want to be a mentor; I want to write $PROGRAMMING_LANG code, I don't want to setup the infra of our services... I want the job I had in 2010! Now, that's for positions that pay ~85K euro/year. Imagine the stress for positions that pay 100K. I don't even think such positions (plain IC) exist in WE (excluding top companies ofc: I'm just the average Joe). It seems that this ~17% salary increase I'm looking for implies a 100% increase in stress. Nuts. 2. Getting a 50K euro/year job in Western Europe is easy for someone like me with ~10 years of experience. I can pass the interviews just fine (I guess I would just have to hide some previous experience of mine so that I look like a junior to the companies). 50K euro/year is around 3K/month after taxes. Not bad. Now, the stress of a 50K euro/year job is close to zero for someone with years of dev experience. Besides, you'll get ton of free time because you know exactly how to do "junior" tasks! No on-call, no mentoring, no cloud, no k8s... just coding like it's 2010! Now, the big IF: what if I quit my current job and get 2x50K euro/year jobs? That would mean (oversimplifying taxes) around 6K euro/month after taxes (more than I would make earning 100K euro/year!). I think I could do it just fine (perhaps I would have trouble with meetings at the same time). Low stress (because I would be a senior doing junior tasks), more money. Bingo. From an ethical point of view: I would be a junior (earning junior money) producing senior-level coding. That's a big win for any company, no? Now, coming back to reality: this is probably never going to happen. Edit: I'm assuming 100% remote setup. Edit 2: this all is just a mental exercise. I'm not planning to get 2x 50K jobs; the idea just came to my mind and all I wanted is to get your opinions about it. Merci!

factorialboy 5y ago
Are you willing to work 80 hours a week? Or is the assumption that since you are extremely efficient, you can squeeze in all the work demands of two fulltime positions into 40 hours per week?
- sdevonoes 5y ago
  The assumption here is that a senior engineer with ~10 years of experience doing "junior" tasks does not need 40h/week to accomplish his tasks. Probably only half of that. In practice, however, things can get a bit more complicated; what's described above is just pure theory. Example: - Junior task: we need a new http GET endpoint to retrieve the list of attendees for a given meeting. The input and output looks as follows... No pagination is needed. Everything should be already setup, you just need to add the code that does the retrieval. Estimated time: X story points (let's say 1 or 2 days) vs. - Senior task: we need to setup the new X microservice. Please, setup auth and use this template the infra team is providing (some Terraform+GitLab ci/cd templates that sometimes do not work as defined). Add monitoring, and implement one useful http endpoint so that junior engineers can just take it as an example and can add more endpoints themselves. Also, if the service goes down on a Sunday morning, guess who's going to be on-call? Not the junior engineer. Estimated time: Y story points (let's say 3 or 4 days). Now, I would need 1h to implement the junior task (tests included!) and I would probably ace it (if not, the hell I have been doing for 10 years?). For the senior task: all I see is complication down the rabbit hole (e.g., why are we using k8s for this? The templates do not work in some scenarios, who can help me improve them? I like to spend Sunday mornings with my kids, btw.
  - tsjq 5y ago
    if two 40h jobs, how do you plan to deal with overlapping meeting / conf call requests ?
    - sdevonoes 5y ago
      Good point! As it is said above, it's all just pure theory. But, let's imagine what would happen: If somehow a "junior" member of your team seems to produce high-quality code (for "junior" standards) that require zero help from other team members, and always on time, then I guess the team would be fine with the "junior" participating minimally in meeting calls (perhaps even with the camera off... now here I'm assuming 100% remote, something I didn't explicitly said before).

11 points by sdevonoes 5y ago

factorialboy 5y ago

Are you willing to work 80 hours a week? Or is the assumption that since you are extremely efficient, you can squeeze in all the work demands of two fulltime positions into 40 hours per week?

sdevonoes 5y ago
The assumption here is that a senior engineer with ~10 years of experience doing "junior" tasks does not need 40h/week to accomplish his tasks. Probably only half of that. In practice, however, things can get a bit more complicated; what's described above is just pure theory. Example: - Junior task: we need a new http GET endpoint to retrieve the list of attendees for a given meeting. The input and output looks as follows... No pagination is needed. Everything should be already setup, you just need to add the code that does the retrieval. Estimated time: X story points (let's say 1 or 2 days) vs. - Senior task: we need to setup the new X microservice. Please, setup auth and use this template the infra team is providing (some Terraform+GitLab ci/cd templates that sometimes do not work as defined). Add monitoring, and implement one useful http endpoint so that junior engineers can just take it as an example and can add more endpoints themselves. Also, if the service goes down on a Sunday morning, guess who's going to be on-call? Not the junior engineer. Estimated time: Y story points (let's say 3 or 4 days). Now, I would need 1h to implement the junior task (tests included!) and I would probably ace it (if not, the hell I have been doing for 10 years?). For the senior task: all I see is complication down the rabbit hole (e.g., why are we using k8s for this? The templates do not work in some scenarios, who can help me improve them? I like to spend Sunday mornings with my kids, btw.
- tsjq 5y ago
  if two 40h jobs, how do you plan to deal with overlapping meeting / conf call requests ?
  - sdevonoes 5y ago
    Good point! As it is said above, it's all just pure theory. But, let's imagine what would happen: If somehow a "junior" member of your team seems to produce high-quality code (for "junior" standards) that require zero help from other team members, and always on time, then I guess the team would be fine with the "junior" participating minimally in meeting calls (perhaps even with the camera off... now here I'm assuming 100% remote, something I didn't explicitly said before).