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Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I’m always mildly offended by them. It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid j

Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I’m always mildly offended by them. It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo. At no point does this article, or most articles like it, do any effort to realize that things are not always like this. Even if there is some unavoidable law that huge companies inevitably fill their ranks with idiots, like this article suggests, you do not need to work at a huge company. Most people do not work at huge companies. There’s lots of amazing tech companies with fulfilling jobs and they want you, now. But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”. There’s some weird kind of suffer porn going on here that’s just unnecessary. If you choose to trade your sanity for a high salary then go right ahead but don’t act like you had no choice.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”. Behind all such writing is an unspoken piece of context: those terrible huge companies pay software devs better than small ones. It's not that they can't work at a smaller company - it's just that it means taking a hit to your take-home pay, so it's Not An Option.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  Agree! In fact, while you wrote this I made an edit (last sentence) to address that. It was supposed to be my core point but I had somehow left it implicit.
- antupis 3y ago
  Also work life balance is usually better in big corp you actually can clock that 9:5 and go home.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    All of my friends at FB/G work way more hours than me and miss family activities. Same as when I was at MS.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      FAANG are megacorps pretending to be startups to young developers, and treat them accordingly. There are other megacorps doing tech that behave like proper megacorps, and pay accordingly.
    - BoxFour 3y ago
      Those companies tend to attract type As, and it’s similarly easy for non type As to feel implicit peer pressure. You don’t have to work a ton to succeed. If you prefer to maintain a 9-5 schedule at these companies, it's extremely possible as long as you: 1) genuinely stick to a 9-5 work routine (some individuals I saw struggling were actually working something like 11-4). 2) are comfortable with the possibility of not experiencing rapid career advancement, potentially reaching a plateau at the first terminal level.
    - surajrmal 3y ago
      The people who tend to work extra hours are the ones who choose to in my experience. If you don't work extra hours now you won't after switching to one of those companies either. You might witness folks who do, but you can usually tell they are more self motivated than they are forced into it.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - Aurornis 3y ago
    Depends on the company. My stints with BigCorp life were full of 6-7PM meeting times and expectations to keep up with Slack and email even during vacations and holidays. I have friends at Amazon who have started to miss our Saturday events because they’re feverishly working to avoid being caught in the next round of layoffs. I also have friends at some FAANG companies who seem like they’re barely working (their own admission) so it varies wildly. Can’t really generalize.
- neogodless 3y ago
  You're saying if you can't maximize your pay, it's not an option? I cannot wrap my head around it. Being happy with your life is not a one-to-one correlation with income. You can make less money than "maximum" and still have a great life.
  - argiopetech 3y ago
    It's not necessarily maximizing money, but maintaining lifestyle. It's extremely common for people to increase their standard of living as their means increase, and reducing that requires significant effort in some cases (e.g., people tend to buy as much house as they can afford, so any significant salary reduction could necessitate selling the house and uprooting your family). It's a minimal sacrifice in the face of having to work a job you hate, IMO, but it's still a powerful barrier for many.
    - neogodless 3y ago
      Right. > extremely common for people to increase their standard of living That was a choice. But the opposite is "not a choice"? You choose to spend so much money that you are forced into work you may despise to support the spending choices you make, so there's no option to... not make those spending choices?
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Choices aren't made equal. Some are easier to make, even unconsciously, than others. For example, choosing immediate pleasure is easier than immediate discomfort. A series of small, incremental choices over time is easier than one large step. Etc.
        djoletina 3y ago
        What is your point? It’s still a choice. It’s easier to spend more money than less money, great insight.
        3y ago
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Unless you’re talking about big tech that’s not true. A random bank or insurance company or whatever will pay worse than well funded startups
gcapu 3y ago
God points but: 1) For someone in BigCo it is fun to read. 2) BigCo is not a bad place for most people. Management should just shut up about efficiency and data driven. No one believes them, not even themselves.
- Moru 3y ago
  It's also nice to read for us in SmallCo. We remember why we took that salary hit to stay sane.
  - charlie0 3y ago
    Hey, some of us in SmallCo have dreams of trading in joy for a much larger paycheck at BigCo. No pain, no gain.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  The audience for the management statements, such as investors and analysts, might just want to hear certain things. These things will have certain fads and fashions as to what needs to be uttered.
- starky 3y ago
  Yeah, at this point in my career I'm tired of the bullshit that management spouts. I know they don't believe one bit of what they are saying except as a method to get product out quicker. We aren't even necessarily labour bound, but management doesn't accept that 9 women can't make a baby in a month. I'm all for looking at processes periodically to make sure we are doing the right things to get everything released, but when you come at it from a hitting ever tighter arbitrary KPIs you just make everyone angry or apathetic to your words.
Draiken 3y ago
If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important I would fully agree with you. But it is. I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever. So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice. Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win like being an early employee in a unicorn startup is not a real plan. It's wishful thinking. I hate this is the world we live in and my soul dies a bit every day I have to waste my talents writing useless software, but there's no real choice.
- giantg2 3y ago
  At least you have talents. Imagine being in your 30s with a family to support and no real career future - bad reviews, bad organizations structure, shitty technology/systems, and no skills to move elsewhere.
- neogodless 3y ago
  > No it's not really a choice. Hard disagree. Have never worked for "terrible big company" (though some mediocre medium companies!) But outside of the super high cost of living areas like NYC and San Francisco, it's trivially simple (if not easy) to live on $50-60K USD each year (adjust this number for inflation as needed) while still enjoying yourself, having high performance technology, doing some travel, etc. You can't buy every damn thing you want or live like a millionaire, but you can live a great life. How many software / engineering jobs in the U.S., excluding terrible big tech companies, pay more than $60k USD per year? Almost all of them. In fact, it's not hard to make well over $100k. And live on half that. So you don't have to work forever just because you're not making $500k USD each year at some huge terrible tech company.
  - anvil-on-my-toe 3y ago
    $60-100k salary is not enough to support a family and retire; it's probably not enough for a single person to make meaningful progress towards retirement because at that level of pay home ownership is constantly out of reach and inflation outpaces wage growth. It's sacrificing your life so someone else can get rich.
harimau777 3y ago
How do you go about finding a job at an amazing company with fulfilling jobs?
- skrebbel 3y ago
  For starters, HN has a monthly "Who's hiring?" thread with a lot of cool companies posting. Personally I find a lot more of the posts there to make me go "hey that sounds like a cool place to work" than eg a search on job sites or Stack Overflow career ads. In a broad sense I mean, eg there's tiny startups, healthy profitable SMBs, and VC-fueled unicorn rocket ships posting there, but they all seem above-average cool for their category to me. As an employer, I find that the inverse holds too - applicants that find us via the "Who's hiring?" thread are much more often a potential fit than those who find us via other routes.
- layer8 3y ago
  Look for owner-managed companies without middle management, or where middle management consists of engineers and not MBAs. Look for small(ish) companies that work on topics you find interesting. Connect with people who are looking for the same. You might not find the fulfilling job in a sane company on the first try, but if you keep looking and talking to people, you’re likely to find one.
giantg2 3y ago
"It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo." I don't know, it sounds like you think people actually like their jobs. Seems like for most of us, we do work at shitty BigCos. Plenty of small shitty companies too. That's just how life goes.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Agreed. It takes constant effort and a lot of luck to land at a small company with competent people and good, sane culture. I scored that once by accident. We all keep in touch, people from every department, and recount how it was the best job we ever had. It was acquired by a medium company of limited competence and everyone was scattered to the wind in a frenzy of empire building by the managers in that company. I have been consulting/contracting and visiting megacorps since then. Traumatizing, to say the least.
hn_version_0023 3y ago
Sounds like “hustle culture”, which IMO is a cancer on the human mind. We’re apex predators; laziness is inherent to our being. Or at least thats my head-canon :)
archiewood 3y ago
> This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused. This is what I term the “dirty secret of BI” - for most organisations, most dashboards are unused, except by the teams creating them. This is because reports need to be useful to be used, and most are not. In my opinion useful means one of: 1) Aiding people with actual decision making power to make decisions 2) Improving the ability of “front line” staff to complete their day to day tasks better PowerBI and similar tools are poorly suited to the above because 1) requires mgmt to understand the data they are looking at, which is difficult without context in a grid of charts, and 2) requires a thoughtfully designed, fast UX that is basically impossible to deliver in a dashboard. I’m now working on an open source BI tool, Evidence.dev (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence) which is targeted at these two use cases. It enables you to add context to data inline, design the UX for the use case, and is just fast. Previous discussions on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)
- cxr 3y ago
  This has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. Even the quote at the top of your comment is a quote from the article, and not from the parent.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    Looks like a pretty cool tool though!
zorrotorro 3y ago
Bless you. Which is even more surprising on 'hacker' news. Maybe the average (US-centric) 'hacker' nowadays is just a corporate worker dreaming. I recently joined a megacorp after decades of small companies and I'm having quite enough fun on the project side and everything. Corporate bureaucracy is nothing after you dealt with actual international bureaucracy. Only downside is that pay is /too low/.
mutex_man 3y ago
Every time I see these articles I'm amazed at how at odds it is with my experience. I work for a tiny company of ~30 people and it's awesome. I'm super well taken care of in pay, benefits, and work/life balance. I could make a bit more at a large corp, but I get some pretty stellar benefits here. Also if it's anything like what I read on here then there's no way it's worth it.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I work in games and that already risky to begin with. Finding a small game studio that can pay decently is pretty much like finding a needle in a hay stack. The smallest studio I worked at was still 100+ people, and grew to 200+ by the time I left.
throaway234 3y ago
I'm with you here. I don't like this hand-wringing suffer porn (great label btw!) about how something is wrong with the world. We only have to consider that building and maintaining an organization is not a clear science. To think otherwise is to indulge in utopian thinking. So there will always be wasted effort in any organization, whether it's BigCo or SmallCo or Boy Scouts or the local Church. It's like, if you build any machine, that machine will produce waste. Heck, if you undertake any venture, such as cooking a meal or writing a book or running a 5k, you will produce waste: wasted food scraps, wasted words (that the editor will remove), wasted trainings (when you werent really focused, eg.) A person being unhappy about an organization happens because of a single reason: they are placed in a position in that organization that makes them unhappy. They can change their position or the organization. Or they can recalibrate their mind to make themselves happy. And this is what happens: people move around or change jobs or reflect and discover a new purpose.
hef19898 3y ago
Not to forget the inevitable techbro complaining about being unable to support a family and buy a house at anything below 500k per year. Or being able to retire...
BoiledCabbage 3y ago
I have no idea who Zippia is, but according to them 1/3rd of software engineers in the US work at companies >10,000 people. And 2/3rds of software engineers work at companies still > 1,000 people. So I'd argue, working at a small shop, while not rare, also isn't as predominant as you're portraying. https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/ https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/
- skrebbel 3y ago
  While I meant globally, and I’m not sure that these stats generalize beyond the US (but they very much might), I’m surprised! I had expected 2/3rd to work at companies under 1000 employees simply because there’s so extremely many of those and many of them need devs. EDIT woa that page says there’s 320k software engineers in the US. That’s one entire percent of the population! That’s a lot, could that really be true?
  - eliasdaler 3y ago
    That’s 0.1%, actually.
    - skrebbel 3y ago
      (Facepalm) (thanks)
  - somsak2 3y ago
    Seems pretty off, Department of Labor clocks it more around 1.8m https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
indymike 3y ago
>It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, People are bad at understanding risk. When a company pays significantly more for the same job than another, there is always an economic reason: * The job is undesirable because of how people are treated, and as a result the only way to attract and retain people is to overpay. The extra pay mitigates flight risk when the inevitable bad day or week happens for the hire. * Management is likely to or has a history of sudden lay offs and firings often indiscriminately. The extra pay mitigates the risk of sudden loss of income to the employee. * Poor reputation/employment brand requires paying more to get people to avoid the risk of associating with that bad employer brand. The extra money is being paid not because the employer wants to. It is exactly because they have to in order to hire and retain people that can do the job. The whole "we're better and pay a premium because you are the best developers in the world" is really management self-justifying having to overpay due to risk. When you look at compensation, ask yourself and the interviewer why is the company over-paying? You'll often save yourself years of misery.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  This is true, but it got very temporarily skewed in recent years at some companies that had a lot of cash flow. There really were companies hiring a lot of highly qualified people mostly to have large teams of highly qualified people. The rubber band is snapping back, though. Layoffs are hitting all of these companies and expectations are rising quickly. Inevitably, companies paying a lot of money for people will expect to get their money’s worth out of them.
  - indymike 3y ago
    > The rubber band is snapping back, though. One can argue that the snap-back is exactly they had to offer more money to have large teams of highly qualified people. > expectations are rising quickly I think more reality hitting than expectations hitting.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
So… you don't want to improve things? The unhappy person should leave. Is that right? Not a major driver of improvement, that there attitude.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”. Behind all such writing is an unspoken piece of context: those terrible huge companies pay software devs better than small ones. It's not that they can't work at a smaller company - it's just that it means taking a hit to your take-home pay, so it's Not An Option.

skrebbel 3y ago
Agree! In fact, while you wrote this I made an edit (last sentence) to address that. It was supposed to be my core point but I had somehow left it implicit.
antupis 3y ago
Also work life balance is usually better in big corp you actually can clock that 9:5 and go home.
- djbusby 3y ago
  All of my friends at FB/G work way more hours than me and miss family activities. Same as when I was at MS.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    FAANG are megacorps pretending to be startups to young developers, and treat them accordingly. There are other megacorps doing tech that behave like proper megacorps, and pay accordingly.
  - BoxFour 3y ago
    Those companies tend to attract type As, and it’s similarly easy for non type As to feel implicit peer pressure. You don’t have to work a ton to succeed. If you prefer to maintain a 9-5 schedule at these companies, it's extremely possible as long as you: 1) genuinely stick to a 9-5 work routine (some individuals I saw struggling were actually working something like 11-4). 2) are comfortable with the possibility of not experiencing rapid career advancement, potentially reaching a plateau at the first terminal level.
  - surajrmal 3y ago
    The people who tend to work extra hours are the ones who choose to in my experience. If you don't work extra hours now you won't after switching to one of those companies either. You might witness folks who do, but you can usually tell they are more self motivated than they are forced into it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- Aurornis 3y ago
  Depends on the company. My stints with BigCorp life were full of 6-7PM meeting times and expectations to keep up with Slack and email even during vacations and holidays. I have friends at Amazon who have started to miss our Saturday events because they’re feverishly working to avoid being caught in the next round of layoffs. I also have friends at some FAANG companies who seem like they’re barely working (their own admission) so it varies wildly. Can’t really generalize.
neogodless 3y ago
You're saying if you can't maximize your pay, it's not an option? I cannot wrap my head around it. Being happy with your life is not a one-to-one correlation with income. You can make less money than "maximum" and still have a great life.
- argiopetech 3y ago
  It's not necessarily maximizing money, but maintaining lifestyle. It's extremely common for people to increase their standard of living as their means increase, and reducing that requires significant effort in some cases (e.g., people tend to buy as much house as they can afford, so any significant salary reduction could necessitate selling the house and uprooting your family). It's a minimal sacrifice in the face of having to work a job you hate, IMO, but it's still a powerful barrier for many.
  - neogodless 3y ago
    Right. > extremely common for people to increase their standard of living That was a choice. But the opposite is "not a choice"? You choose to spend so much money that you are forced into work you may despise to support the spending choices you make, so there's no option to... not make those spending choices?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Choices aren't made equal. Some are easier to make, even unconsciously, than others. For example, choosing immediate pleasure is easier than immediate discomfort. A series of small, incremental choices over time is easier than one large step. Etc.
      - djoletina 3y ago
        What is your point? It’s still a choice. It’s easier to spend more money than less money, great insight.
        3y ago
coffeebeqn 3y ago
Unless you’re talking about big tech that’s not true. A random bank or insurance company or whatever will pay worse than well funded startups

gcapu 3y ago

God points but: 1) For someone in BigCo it is fun to read. 2) BigCo is not a bad place for most people. Management should just shut up about efficiency and data driven. No one believes them, not even themselves.

Moru 3y ago
It's also nice to read for us in SmallCo. We remember why we took that salary hit to stay sane.
- charlie0 3y ago
  Hey, some of us in SmallCo have dreams of trading in joy for a much larger paycheck at BigCo. No pain, no gain.
RandomLensman 3y ago
The audience for the management statements, such as investors and analysts, might just want to hear certain things. These things will have certain fads and fashions as to what needs to be uttered.
starky 3y ago
Yeah, at this point in my career I'm tired of the bullshit that management spouts. I know they don't believe one bit of what they are saying except as a method to get product out quicker. We aren't even necessarily labour bound, but management doesn't accept that 9 women can't make a baby in a month. I'm all for looking at processes periodically to make sure we are doing the right things to get everything released, but when you come at it from a hitting ever tighter arbitrary KPIs you just make everyone angry or apathetic to your words.

Draiken 3y ago

If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important I would fully agree with you. But it is. I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever. So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice. Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win like being an early employee in a unicorn startup is not a real plan. It's wishful thinking. I hate this is the world we live in and my soul dies a bit every day I have to waste my talents writing useless software, but there's no real choice.

giantg2 3y ago
At least you have talents. Imagine being in your 30s with a family to support and no real career future - bad reviews, bad organizations structure, shitty technology/systems, and no skills to move elsewhere.
neogodless 3y ago
> No it's not really a choice. Hard disagree. Have never worked for "terrible big company" (though some mediocre medium companies!) But outside of the super high cost of living areas like NYC and San Francisco, it's trivially simple (if not easy) to live on $50-60K USD each year (adjust this number for inflation as needed) while still enjoying yourself, having high performance technology, doing some travel, etc. You can't buy every damn thing you want or live like a millionaire, but you can live a great life. How many software / engineering jobs in the U.S., excluding terrible big tech companies, pay more than $60k USD per year? Almost all of them. In fact, it's not hard to make well over $100k. And live on half that. So you don't have to work forever just because you're not making $500k USD each year at some huge terrible tech company.
- anvil-on-my-toe 3y ago
  $60-100k salary is not enough to support a family and retire; it's probably not enough for a single person to make meaningful progress towards retirement because at that level of pay home ownership is constantly out of reach and inflation outpaces wage growth. It's sacrificing your life so someone else can get rich.

harimau777 3y ago

How do you go about finding a job at an amazing company with fulfilling jobs?

skrebbel 3y ago
For starters, HN has a monthly "Who's hiring?" thread with a lot of cool companies posting. Personally I find a lot more of the posts there to make me go "hey that sounds like a cool place to work" than eg a search on job sites or Stack Overflow career ads. In a broad sense I mean, eg there's tiny startups, healthy profitable SMBs, and VC-fueled unicorn rocket ships posting there, but they all seem above-average cool for their category to me. As an employer, I find that the inverse holds too - applicants that find us via the "Who's hiring?" thread are much more often a potential fit than those who find us via other routes.
layer8 3y ago
Look for owner-managed companies without middle management, or where middle management consists of engineers and not MBAs. Look for small(ish) companies that work on topics you find interesting. Connect with people who are looking for the same. You might not find the fulfilling job in a sane company on the first try, but if you keep looking and talking to people, you’re likely to find one.

giantg2 3y ago

"It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo." I don't know, it sounds like you think people actually like their jobs. Seems like for most of us, we do work at shitty BigCos. Plenty of small shitty companies too. That's just how life goes.

datavirtue 3y ago
Agreed. It takes constant effort and a lot of luck to land at a small company with competent people and good, sane culture. I scored that once by accident. We all keep in touch, people from every department, and recount how it was the best job we ever had. It was acquired by a medium company of limited competence and everyone was scattered to the wind in a frenzy of empire building by the managers in that company. I have been consulting/contracting and visiting megacorps since then. Traumatizing, to say the least.

hn_version_0023 3y ago

Sounds like “hustle culture”, which IMO is a cancer on the human mind. We’re apex predators; laziness is inherent to our being. Or at least thats my head-canon :)

archiewood 3y ago

> This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused. This is what I term the “dirty secret of BI” - for most organisations, most dashboards are unused, except by the teams creating them. This is because reports need to be useful to be used, and most are not. In my opinion useful means one of: 1) Aiding people with actual decision making power to make decisions 2) Improving the ability of “front line” staff to complete their day to day tasks better PowerBI and similar tools are poorly suited to the above because 1) requires mgmt to understand the data they are looking at, which is difficult without context in a grid of charts, and 2) requires a thoughtfully designed, fast UX that is basically impossible to deliver in a dashboard. I’m now working on an open source BI tool, Evidence.dev (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence) which is targeted at these two use cases. It enables you to add context to data inline, design the UX for the use case, and is just fast. Previous discussions on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)

cxr 3y ago
This has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. Even the quote at the top of your comment is a quote from the article, and not from the parent.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  Looks like a pretty cool tool though!

zorrotorro 3y ago

Bless you. Which is even more surprising on 'hacker' news. Maybe the average (US-centric) 'hacker' nowadays is just a corporate worker dreaming. I recently joined a megacorp after decades of small companies and I'm having quite enough fun on the project side and everything. Corporate bureaucracy is nothing after you dealt with actual international bureaucracy. Only downside is that pay is /too low/.

mutex_man 3y ago

Every time I see these articles I'm amazed at how at odds it is with my experience. I work for a tiny company of ~30 people and it's awesome. I'm super well taken care of in pay, benefits, and work/life balance. I could make a bit more at a large corp, but I get some pretty stellar benefits here. Also if it's anything like what I read on here then there's no way it's worth it.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
I work in games and that already risky to begin with. Finding a small game studio that can pay decently is pretty much like finding a needle in a hay stack. The smallest studio I worked at was still 100+ people, and grew to 200+ by the time I left.

throaway234 3y ago

I'm with you here. I don't like this hand-wringing suffer porn (great label btw!) about how something is wrong with the world. We only have to consider that building and maintaining an organization is not a clear science. To think otherwise is to indulge in utopian thinking. So there will always be wasted effort in any organization, whether it's BigCo or SmallCo or Boy Scouts or the local Church. It's like, if you build any machine, that machine will produce waste. Heck, if you undertake any venture, such as cooking a meal or writing a book or running a 5k, you will produce waste: wasted food scraps, wasted words (that the editor will remove), wasted trainings (when you werent really focused, eg.) A person being unhappy about an organization happens because of a single reason: they are placed in a position in that organization that makes them unhappy. They can change their position or the organization. Or they can recalibrate their mind to make themselves happy. And this is what happens: people move around or change jobs or reflect and discover a new purpose.

hef19898 3y ago

Not to forget the inevitable techbro complaining about being unable to support a family and buy a house at anything below 500k per year. Or being able to retire...

BoiledCabbage 3y ago

I have no idea who Zippia is, but according to them 1/3rd of software engineers in the US work at companies >10,000 people. And 2/3rds of software engineers work at companies still > 1,000 people. So I'd argue, working at a small shop, while not rare, also isn't as predominant as you're portraying. https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/ https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/

skrebbel 3y ago
While I meant globally, and I’m not sure that these stats generalize beyond the US (but they very much might), I’m surprised! I had expected 2/3rd to work at companies under 1000 employees simply because there’s so extremely many of those and many of them need devs. EDIT woa that page says there’s 320k software engineers in the US. That’s one entire percent of the population! That’s a lot, could that really be true?
- eliasdaler 3y ago
  That’s 0.1%, actually.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    (Facepalm) (thanks)
- somsak2 3y ago
  Seems pretty off, Department of Labor clocks it more around 1.8m https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

indymike 3y ago

>It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, People are bad at understanding risk. When a company pays significantly more for the same job than another, there is always an economic reason: * The job is undesirable because of how people are treated, and as a result the only way to attract and retain people is to overpay. The extra pay mitigates flight risk when the inevitable bad day or week happens for the hire. * Management is likely to or has a history of sudden lay offs and firings often indiscriminately. The extra pay mitigates the risk of sudden loss of income to the employee. * Poor reputation/employment brand requires paying more to get people to avoid the risk of associating with that bad employer brand. The extra money is being paid not because the employer wants to. It is exactly because they have to in order to hire and retain people that can do the job. The whole "we're better and pay a premium because you are the best developers in the world" is really management self-justifying having to overpay due to risk. When you look at compensation, ask yourself and the interviewer why is the company over-paying? You'll often save yourself years of misery.

Aurornis 3y ago
This is true, but it got very temporarily skewed in recent years at some companies that had a lot of cash flow. There really were companies hiring a lot of highly qualified people mostly to have large teams of highly qualified people. The rubber band is snapping back, though. Layoffs are hitting all of these companies and expectations are rising quickly. Inevitably, companies paying a lot of money for people will expect to get their money’s worth out of them.
- indymike 3y ago
  > The rubber band is snapping back, though. One can argue that the snap-back is exactly they had to offer more money to have large teams of highly qualified people. > expectations are rising quickly I think more reality hitting than expectations hitting.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

So… you don't want to improve things? The unhappy person should leave. Is that right? Not a major driver of improvement, that there attitude.