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Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

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Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#471
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The taxes are also much higher in Europe, especially on those compliant "upper middle class" techies we're talking about here. For anyone with basic understanding of arithmetics it's not even a question that EU techies are woefully underpaid, which is why all the good ones work in the US or for EU subsidiaries of US companies which actually respect the engineers.

I don't believe this is the case. In central Europe (Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary) you can have EDIT: (using the most tax-effective form of employment, which most of the time is working as a contractor. Being a full-time employee comes with so much higher taxes in EU)

> Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary

The salaries that are considered "acceptable" in those countries would result in a _negative_ effective tax rate in the US. Tax rate alone is not everything. It's a combination of pretax pay and the effective tax rate that you need to be considering.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I've only lived in the bay area 20 years, but this strikes me as quite dramatic. I know literally dozens of men in tech happily raising families in the Bay Area. It's true the male/female ratios are worse (although we should certainly adjust for the large gay male population). But when I talk to friends who are dating, it's the women who seem to be struggling to find anybody decent, not the men. Perhaps the p…

> It's true the male/female ratios are worse The fact that there are way more men than women in the Bay is a statistical reality, which you admit yourself. Then you bring an opinion blog-post by a single woman as counter-evidence. Ironically, all these complaints about "guys there that have a disgusting sense of entitlement" just go to show how picky she is, and can afford to be, in San Francisco. Nothing in GP's pos…

> As a final anecdote, I did know women who dated executives and VCs in the Bay. Some of these guys had mammoth egos. Curiously, that didn't prevent them from having far better dating lives than any engineer I knew.

Dating != relationship. Women can have fun too, just dating, and sometimes they are the ones using you just because your ego doesn’t allow you to see it.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move to South East Asia instead. Burgeoning tech scene, some incredible nature, dating is considerably easier, both with locals and other expats, health care is first-rate and a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper ... "a rural state" sounds like all the worst bits of living in the US.

Out of curiosity, where specifically in SE Asia would you consider living (or actually do live)?

Bali and Thailand (Chiang Mai and Bangkok) are fantastic.

Medellin in South America as well

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year There is so much wrong in this sentence. First, there is no more “meat grinders” in the US than in Europe. I worked at Microsoft and Criteo in Europe, and the slacking there seems to be on par with what OP describes. You mention 40/80k per year being pitiful? This kind of remu…

> Also, please, bear in mind that you cannot directly compare US and EU salaries. Your 80k€ gross in e.g. France should be the equivalent of $150k for a US worker; if you account for the same level of medical care and retirement savings. Not much of a difference after you realise this. What makes you think that? As to retirement savings, American retirement payments replace 70% of working income on average, versus 60…

I totally agree. Having lived through both systems and countries with similar salaries than the one you mention. France is a scam. Europe is a scam. Companie are not entitled to anything they make you either enter some traditional companies with very little benefits (definitly no 401k, discounted movie tickets at best) or they make you enter startup world giving you shitting fictional "stocks" that definitely won't make you a millionaire even if the company hits a multi-billion dollar valuation. You know what else? people managing, doing PM, all the soft skills jobs are better paid in france than dev jobs and better viewed overall. unlike in USA where people pay for the technical skills, engineers compensations in europe are low. somehow we still an old country dominated by old money and the rule that only the elites can get chunks of the companies even tho they are not the one slaving. There are a few exceptions to this but those companies moved their HQ and their core in USA to get away from all this BS. such as Datadog or even Docker. oh and regarding price of accomodation paris is much more expensive than NYC. new york not being only manhattan and brooklyn for people who like to compare even modern apartments in LIC sell for half of what a 200year old apartment would sell in paris.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#475
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The taxes are also much higher in Europe, especially on those compliant "upper middle class" techies we're talking about here. For anyone with basic understanding of arithmetics it's not even a question that EU techies are woefully underpaid, which is why all the good ones work in the US or for EU subsidiaries of US companies which actually respect the engineers.

I don't believe this is the case. In central Europe (Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary) you can have EDIT: (using the most tax-effective form of employment, which most of the time is working as a contractor. Being a full-time employee comes with so much higher taxes in EU)

> AFAIK in US just the health insurance is very expensive.

In the US, someone like a programmer would get their health insurance paid for by their employer as additional compensation on top of their already much higher salary. The vast majority of Americans either get health insurance through their employer or are retired and are eligible for Medicare. Employers on average pay 82% of premiums for a single person, leaving on average $1,200 paid by the worker. For someone like a programmer, it’s common for employees to pay the whole premium. When you look at US salaries, that additional compensation is on top of the reported salary. So although health insurance is very expensive, you’re mostly not paying it out of the reported salary.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#476

I am not kidding: you are all set to be CTO or dev lead (mind: only if there’s actually a team so you don’t have to do much development) at some late-early stage funded startup, that wants a long-time Google alum on their staff, in leadership. Without even a change in your work ethic. Not even slightly a joke.

Can you expand on this?

Leadership positions like that mean doing a whole other set of stuff that feels like "not-work" if work has always meant personally, directly moving a product forward. Those meetings you always hated because they killed your productivity? Now they are your productivity. Sitting at your desk and can't think of a single thing to do that anyone's likely to care about? Try not to look like you're relaxing, but relax. You did your thing. Doing more now would be doing worse at your job because you're probably going to be annoying and slowing down the people doing the work. Maybe shoot off an email to someone else to see if you can get a chain going, just to keep up visibility. I mean, you can just "lead" a meeting (to be clear, this is actually valuable when done well!) and come out of it feeling like you contributed nothing at all, but guess what? You just did your job. Shit, sometimes just telling two other people to go talk, without you, and tell you what they come up with, is your job!

IME the weirdest thing about those sorts of middle- to upper-management software positions is that almost all the actual work feels like slacking or time-filler you might do when too burnt out to do real work, until you get used to it. Write up some proposals for something, write some specs or go over some stories with someone. Get some face-time with a stakeholder to go over some feature, propose some new ones. Talk timeline with some manager. Coach sales on the product. It is actual work that someone wants to be done, but to me (and I suspect to OP) it feels like you're no longer doing any work at all, you're just, like, someone who hangs around the people doing the work and chats with folks.

Yet (in most orgs—perhaps not FAANG) you are better-respected (you can feel this in meetings, it's incredibly weird at first) and better-compensated than you would be as a developer.

And then the Google pedigree thing is obvious. Youngish startups with a little money just starting to build their team past "a co-founder and these two recent grads" are hungry to get FAANG alums into leadership. I don't know whether that's a good thing for them to care about—maybe it is—but they do seem to show a very strong preference for them.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can expect some hundreds/thousands dollars per year This is not correct. A senior (meaning L5-L6+, nothing crazy) engineer at a big public tech co will get 6 figures yearly in stock compensation in addition to their salary.

Sorry, but this is urban legend to me. No saying it does not happen, but that is definitely a very special case. I manage a team of quantitative developers in a Hedge Fund and do between 50 and 100 interviews per year, at senior level. I have head hunter compensation report on the candidates. I see regularly candidates from Google, Amazon, and finance industry. I very rarely see 6 digit bonus for big techs. My experi…

We don't get six digit bonuses. I'm in the high end of the range the parent posted, and I've never seen a six digit bonus. However, I do get a high five digit (cash) bonus, and around 250k of stock comp on top of my 250k base salary. I don't think of the stock as a bonus. It's just part of my compensation.

Honestly even the bonuses are not bonuses the way bank people normally think of them. I have family that worked in corporate finance and they described not uncommon situations where a bonus would be more than all the rest of the compensation for a year. And it was highly variable. Meanwhile both my bonus and stock comp have been steadily increasing, but not in a variable way. It's a pretty consistent 5-15% per year.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#478
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this highlights the fundamental problem with hiring at many large companies. They think they are getting the best, but are they? They sure are overpaying for their employees. I think if OP isn't motivated enough to learn, excel, and build cool things on the side while he has a catered life at google, I don't think she/he will put in much effort elsewhere? That intrinsic motivation isn't there. And it honestly…

>That intrinsic motivation isn't there it took me leaving a job that i thought i was stuck in to find my inner musician, snowboard daily, and ultimately start my first business. sometimes being an employee is just a soul-sucking adventure

Yeah just having to be at my office for 9 hours makes me sleep worse, and drains your spice for life that you would normally be able to parlay into diving into your interests.

Did you just quit and spend a year or whatever with your interests and thinking of business ideas?

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#479
post #130

You remind me myself a few years ago: a talented, but bored slacker who didn't see any point in investing any energy into that project. Turns out I was right: the project didn't go anywhere after I left and investing any extra time would be a clueless thing to do. So what's changed since then? Have I found meaning in work? No! I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what bod…

This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for while in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year, no stock options, without any hope of early retirement or owning a decent home without a 30 year loan or financial…

> life really is unfair and success in life is more linked to the lottery of birth and opportunities available to you than any amount of hard work.

Of course it is. My life is one example. Working in a third world country I was working like crazy and I had many of my customers in Europe and US F100 companies say that I am the hardest worker and I am way better than their employees. When they came to know how much I was paid they were in complete shock. My company too used to ignore the appreciations because if they do then they would have to pay me more! I worked in the company for 12 years. Moved to another smaller company and the cycle repeats there too and have moved out after 1.8 years in it.

It is a lottery alright. That is why you had gold rush and mass migration in search of better life. Lower migration barriers and majority in poverty motivated them. It is difficult to make this decision now as there is a feeling of OK pay and a bigger migration barrier.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#480
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My advice would be work hard, save your money, travel when you can to better locales to improve your social life, but with the eventual goal of permanently moving out when you've saved enough. If you pick your destination within the USA well, dating prospects will improve greatly, and if you look worldwide (and can overcome the language and immigration issues), it could improve dramatically. The Bay Area will seem…

Just out of curiosity, why do you say "Assuming Trump is re-elected, my portfolio should hit the $1,000,000 mark within two years."? Do you believe the stock market will get bad if he doesn't win the election? or is it the other way, i.e. if the does get re-elected, the market will be better so it will take you less than 2 years to reach your goal? I've never heard this take before so I'm genuinely curious.

Apolitical answer:

Markets prefer political stability. Average annual S&P 500 returns are around ~7% adjusted for inflation, but ~12% when a President is in his second term.

Political answer:

A Trump loss would be presumably be to one of the self-avowed socialists running which would certainly crash the markets.

Furthermore, even without a market crash, a socialist implementing mark-to-market capital gains taxation while also doubling the long-term capital gains rates (15% to 32% for me) would drastically slow down my march towards $1,000,000.

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