Not what you asked, but even if it feels like the cause of your stress is work, don't rule out other things like lack of exercise, unhealthy diet, relationships that feel like they're going nowhere etc.
And vice versa!
Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
51–60 of 60 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#52> Money aside, did you ever leave a job you were happy with to find one where you were even more happy? Did that work? I understand you said money aside but money is genuinely all you should care about. You are trading decades of your waking life to the rat race. It should be your first, and in my opinion, most imperative concern. If you were truly a generous and austere person you'd be a volunteer. Frequently. I've…
I don’t think this is great advice. I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical take that does not apply so well to the kinds of jobs that many people have at HN. I think the main way that money (above a point) matters a lot is that it tends to correlate with other good qualities like not being stressed or overworked, being respected by your colleagues / bosses, etc. So I think it mostly isn’t like you choos…
With Amazon it's very explicitly to push people out without paying them.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#53only two rules in life.
good or bad, nothing lasts. plan on it.
the next thing’s always better. if it’s not, it’s not the next thing.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#54> Money aside, did you ever leave a job you were happy with to find one where you were even more happy? Did that work? I understand you said money aside but money is genuinely all you should care about. You are trading decades of your waking life to the rat race. It should be your first, and in my opinion, most imperative concern. If you were truly a generous and austere person you'd be a volunteer. Frequently. I've…
I don’t think this is great advice. I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical take that does not apply so well to the kinds of jobs that many people have at HN. I think the main way that money (above a point) matters a lot is that it tends to correlate with other good qualities like not being stressed or overworked, being respected by your colleagues / bosses, etc. So I think it mostly isn’t like you choos…
> I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical
Like most engineers I didn't start out that way so perhaps you are right and a few grains of salt would make it better. However, I do not think the average HNer represents a weird aberration of happiness on the scale. I think most companies that hire on this site likely chronically underpay people. Not their fault most likely. HN caters to early stage startups.
However, I think my overarching message is clear. Happiness is entirely relative. At any rate, you should never prioritize happiness over financial security because you should be well compensated, first and foremost, for the time in your life you will never get back. Your compensation should be even better for dealing with a bad company. You might argue that spending those hours of your life in a relative happy state is healthier. I'd agree. But to me, that eventuality comes about after establishing good pay. I don't plan on retiring extremely wealthy but I think I'll be okay looking back at the sacrifices I've made sitting on the veranda with fewer financial worries. Perhaps this is a uniquely American perspective. I don't know.
Certainly, trading $100k and a good job for $150k and a job that gets you yelled at all the time is not a very good trade. Analyze the opportunity cost. The big point here is two things I think and I think you'd agree:
1. Analysis of opportunity cost is important. That means, to me, quantifying "happiness" with some dollar value. Is happiness worth $10k to you? $30k? I guess it depends. I'd actually quite enjoy a research position, for example, but I cannot take the make-ends-meet-and-no-retirement pay that most academic positions give.
2. People are often afraid to leap into a new position. To me, this is because they fail to quantify happiness with some dollar value. People often use qualitative metrics. Those are useful but only in the context of the quantitative reality.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where are you finding other (tech) jobs that are ok with this arrangement?
The secret is nobody needs to know
How does that work? Do you not need to provide your previous (current) manager as a reference?
When your vacation ends, do you just quit and not give 2 weeks notice?
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think this is great advice. I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical take that does not apply so well to the kinds of jobs that many people have at HN. I think the main way that money (above a point) matters a lot is that it tends to correlate with other good qualities like not being stressed or overworked, being respected by your colleagues / bosses, etc. So I think it mostly isn’t like you choos…
> I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical Like most engineers I didn't start out that way so perhaps you are right and a few grains of salt would make it better. However, I do not think the average HNer represents a weird aberration of happiness on the scale. I think most companies that hire on this site likely chronically underpay people. Not their fault most likely. HN caters to early stage startups. H…
I mostly assume people here are above the threshold you describe but maybe that’s just wrong? I think the uniquely American perspective is software developers getting paid very well at plenty of big tech companies. That’s the kind of compensation that people who go into biglaw or investment banking would get without the poor working conditions or high barriers to entry. That sort of compensation is much less common in Europe, even from the same American tech companies. A thing people often say is that this compensates for high cost of living but plenty of European cities are expensive and cost of living adjustments for these companies in the US often aren’t so large relative to the compensation, presumably because people could threaten to move to a high-CoL area. Maybe this will stop being the case (software developers might get paid less in the US) at some point. And maybe that is already happening (stock prices no longer massively increasing making stock grants magically worth more) to a lesser extent.
Personally, I think most people don’t quit because of a lack of quantitative approaches but rather because they are afraid about losing what they have, ending somewhere else that’s worse, making big, irreversible-seeming decisions, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#57At one of my previous jobs, I did a project on employee retention. Our goal was to identify valuable employees who were most likely to leave. The results were surprising at first. The top two factors leading to an employee moving to a new job were: high performance review and high increase in compensation (raise and bonus). On reflection, we realized that we just reaffirmed their market value, so they could negotiate…
Really curious about something: according to the Pareto principle you should identify the top square root of employees that are top performers and pay them significantly more than the rest (they are producing several times more,~ 9 times, you even if you pay them double you get more value than from the rest of the people). Was this a conclusion of your project on employee retention?
This can change from quarter to quarter. There are companies like Cisco which pay bonuses sometimes exceeding 100% of salary to top employees. This way they’re not stuck paying that if the employee loses motivation.
There are some downsides. Engineers are far removed from the money and complex problems often require the work of many people. Some of that work is 100% necessary and sometimes not valued (writing tests). The typical mistake I see is companies rewarding people who delivered big greenfield projects before the projects have been proven to actually work. A few people on the lucky team get raises, bonuses, promotions, and then more then half the time, the project fails and the older stand-by that was being supported and slowly improved by the less-cool engineers continues to being in all the money. Those engineers then get pissed and some fraction quit.
So a few major caveats * correctly identifying the top 3% is difficult for upper management * identifying too early leads to false positives and backlash * because it’s far from the money, many programmers are quasi-communist in terms of thinking about team deliveries, so highlighting the output of a single engineer makes one person happy but half a dozen mad. There are many companies that don’t announce promotions too far and wide for that reason
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#58Talk to former employees. Connect via linked in
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if leaving your 1st software job will make you happier?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
some entries in the same column: should I quit my job -> 5.203 should I start my own business -> 5.256 should I propose -> -5.125
I’m not sure I understand what I’m looking at but I think my reading is that if people are unsure about quitting their jobs they probably just need a bit of kick out of status-quo bias, but if people are unsure about whether or not they should propose, they should probably find something they are more sure about instead of letting a coin decide. It doesn’t sound totally unintuitive to me. I guess I think of people th…
My interpretation is "If you're unsure enough to flip a coin, then...
1) Being forced to quit your job would make you 5.203 out of 10 points happier(!)
2) Being forced to start your own business would make you 5.203 out of 10 points happier(!)
3) Being forced to propose would make you 5.125 out of 10 points LESS happy(!)"
The size of the effect is much larger than I'd expect.
> Also, based on the GP’s formula, maybe the effects look large because people don’t do what the coin tells them very often so you are dividing by a small number?
I don't think so. The same "small number" exists implicitly in the numerator, since (EV[H | heads] - EV[H | tails]) = 0 for anyone ignoring the coin.
For example, imagine quitting really does make you 5 points happier, but a random 99% of people ignore the coin, and 1% follow it.
The numerator would be (EV[H | heads] - EV[H | tails]) = 0.99*0 + 0.01*5, since happiness is unaffected by coin toss for people ignoring the coin. The denominator would be 0.01, so we'd get B_wald=5 as desired.