Ask HN: Tell me your stories of taking lower paid work to be happier

In my case, I really needed to be "in control" of my day-to-day work for awhile. A part of me regrets the lost income, because my investments that I used to live on would have gone bonkers; but I was in a situation at my old job that was quickly getting unhealthy.

So what I'll say is:

1: There's a lot to be said for making gobs of money when you're young. If you can tough it out for XX more months and invest gobs of money, those investments might help you retire much younger than you think. (And at that point, you don't need to show up for work.) (To put it in perspective: I missed out on a rather lucrative investment because I lived on my savings for 18 months and didn't have the spare cash to invest.)

2: There's a lot to be said for work satisfaction. You might need to "scale back" a bit: Drive a Toyota instead of a Lexus, have a more modest home, ect.

In my case, I don't regret quitting my job to start a business. I regret certain mistakes I made with the business, but those are critical lessons that I'll use if/when I ever work in a "low income" stage of a startup again.

Was a front-end developer, then tried to go full-stack and it was just too much to deal with. I worked at a huge corporation and the team I was on was full of the "rock star" types - like you said, always chasing the latest thing. I finally had to get out when someone said, "Bruh, you still use Angular? Pfffft, SVELTE is where its now, you're practically a dinosaur!" Same thing, it became so consuming trying to know the coolest thing instead of just being able to build something robust, accessible and easy to use. I look back now and just think how bizarre that mindset is.

I moved into accessibility and love it. I'm further up the chain and work closely with business owners and designers which is really fun to work with and I get to indulge the UI/UX side of my brain now.

I'm doing the same thing. I do some fun dev stuff on the side and have a few freelance clients I work with to keep a nice side income coming in. I have a lot less gray hair now and actually enjoy having free time to decide what I want to work on and when I want to work on it. My wife says I hardly ever complain about my job now so I got that going for me, which is nice.

- There's an important difference between being earning less and being paid unfairly. It's easy to work for less as long as it's enough to fund your lifestyle and save something for retirement. It's very difficult to be happy if you believe you're paid unfairly (which is subjective, of course).

- There's generally no correlation between job satisfaction and pay. I've left to work at more interesting roles and about half the time ended up earning more for the privilege.

- On average, toxic companies pay more. There seems to be a certain class of company that believes it's okay to treat employees poorly as long as they pay well enough. This includes everything from overwork to overt bullying and worse. These opportunities tend to be evergreen due to their high turnover and so are overrepresented on job listings, etc. (Your network is less likely to refer you into this sort of role.) Focusing on salary alone is a sure-fire way to end up somewhere toxic, or stay somewhere longer than is wise.