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Ask HN: Which industries are the most varied in total comp? Most homogeneous?

6 points by ccajas ↗ HN
I'm trying to get some guidance as to where to start looking for variance in total compensation, which usually correlated with work-life balance and career growth, among different industries. My first guess is that the heavily regulated industries like healthcare have less variation in total comp.

As a software engineer, I know that the bottom floor of compensation scrapes minimum wage in some companies, also usually they are least desirable for quality of time and work. The only one I can think of where the floor doesn't get that bad is perhaps doctors. There are tiers of pay there too, but the bottom floor is usually high for them.

Is there any research or dissertation done on this subject? Or even just a list ranking several fields from most homogeneous in total comp to least.

5 comments

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contingencies
The most freedom is in IT, because you can go remote, there is no licensing (change markets at will), and starting your own venture is always an option with relatively low barriers to entry. Also, the norm is that you get paid, unlike - say - pure art type creatives. Try thinking outside of the traditional wageslave context and see if you can save on living expenses, tax or get extra holidays by configuring your life around longer term remote projects, etc. instead of doing the mortgage in a major city thing. It's worked out well for me, YMMV.
ccajas
How would you live on, say, $1200 a month without leaving the US and without roommates/a partner? Currently I pay $400 a month to share an apartment with one of my family. And it's been hard in putting aside money to save. I'm trying to see where else I can get by that actually allows me to save on more expenses (and I don't know yet if I can ditch the car because the cheapest places in the US tend to be the most likely where cars are a major benefit)
contingencies
I don't know the US well. Bicycles are cheaper than cars, which both depreciate and steal time while removing opportunity for exercise. Don't drink. Cook more at home. If all else fails, change jobs or marry money.
eindiran
I think what you'll find is that industries that use knowledge workers tend to have higher variance than those that don't; industries that have a high percentage of wages come from incentive pay will have a greater variance than industries that don't use incentive pay; and industries that are heavily regulated or unionized will have lower variance than industries that are lightly regulated or unionized.

Incentive pay: for example, sales people and wait staff have a highly variant distribution based on commission and tips respectively.

Knowledge workers: software engineers have an extremely high variance wage distribution.

High-regulation industries: mining is highly regulated and is unionized, leading to a very low degree of variance in wages between miners.

There are exceptions to this and the categories can interact in interesting ways: For example, medicine is highly regulated but they are knowledge workers, so there is reasonably high variance in wages, particularly for doctors (relative to other health professionals).

Another interesting effect is that highly unionized industries can see significant variance, but it is controlled almost exclusively by seniority within the union. Controlling for seniority, the variance in these industries tends to disappear.

This is an interesting paper on the subject that provides some pretty compelling evidence for the regulation and incentive pay claims: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1981/04/art5full.pdf