Ask HN: Are you a “lifer”? If so why?
I started at a mid-cap household name company at the start of the pandemic and don't see myself leaving of my own accord until I retire for a few reasons:
1. Work is fully remote
2. We have excellent work / life balance
3. Company's stock has weathered this years storm
4. Interviewing is a horror show best avoided, besides...
5. Job market is weakening with no recovery in sight
6. I'm in my early 40s
7. Startup success (which I've had previously as an early employee) is going to be rare in the coming years
427 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadYou literally cannot see the job market improving (or the startup environment for that matter) at any point in your remaining 25 years of employment?
Sure, if nothing changes you're in great shape, but change is inevitable, and the likelihood everything you've mentioned stays the same is effectively zero.
I can't stress how much #6 impacts what makes someone a 'lifer'. By the time you are in 35+ and you've been in tech your entire career, you lean a few important life lessons that you witness the less experienced (both career and life) do all the time.
The bar of compensation is almost always goes up as you progress early in your career. You get used to your standard of living. Next thing you know, you want more money. Getting a promotion or new job that bumps your income, that standard of living naturally goes up. It's hard NOT to go on fancier vacations, upgrade your Honda to a Porsche, hire landscaper/housekeeper/dog walker, buy a bigger house, etc. Eventually, you run into a situation that throws a wrench in disposable income and you have to lower that bar. Then you realize money isn't the most important thing in your career. You learn that the difference between a total comp of $150k to $250k isn't as life changing compared to going from $75k to $150k, so what is the purpose of fighting for more?
When you are 35+, job stability is super important. You might have a family, a hefty savings/retirement account, etc. Whats most important is that work/life balance and not that RSU grant next quarter. Once you find a company that makes you comfortable, and you reach a level of seniority that isn't overwhelming/stressful, stay.
From what I hear of the corporate world, companies are always waiting to do this to everyone. The moment they're confident you're a lifer, you'll never see another market-matching raise or bonus. Maybe never see a raise again.
Any older workers have thoughts on how to manage this? I suspect there may be nothing for it but being prepared to leave if I feel my comp is falling too far behind.
(Or maybe I should just give in, call the $$$ good enough, semi-retire and chill... there's more to life, I hear...)
I was like most people in IT when I started here, I had done a lot of job hopping, made good money and was a temporary millionaire at some bullshit startup. What I didn't expect was to stick around. When I started half the team had been at the company for over 20 years and I thought that they had to be nuts -a few people never worked for any other company 45+ years of service. Then one day I realized I had been here for a decade and then 20 years and now I have 9 years left before I'm sitting on a beach drinking Imperial and being bitten by mosquitos so I figure if I can do it here I might as well.
Very well put. With work, it's often better the devil you know
I work at a FAANG and I will never afford a home. Who is this list for? My senior engineer coworkers live in condos unless they move 2 hours away or have a very high earning spouse
This is still wild to me.
I’m well into my career (coming close to 25 years):
— I do well when looking for work in that I interview well and get most gigs I go for.
- I trade stability for higher rates working shorter gigs without any of the usual safety net / benefits.
- Comp is top end of the range offered in a relatively well off part of the world.
And yet with all that said, $200k is still an utter pipe dream.
I’m not saying I’m necessarily jealous (I’m sure there’s the downsides I don’t see) but man-oh-man that’s a lot of money.
I’m almost reluctant to ask but what is FAANG comp typically?
The amount of stock is locked in based on how many shares the dollar amount you’re offered would buy when you start, so if the share price goes up over time then that’s going to be worth more when it vests (which I guess mostly happened in the last decade), but if it drops from when you started it’s worth less (as happened in the last year, so if you started this time last year and the company stock is down 50%, that compensation is worth a lot less now).
I definitely think it’s good to be aware of what compensation at these places looks like, I wasn’t really aware of how significant the stock thing is until recently (but I had a fun career up to now so not to worry!). I guess one of the downsides is that these are often huge companies there’s a reasonable chance you’ll end up maintaining some boring internal system or whatever, so it depends what motivates you.
It's disappointing, but it's the reality for a lot of people I'm sure.
The alternative to that is contracting - London is a great place to look for that.
There are also roles where you just get paid way more than other roles without a need for particularly difficult expertise. People who manage very 'important' stuff for example.
The going contract dev rate is 150/hr (Java/Python).
Citation needed.
Would be really curious to hear what’s out there.
Could I reach out to you separately so as not to run out of thread depth on here?
(The big question I have on this is if you have a link discussing implications for tax etc. on taking a role from the USA while based in the UK - which is an easier option for me at this time).
If you are making Faang money you can choose a shorter commute. 30 miles is 1-2 hours in silicon valley. My limit is 10 miles/40 mins
FWIW a random survey on the internet lists Austin TX, Miami FL, and San Diego CA as the 'most stressful commutes'
Is the situation any better in other big IT-cities in the States (Seattle, NYC) or in Europe (London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Munich)? Some of these are slightly better than SF and some are even worse IMO.
Yes, housing in the core downtowns is pricey, but get outside the city and there are decent options. This is true of a lot of places. The Bay Area makes it unusually hard to escape high pricing.
You could afford a home in most other US cities even with a pay cut from the typical FAANG salary.
The solution is easy, don’t live in an expensive city. Or inherit property from relatives who lived there 50 years ago. Or have a rich spouse.
And even in those areas, you can find two-unit condos in that range.
I was in a similar situation a few years ago, working at FAANG and living in SCV. Wanted a house more than anything.
Eventually, got relocated to a lower COL area and finally accomplished my dream of owning a home.
Inspector didn’t catch a few things, also bought at the peak of housing mania and now we are both underwater and have sunk a large chunk of our savings into making the house safe and livable for our kids.
If we would have stayed in SCV and rented we’d be in a better financial position. However, overall we are happy with our choices given we don’t have to stress about things like keeping a 3yo quiet for the neighbors who live below us.
Not saying a house won’t make you happy, just saying houses are not a complete measure of financial success.
I generally see it abbreviated as SV.
I agree. I also think there's less naivete when you have heard for the fifth time how revolutionary this new tech or business will be.
I don't know about you, but the first few times I heard that, I believed the speaker.
But eventually I figured out that while there are exciting new revolutions (the first time I saw a lyft it was magical), there are far more interesting or boring ideas that don't require extraordinary effort, just regular, sustained focus.
My work life balance is much better now working at $BigTech than it was being the de facto dev lead at a company that was on an acquisition spree where I was responsible for leading integration efforts or at a 60 person startup where I was responsible for making them “cloud native” and introducing AWS to the company as they were pivoting to selling access to micro services to large health care companies especially right after Covid hit.
WLB being worse as pay increases is more of a myth than anything else. I haven’t gotten paid more Obed the years because I was expected to work harder.
I got paid more because of the value I bought to the company.
I felt a lot more “stable” after 35 no matter where I worked because I knew I had the skillset and the network to throw my resume up in the air and get another job quickly when things went sideways and I did change jobs six times over those years.
Before 35, I had been at a job for nine years and let my skills atrophy.
I also had a decent “oh shit”/“go to hell fund”
> Then you realize money isn't the most important thing in your career. You learn that the difference between a total comp of $150k to $250k
This is definitely not true. I bumped around as your standard corporate dev until I was 46.
I stayed at my second job for a decade until 2008 and became your stereotypical expert beginner. I job hopped 5 times by 2020 and I was making $150K and seeing offers locally for about $165k - $170K based on my experience with leading projects, “cloud”, and just regular old C# development.
But I liked my job and my wife and I had “enough” with her working part time making $25K in the school system.
Then I fell into a remote job at $BigTech in the cloud consulting department making in the $200s in mid 2020. The difference is night and day. There are a lot more ands than an ors.
I can now “retire my wife” at 46, rent my house to my son and a couple of his friends who we have known for years at below market cost to help them get started while we travel the country staying in mid range extended stay hotels, flying everywhere, afford a winter home/investment property (more of a lifestyle choice than an investment), max out my 401K (including catch up contributions in a year and a half when I turn 50), max out my “after tax 401k at 10% of my base salary, and still have a decent amount of fun money.
Even if I were living a normal life, it would have meant the difference between having to choose whether we wanted to refinance to a 15 year mortgage (we did in 2021), go on multiple vacations, cash flow our son’s (my step son since he was 10) college education, or maximize retirement savings. We could have done all of those things and not choose.
These two sentances seem contradictory. If you have a large savings / retirement, don't you have a LARGER parachute / less stress looking for a job? I mean unless yeah you've gone so far on the hedonistic treadmill that you can barely afford your month to month bills.
I don't know, I've never been out of a job for more than like 2 months of actively looking, I think software developers are way to paranoid about job hunting.
Are you in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s?
My wife doesn't have a good job, and I don't have rich parents, have to travel a couple of times per year to see them, pay for them to see me, etc.
What are you talking about? Unemployment is at historic lows, the job market hasn't been this good in a long time. Sure, some ad-revenue based companies are laying off some workers, but the market is great.
https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
Untrue; the headline unemployment figure is those in the labor force, not employed, and actively seeking work (they may be recieiving benefits, have exhausted benefits, or have not qualified for benefits because of the nature of their prior employment or their departure from it, or because they were never previously employed.)
The headline unemployment figure (and the alternative measures) come by way of the monthly Current Population Survey [0], not data fron unemployment benefit programs. The idea that the unemployment rate is, either definitionally or methodologically, restricted to only include benefit recipients is simply false. It's a popular lie by political propagandists who know the truth and want to push the myth of systematic distortion, and I guess your argument is a natural way for someone who has internalized that propaganda, doesn’t know the methodology, but has seen thr definition to try to rationalize what they have internalized, but its just not true.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/
So, no, I wouldn't be a lifer in my early 40s. I'd be a "ride it out as long as it stays good", though. (Again, I've been around a while. If you have interesting work, good people, reasonable management, and good pay, think hard before you go somewhere else. That's not always easy to get.)
I prioritize personal investment and social engagement over raw salary income. I could find a better paying job tomorrow, within my current company. I like being up to my elbows in the business problem, and the best way to get a seat at the table is to have been around long enough to earn it.
My spouse and I both work at the same company, which greatly increases the sticky-ness of it for me. I can book family meetings with them from within my work calendar. That's worth a lot.
I've spend 15 years ingratiating myself across multiple teams, and multiple larger organizational slices. I have a lot of contacts to fall back on. If I needed a new job tomorrow, I could find one within the company, without having to go outside.
A lot of your items are "of the moment" and could change tomorrow. I wouldn't bank on them remaining stable.
If you want to get rid of them or take advantage of their expertise, raise the bar. Require more work in some way so that the jobs they do 6 months from now isn’t something that could be done by a new grad.
If they follow you, great. Everyone wins. If they do not, here’s options to exit, take a pick, have a good life.
BTW did you know the above are the number 2, 3 & 4 largest software companies in the world respectively[0]? Also I suspect "doing nothing" is a bit of an exaggeration and/or OP isn't 100% privy to what these people actually do. It's probably a relaxed pace but not literally "nothing" & their experience and knowledge still make that valuable for the company.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_c...
Politics, knowing where bodies are buried and entrenched bureaucracy can be just as much "tenure" but for staff.
It can be pretty bad, and often is.
You're talking about kids? I would think kids require less work over time. I would think a 30-year-old employee with a 1-year-old kid would have more home obligations than a 55-year-old employee with a 26-year-old kid.
If you can (and will) do the job, you should be welcomed, respected, and rewarded without regard to age, race, gender, degree, veteran status, parenthood, height, weight, or any of 100 other irrelevant characteristics.
> If you can (and will) do the job, you should be welcomed, respected, and rewarded without regard to age, race, gender, degree, veteran status, parenthood, height, weight, or any of 100 other irrelevant characteristics.
I used to think in this way, that everything should be pure merit. Unfortunately reality doesn't work that way, inputs and rewards are hard to quantify, and the pareto principle exists. Eg. Your work powering millions, yet you're only paid a month's salary and have to meet next month's expense. Furthermore, if things are left to pure meritocracy you'd have more and more in-groups and imbalance. So in some sense you'll be doing society a favor by uplifting others that are not part of the in-group of meritocracy purists.
But the wrinkle is @sokoloff is mid/late-50s and @like-oreally is mid/late-30s. Who should earn more pay? Who should be promoted to lead the next major initiative to drive the company forward?
Deciding to pay me the same or more for less value certainly makes things better and more convenient/comfortable for me. It does exactly the opposite for @like-oreally. Should they continue to over-contribute relative to their compensation in hopes that they’ll one day be in a position to receive more for contributing less? Does that provide the right incentives?
Does promoting me to lead that major new initiative put the company in the best position to succeed in the market and, via that success, continue to provide income for all employees?
> Deciding to pay me the same or more for less value certainly makes things better and more convenient/comfortable for me.
Of course it's going to feel better just looking at the numbers. But then we get back to the same old problem - how do you define value and contributions and say A goes over B?
Sure, I'll admit that it doesn't create the best incentives for people who want to optimize their paycheck and standing, ie. ambitious people. However, this is fine in some circumstances when you're aiming to create a self-sustaining team.
> Does promoting me to lead that major new initiative put the company in the best position to succeed in the market and, via that success, continue to provide income for all employees?
'Best' is an ill defined, extremist term. For many tasks at hand, there are checkboxes that they have to tick, and for all you know, they might need not to be the best, but just at sufficient level to check those boxes. And that is enough.
Take an example where a dungeon boss needs a certain amount of damage dealt to it within a certain period of time to beat him. There are many class specialties, some doing more damage than others, but these are rare, and all of them meet the requirements. Are you going to spend extra time trying to grab that rare class specialty or take one of the abundant ones? Of course not.
Provide the same services with about 60% less revenue, and NOT by inflating the difference away. Oh and without hiring essentially anyone.
Keep raising the retirement age so someone born after ~1980 essentially never retires. And ... I guess pray that medicine actually makes this possible.
Both have obvious problems. It seems to me a near-certainty that all governments will not know how to run fast enough to option b. Now there may be "robots" or whatever as a plan, long term, but while I don't work in robotics, I do have a master in it. We're 50 years away from viable robotic care for humans. We're currently not capable to build a robot that's physically capable of doing it without weighing 800+ kg, which makes it a non-starter (and this is the only part of the problem I expect someone like Elon Musk might be able to fix in, say, 10 years)
Of course, governments being what they are they are, are working on it. By:
1) making immigration much harder (and world demographics will start making it harder very soon now, and those won't stop)
2) dropping investment in robotics and medical research
3) making it harder every year to become medical care professionals
TLDR: you definitely won't retire in 20 years. Unless we can create a company and make, at the barest minimum, ~5 million there won't be retirement for any of us.
This maybe less of an issue in Europe but its still an issue there for sure, this is a young industry that likes young people, tolerates middle aged (40-50) and hates anything above that.
For the past 20 years there's been a massive influx of people into IT.
Which means that we're starting to reach a point where there are ALREADY a lot of people in IT.
Those people will start becoming older and older.
It's a slow phenomenon, but I expect that by 2040 or so the average age of the IT worker to have gone up by at least 10, but more likely by 15 years.
So no more this "28 year olds are the majority", but more "40 year olds are the majority".
I hate my job, but there aren't many good options for me in my situation. If somthing better does come along, id consider it. That's 10 years down, what's another 20ish years?
If you can afford it and growth prospects within the system aren't looking so great, it could be time to take a risk on growing yourself independently for a couple years.
Seems like most people do. So yeah.
I don't see growth potential anywhere. I'm constrained to my current area, can't put in many extra hours, and other family restraints. This is the best option I've seen.
Sometimes I think about getting a new job for a pay bump, but I'm not sure I could compete at a "real" tech company anyway, I'm just a regular/average dev and I almost left the field entirely after I burned out from my previous job.
So, that said, I might end up a lifer (already in my 40s). I love my job but I know the circumstances can change at any point if I get a new boss or the work climate changes.
I don't think I'd want to stay until retirement at a regular ol' company or corporation where I'm making someone else rich.
Just my 2c.
I am at the top of my game and the company recognized it. It will be very hard to find another company like where I am right now. Currently the manager I have is one of the best and the coworkers are also one of the best.
I have zero incentive to move somewhere else.
My man Rands explains it best: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/
I’ve been in too many situations where my role was changed overnight because of the above.
Currently at the most sought-after (by many) FAANG but I’m always fully prepared to leave/be laid off and don’t let my mind think it could be long term.
What is long term is instead a dense network of professional relationships with ex-bosses and coworkers to whom I would fully entrust my life and certainly my career, and I typically jump ship by moving closer to them every few years. Corporations are just a soulless random entity.
I didn’t have the education get get into a FAANG in the early years and don’t have the risk tolerance for a startup.
I turn 51 in a few weeks, and as much as I would love to stick around we recently went through a merger and the company that bought us tends to do more outsourcing of their tech to vendors than internal development, so no telling if changes will make me end up looking elsewhere.
I work from home, have maxed out my 401k all this time so I have a few million there, I’m an architect on a data science team so it’s interesting work. I’d gladly stay here another decade if I could.
Don’t count on anything in this world staying the same. The good times last only so long.