5 ms·

Seriously, why do people care about being promoted beyond senior/staff? Even at a smaller company you're making 200k/year, you probably have a good handle on yo

Seriously, why do people care about being promoted beyond senior/staff? Even at a smaller company you're making 200k/year, you probably have a good handle on your job, why not just coast? There's a big discontinuity in comp if you can make it to the director level, but being a manager or senior staff seems like a ton of work for no benefit. I work like 20 hours a week at my job, I almost quit because it's extremely boring and dysfunctional, but then I realized I can just disengage and enjoy my extra free time instead of pushing to exceed expectations. And I still get paid the same.

meowtimemania 4y ago
If you aspire to be a homeowner, 200k in the Bay Area will be difficult.
- celdon25 4y ago
  As of 2022, it's now difficult anywhere in most US metropolitan areas.
  - hyperbovine 4y ago
    "Most of the US" != the five places you'd be willing to live. Outside of the HN bubble, a $200k salary _easily_ affords a home in most markets. https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-home-prices-q1-2022-single-family-2022-05-03.pdf https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-...
    - babelfish 4y ago
      Okay, but the important part is "the five places you'd be willing to live". There are significant reasons most of us aren't moving to the middle of nowhere to be able to afford a home.
    - celdon25 4y ago
      I meant to say 'major metropolitan' - Thanks for the clarification
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
water-your-self 4y ago
Try having a family as a sole earner on 200k in the bay area. Or new york.
- ahtihn 4y ago
  Is this a joke? What is median household income for families in both of these cities? Fairly sure it's below 100k.
  - burnoutgal 4y ago
    But you need a house with a backyard, two teslas, a wine cellar and a college fund or you aren't really living /s
  - aroman 4y ago
    In San Francisco, the median household income was $120k. That’s 2 years ago mind you, and a lot of inflation has occurred since then. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia
    - srean 4y ago
      Do their budgets balance or do they take on credit card and other debt to manage the deficit ? I am not claiming its one way or the other as I do not know the answer.
    - bradlys 4y ago
      Doesn’t account for the fact that many are under rent control, own houses from decades ago, etc. It’s better to look at the average incomes of people who are buying houses in SF.
    - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
      The median household only has 2 people so presumably the median income for a family is higher.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
shadowgovt 4y ago
At Google specifically, even being promoted to staff is a huge undertaking. And until recently, there was an expectation of forward career trajectory built into the lower ranks, i.e. every engineer was functionally multi-year probationary. If you found something valuable to do but you weren't progressing your career (because, say, the work was necessary but boring, like micro-optimizations, feature polish on a mature product, or documentation / example creation), you'd start to have talks with your manager about your future at the company. I believe they relaxed that process when someone at the top took a look at their org-chart and realized they've become a big company where they need a critical mass of not-actually-interested-in-progressing engineers to keep the lights on and if they actually followed their policy, they risked churning those reliable workhorses out of the company because they couldn't actually afford to find a slot to promote them all.
- cjsplat 4y ago
  I don't know because the change was decided way above my pay grade, but I always assumed that the reason was HR legal. It is hard to look at people who are objectively doing as well as each other, and rate some lower only because they have been at that job grade "too long". The fig leaf was always that the ladders encourages keeping up with technology and the company, which meant people couldn't tread water at the lower grades. But if the "new technology" isn't necessary for the job duties, labor lawyers can have a field day.
Hermitian909 4y ago
Off the top of my head: 1. More money means less time till I hit FU money and can choose work without any consideration of pay 2. 200k/yr is not as much as it seems if you're in the bay area and have kids 3. Bigger title -> more input on core design decisions. Hate some idea coming from the higher ups? You're in a position to do something about it. 4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems to work on. People trust you to say "this should be a priority"
- geodel 4y ago
  In general I agree. It's just that I don't know if salaried job lead to FU money. The only person I had or will be able to say FU is to myself sitting alone in living room.
  - ketchupdebugger 4y ago
    You'd be able to reach FIRE money as a SWE. Possibly FU money if you get to vp level at a FAANG and then work for 10 years.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    Depends on who you are and what your growth potential is. I know SWEs getting offers in the 7-8 figure range. That's not in any way typical but if you're smart enough, hardworking, and get the right breaks hitting a 7 figure income isn't something I'd consider weird and is definitely FU money.
- burnoutgal 4y ago
  Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money? Personally I'd rather work half time for twice as many years than try to race to retire. A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas, which is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you want to be a moderately checked out person, living in a smaller city and stretching your giant bay area salary is the way to go. If you want to be aggressively careerist, you have to be face-to-face in the bay networking. More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp, imo, which might be appealing for some people but is anathema to me. The people higher up got there by being more argumentative, or backstabbing, or ingratiating themselves, and instead of going along with them now you get to fight them. No thanks.
fullshark 4y ago
My main motivation for work at this point is to provide for my children and buy my retirement. More money via promotion helps me achieve those goals.
MattGaiser 4y ago
You are counting on that job to always be there for one thing.
- burnoutgal 4y ago
  In the boom time there's an unending appetite for mediocre engineers to inflate headcount, making managers look good (more reports) and companies look good (to investors). In the bust time, I don't think even the smartest people will be safe, and the top of the ladder may well be pruned more aggressively because they're expensive. Having positive reviews may protect you, but being high in the org won't.
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    Depends on how high. You don't want to be in the "off in the corner" research group which is usually comprised of very high level engineers (senior or staff level or higher). You definitely don't want to be high up in the middle tier either. What you want is to be known to your Vice Presidents and above. That's when you reached "high enough" to avoid the great cull. I witnessed this more times than I can count. Otherwise its all balance sheet calculations and maybe your manager can pull a punch or two if the product area is critical enough.
dub 4y ago
Performance reviews in corporate culture often have a "what have you done for me lately?" mindset. If you're senior or staff and haven't launched anything exciting lately, middle management might become less interested in whether the service is running well and more interested in having "career" conversations about how your role description says you're supposed to be launching cross-functional projects more frequently.
lesuorac 4y ago
A promotion (pre-director in CA/NYC) can easily be an increase of 50k (~25%) in comp so it's pretty meaningful.
ctvo 4y ago
I understand the perspective of people who view their profession as solely a job, checking out after their 9-5 and doing other things with their life. This isn't me. I enjoy the work. Idealistically, I think I can make a large impact on people with my knowledge and experience. Shave off a seconds on a workflow in Google Docs end-to-end, that's a net good to humanity. It's not all about compensation. At some point it's almost only about impact, and impact often requires higher titles and putting in hours due to systems that govern these large companies.
Invictus0 4y ago
To be clear, your question is why do people want to grow? Or why do they want to make more money? Or why do they want more status/power/recognition?
renewiltord 4y ago
Because coasting costs me mentally. I want more than that. I coasted for a year and it was disastrous to me, mentally.

meowtimemania 4y ago

If you aspire to be a homeowner, 200k in the Bay Area will be difficult.

celdon25 4y ago
As of 2022, it's now difficult anywhere in most US metropolitan areas.
- hyperbovine 4y ago
  "Most of the US" != the five places you'd be willing to live. Outside of the HN bubble, a $200k salary _easily_ affords a home in most markets. https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-home-prices-q1-2022-single-family-2022-05-03.pdf https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-...
  - babelfish 4y ago
    Okay, but the important part is "the five places you'd be willing to live". There are significant reasons most of us aren't moving to the middle of nowhere to be able to afford a home.
  - celdon25 4y ago
    I meant to say 'major metropolitan' - Thanks for the clarification
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

water-your-self 4y ago

Try having a family as a sole earner on 200k in the bay area. Or new york.

ahtihn 4y ago
Is this a joke? What is median household income for families in both of these cities? Fairly sure it's below 100k.
- burnoutgal 4y ago
  But you need a house with a backyard, two teslas, a wine cellar and a college fund or you aren't really living /s
- aroman 4y ago
  In San Francisco, the median household income was $120k. That’s 2 years ago mind you, and a lot of inflation has occurred since then. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia
  - srean 4y ago
    Do their budgets balance or do they take on credit card and other debt to manage the deficit ? I am not claiming its one way or the other as I do not know the answer.
  - bradlys 4y ago
    Doesn’t account for the fact that many are under rent control, own houses from decades ago, etc. It’s better to look at the average incomes of people who are buying houses in SF.
  - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    The median household only has 2 people so presumably the median income for a family is higher.
- BeetleB 4y ago

shadowgovt 4y ago

At Google specifically, even being promoted to staff is a huge undertaking. And until recently, there was an expectation of forward career trajectory built into the lower ranks, i.e. every engineer was functionally multi-year probationary. If you found something valuable to do but you weren't progressing your career (because, say, the work was necessary but boring, like micro-optimizations, feature polish on a mature product, or documentation / example creation), you'd start to have talks with your manager about your future at the company. I believe they relaxed that process when someone at the top took a look at their org-chart and realized they've become a big company where they need a critical mass of not-actually-interested-in-progressing engineers to keep the lights on and if they actually followed their policy, they risked churning those reliable workhorses out of the company because they couldn't actually afford to find a slot to promote them all.

cjsplat 4y ago
I don't know because the change was decided way above my pay grade, but I always assumed that the reason was HR legal. It is hard to look at people who are objectively doing as well as each other, and rate some lower only because they have been at that job grade "too long". The fig leaf was always that the ladders encourages keeping up with technology and the company, which meant people couldn't tread water at the lower grades. But if the "new technology" isn't necessary for the job duties, labor lawyers can have a field day.

Hermitian909 4y ago

Off the top of my head: 1. More money means less time till I hit FU money and can choose work without any consideration of pay 2. 200k/yr is not as much as it seems if you're in the bay area and have kids 3. Bigger title -> more input on core design decisions. Hate some idea coming from the higher ups? You're in a position to do something about it. 4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems to work on. People trust you to say "this should be a priority"

geodel 4y ago
In general I agree. It's just that I don't know if salaried job lead to FU money. The only person I had or will be able to say FU is to myself sitting alone in living room.
- ketchupdebugger 4y ago
  You'd be able to reach FIRE money as a SWE. Possibly FU money if you get to vp level at a FAANG and then work for 10 years.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  Depends on who you are and what your growth potential is. I know SWEs getting offers in the 7-8 figure range. That's not in any way typical but if you're smart enough, hardworking, and get the right breaks hitting a 7 figure income isn't something I'd consider weird and is definitely FU money.
burnoutgal 4y ago
Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money? Personally I'd rather work half time for twice as many years than try to race to retire. A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas, which is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you want to be a moderately checked out person, living in a smaller city and stretching your giant bay area salary is the way to go. If you want to be aggressively careerist, you have to be face-to-face in the bay networking. More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp, imo, which might be appealing for some people but is anathema to me. The people higher up got there by being more argumentative, or backstabbing, or ingratiating themselves, and instead of going along with them now you get to fight them. No thanks.

fullshark 4y ago

My main motivation for work at this point is to provide for my children and buy my retirement. More money via promotion helps me achieve those goals.

MattGaiser 4y ago

You are counting on that job to always be there for one thing.

burnoutgal 4y ago
In the boom time there's an unending appetite for mediocre engineers to inflate headcount, making managers look good (more reports) and companies look good (to investors). In the bust time, I don't think even the smartest people will be safe, and the top of the ladder may well be pruned more aggressively because they're expensive. Having positive reviews may protect you, but being high in the org won't.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Depends on how high. You don't want to be in the "off in the corner" research group which is usually comprised of very high level engineers (senior or staff level or higher). You definitely don't want to be high up in the middle tier either. What you want is to be known to your Vice Presidents and above. That's when you reached "high enough" to avoid the great cull. I witnessed this more times than I can count. Otherwise its all balance sheet calculations and maybe your manager can pull a punch or two if the product area is critical enough.

dub 4y ago

Performance reviews in corporate culture often have a "what have you done for me lately?" mindset. If you're senior or staff and haven't launched anything exciting lately, middle management might become less interested in whether the service is running well and more interested in having "career" conversations about how your role description says you're supposed to be launching cross-functional projects more frequently.

lesuorac 4y ago

A promotion (pre-director in CA/NYC) can easily be an increase of 50k (~25%) in comp so it's pretty meaningful.

ctvo 4y ago

I understand the perspective of people who view their profession as solely a job, checking out after their 9-5 and doing other things with their life. This isn't me. I enjoy the work. Idealistically, I think I can make a large impact on people with my knowledge and experience. Shave off a seconds on a workflow in Google Docs end-to-end, that's a net good to humanity. It's not all about compensation. At some point it's almost only about impact, and impact often requires higher titles and putting in hours due to systems that govern these large companies.

Invictus0 4y ago

To be clear, your question is why do people want to grow? Or why do they want to make more money? Or why do they want more status/power/recognition?

renewiltord 4y ago

Because coasting costs me mentally. I want more than that. I coasted for a year and it was disastrous to me, mentally.