You want me to be passionate about making rich people richer? How laughable. I show up for work and do my job to the best of my ability because if I didn’t, I’d starve on the streets with no health insurance.
A company I worked at ran out of money. All my people stayed.
1 month, 2, 3 went by. I found guaranteed positions for them based solely on my recommendation for more pay then if we had money, the people still stayed.
They came in for work the same. Everything kept going. We eventually had a successful product, made money, and were able to backpay.
If I was a disorganized manager giving meaningless drudgery and absurd requirements divorced from product and purpose they would have all left.
There has to be a deeper mission, purpose, and vision that keeps people around and focused. That's the managements job.
People aren't generally in tech for the money, there's better money in real estate, sales and finance with less work. Drive the passion and you'll drive the work.
Programming is like movies, art, and music: great things rarely happen when people are just chasing dollars.
You make the real money here as an IB analyst (100+ hours a week in the office — definitely NOT less work than the average SWE job), or as a financial advisor, i.e. sales.
So, yeah, if you go into sales, sales, or sales, you can make more money that way than in tech as a SWE. But, honestly, do you think the average engineer would do well in sales?
Nah, that's not the point. I forget who it was, maybe Oxfam did a study on the "American dream" income requirements, I think it was:
Family of four, one breadwinner, property owner, annual vacation, eating out once a week, two cars, college education for children...
You know, baseline idyllic suburban living. For the bay it was I believe north of $200K.
That's what I'm talking about. Someone making 250K in Mountainview isn't in it "for the money", they are just trying to live a life that frankly, most other countries can tender for about $75,000 but because of decisions we've made in how we structure society, it takes a quarter million a year.
This is the real equivalent to the 1950s idea of "middle class", it's just gotten so out of reach for most people, we construe people looking for it as greedy.
They aren't. Once you understand that, you can align incentives ... A $5,000 reward doesn't mean much for these people since 250k doesn't mean they're chasing dollars, instead a challenging rewarding job where they can work from home whenever they want, that's what keeps them around.
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Honestly it's the wrong problem. Having passionate, eager, focused, organized, willing workers is essentially the only job of management.
If that's not happening, switch out the managers.
You want me to be passionate about making rich people richer? How laughable. I show up for work and do my job to the best of my ability because if I didn’t, I’d starve on the streets with no health insurance.
A company I worked at ran out of money. All my people stayed.
1 month, 2, 3 went by. I found guaranteed positions for them based solely on my recommendation for more pay then if we had money, the people still stayed.
They came in for work the same. Everything kept going. We eventually had a successful product, made money, and were able to backpay.
If I was a disorganized manager giving meaningless drudgery and absurd requirements divorced from product and purpose they would have all left.
There has to be a deeper mission, purpose, and vision that keeps people around and focused. That's the managements job.
People aren't generally in tech for the money, there's better money in real estate, sales and finance with less work. Drive the passion and you'll drive the work.
Programming is like movies, art, and music: great things rarely happen when people are just chasing dollars.
Sales.
You make the real money here as an IB analyst (100+ hours a week in the office — definitely NOT less work than the average SWE job), or as a financial advisor, i.e. sales.
So, yeah, if you go into sales, sales, or sales, you can make more money that way than in tech as a SWE. But, honestly, do you think the average engineer would do well in sales?
Nah, that's not the point. I forget who it was, maybe Oxfam did a study on the "American dream" income requirements, I think it was:
Family of four, one breadwinner, property owner, annual vacation, eating out once a week, two cars, college education for children...
You know, baseline idyllic suburban living. For the bay it was I believe north of $200K.
That's what I'm talking about. Someone making 250K in Mountainview isn't in it "for the money", they are just trying to live a life that frankly, most other countries can tender for about $75,000 but because of decisions we've made in how we structure society, it takes a quarter million a year.
This is the real equivalent to the 1950s idea of "middle class", it's just gotten so out of reach for most people, we construe people looking for it as greedy.
They aren't. Once you understand that, you can align incentives ... A $5,000 reward doesn't mean much for these people since 250k doesn't mean they're chasing dollars, instead a challenging rewarding job where they can work from home whenever they want, that's what keeps them around.
Eeehhhhhh, if the overall company doesn’t have a good culture or vision etc, there only so much management can paper over
Executives and founders are also managers.