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Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
1337 points by futur321 on Jan 5, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 970 comments
I joined Google straight from college 6 years ago as a SWE, and by now I'm used to the style of work of "do the minimal work possible to do the job", I never challenge myself to deeply learn about what I'm doing, it's almost like I've been using only 10% of my mental capacity for work (the rest was on dating/dealing with breakups/dealing with depression/gaming/...). Even when I get a meaningful project, all I do is copy code from the internal codebase and patch things together until they work. I was promoted only once.

Now that I'm thinking of jumping ship to other interesting companies, I'm having serious doubts that I really learned what I should have learned during all those years. Especially since I'm considering companies with a higher hiring bar than Google.

How can I keep myself accountable while I'm still at the company to deeply learn the FE/BE technologies to be better prepared for other companies? Should I start by preparing a checklist of technologies and dive into each of them for a month and continue from there?




Hi there, I did the exact same thing as you (at Google Sydney), before eventually deciding that I must strike out into the wilderness.

In the few years since I left; I worked as a solutions architect managing a team, a team lead, a remote dev, and now in a startup. Front-end, back-end, flip-side, all the ends. So I've been deliberately trying different angles of my career to see what suits.

I'd describe this process as grueling, ("challenging" is too friendly). I honestly think I would have been happier staying at Google, farting around, and being social. I agree with a lot of the comments here. However it's a catch-22, because the me that exists now wouldn't choose to go back and overall I think this has been good for me – and not just because of the, er, _character building_ aspect of it.

If you stay at Google, make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life. If I'd've stayed, I could have comfortably raised some kids with my wife by now - but that's still on the todo list.

If you leave, just jump right in. I didn't study anything, I just picked it up as I went along. If you were able to follow Steve Yegge's advice and Get That Job At Google, then I'm sure you're a smart cookie and can fake it til you make it.

Basically I'm saying you can be happy either way. If you leave, know what you're getting yourself into. If you stay, don't waste this time but use it on yourself.


"If you stay at Google, make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life. If I'd've stayed, I could have comfortably raised some kids with my wife by now - but that's still on the todo list."

THIS all the way.

When we are young, we think that we will be remembered by the company that we worked for and the people that we worked with. The sad truth is that in 99.9999% none of those people will remember you the second you walk out the door.

The family you raise will remember and love you though.

I'm in my 40s and got fired a very cushy job like OP has. The reason was cause I wanted to challenge myself and I worked myself into early alcoholism which resulted in my dismissal. My co-workers don't call, the company doesn't call, they don't care. My marriage broken up cause of the job and me wanting to pursue my so called dream. I'm alone and will most likely die alone this year by my own hand since the pain is too much bare sometimes. I miss my wife and my little Pomeranian terribly.

OP... if you want challenge in your life, challenge yourself to being a good partner to someone in a marriage and raise some kids, get a Pomeranian :) Have something in this world that will truly appreciate and remember you when you are gone.

"I never saw a tombstone that read. 'If I had only worked more'"


I was there. Now in my 50's with an amazing life. I'm grateful every day to my alcoholic, depressed 40-odd-year-old self who didn't kill himself. I could not have seen from there how happy I am now, and I could not have predicted the adventures I went (am going!) through to get here.

Hang in there, buddy. Just keep breathing. It will change.


I had the same experience my first few years out of college. Had a long relationship end, started drinking, went through several jobs and within three years found myself alone, severely depressed and an alcoholic. I contemplated suicide frequently, but held out hope my life would change if I could just get to tomorrow. My life started feeling like the movie "Groundhog Day".

Eventually things did change, and my 30's have been a whirlwind of happiness, sobriety and a GF who loves me unconditionally for me. Like you said, if I knew this is where the black hole I fell into would lead to, I would've pushed harder to get sober, try harder to put myself back together sooner. But I'm here now and am grateful I held out and often think about this wonderful life I almost passed on.


Of course, the "just keep breathing, it will change" is just as true for the good times, too.

I try and remember every day to savour and make the most of this happiness, and be grateful for it.

Because it won't last. Nothing does.


Happy to hear you're doing well. Coincidentally, you and I have very similar names.


I used to have access to the UK electoral list. In about 2003 there were 32 "Marcus Holmes" in the list. I also had their addresses. I was contemplating inviting them all to a get-together ;)

I spoke to the guy who owns marcusholmes.com when I got my domain (marcusholmes.biz). Nice chap. American, of course.

Maybe we should have a convention or something. Because we're obviously related. Sherlock was our great-great-uncle (at least, that's what I tell people).


Hey brother, I've been in some rough places too. Wanna talk? Might not feel like you do... but some chance you'll feel 5% better after. I'll be up for another hour, feel free to email me on a temp email and I'll write back from my real: aloha@janmail.org


So true. I've worked at the same company for 18 years. I've seen lots of people move on or retire. Literally within days they are wholly forgotten or at least never mentioned again. I've never seen anyone that is not easily replaced. It has drilled into me over and over again that we are all just cogs in the machine. Even someone who has been at the company for 30 years and is celebrated when they retire is totally not missed and forgotten within days of their leaving.


I'm sorry to hear that you are going through such tough times.

If you still have issues with alcohol use I strongly suggest you check out an Alcoholics Anonymous (https://aa.org/) group near you. Give it a chance, it will likely be very helpful.

About depression/emotional pain/suicidal thoughts first of all it would be very good to see a professional (doctor / psychologist) about this, they can help you. You may also talk to a friend if you have someone you feel you can talk to.

Try some daily activities that occupy your mind and/or body for a while: reading, running, walks in the park, workout in the gym, yoga, prayer. Whatever you can do.

You don't have to face everything alone, it's ok to ask for help.


Hey, I've been in a same situation except that my problem was not alcoholism but an addiction to painkillers and then opiates. Lost pretty much everything due to the complete disaster I became. I was a security engineer back then and you can guess that my responsibilities didn't play nice with drug addiction.

The latter arose from my chronic depression and the lack of ability to create any long-term social relationships which are not based on professional interaction. I have never had friends outside of "workplace buddies" mindset for all my 33 years of life. They were lost instantly when I left the job. I've managed to find a way in remote consulting which lets me pay the bills and have some food (I quitted drugs cold turkey two years ago). But nothing hits you harder than a feeling that it's all over and you are tamed with your loneliness, the only thing that is left is your aging you don't want to face.

I can give no word of advice to you, but I want to say that I feel you. You are strong, don't let 'em get you this easy.


Dude, you are still young! You made some mistakes in the first half of your life, but your second half can be better due to the experience you gained. There are lots of people who start a second relationship in their 40s, after going through a divorce. And you can always adopt another dog... What I'm saying is that even though life seems bleak right now, you still have many years of happiness ahead.


Sending you a lot of love, friend. There are a lot of resources for help out there just to have someone to talk to: http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org for example.


I encourage you to reach out to others in the same place - r/SuicideWatch/ is a good place to start. I don't know you or what you've been through but I am certain there are things in your life that are still worth living for.


Hi there, I can relate to a lot of what you said. I too fell very hard into alcoholism while trying to balance my performance at my fairly high stress job. I won't say my alcoholism was caused by my job, it was bound to happen for me regardless of any job. Anyhow...

Just logged in to say, there's a lot of us out here in the world. You're not alone. I've lost a cushy job due to it, lost more than one actually. I guess all I'll say is that it's possible to get out of that hellhole, you'll get there one day. And as someone else said, the fact that you talked about all this is a big deal. It means a lot. I'm rooting for you. If you ever want someone to talk to, let me know!


Just the act to say loud everything you got trough and what you think is a step to move forward. Be strong and the light to share the others what you did wrong and find the path to make you happy.

Hanging in there buddy :)


It can be tough to have hope in the moment, but things will get better again if you hang in there, and you'll be eternally grateful to yourself for toughing it out. You'll also wonder how you could have been so pessimistic and silly to think there was no hope, you'll want to travel back in time just to slap yourself.

You're young, you made some mistakes, but you learned from them. You are better off than those who still haven't learned. You have plenty of time to build a new, better life for yourself. With a new, younger wife, if that's your thing. Some people will probably take offense at that last part, but I'm not talking Epstein young, I'm just saying his ex was probably 40 something, and his new wife can be a hotter 30 something if that's important to him.


There can be a thousand reasons to do die, but we need just one reason to live.

Since you clearly wanted to do something worthwhile with your life, do check www.drawdown.org.

Do write to me if you want to talk ( sriramNRN at gmail ) . I can share a few worthwhile things that I've picked up to do for the rest of my life.


See I am pretty scared of early alcoholism because I've heard all the fun stuff is getting into alcoholism during your late 60's and early 70's.

More seriously though, thank you for this comment, it made me smile.


When I had dark thoughts I went to a doctor and talked it out and it really helped. It doesn't have to be a doctor but try and talk it out with someone.


There is middle ground between being slacker who don't even learn and overworking yourself to the point of ineffectivity (alcoholism is definitely there).

It is quite possible to have familly, care about them and spend time with them and not be either.


I'm so sorry to hear this. If you ever need a non-judgemental stranger to talk, please feel free to message me (temp email robbrobsonnn@gmail.com) and I'll respond on my real one.

Things can always get better.


What was the dream you wanted to pursue?


sure you will agree that are people in this world who lead far miserable life than you. just relax and try focussing on hobbies, social/community work/... To err is human but to realize that you made mistake, you are already on the right path to a better life.


My heart goes out to you. Please email me (elwell dot christopher at gmail dot com) to chat.


Current Googler here; my solution to staving off complacency has been constantly asking myself if there are other problems I can and will work on - and they don't have to be problems on your team. (Although, I will say that at a certain point, if you're growing, I think your responsibilities should be shifting from solving problems to identifying/prioritizing the problems.)

Every team has a looonnngggggg list of things that they want to do but can't because they don't have the people for it (even if they're not keeping track of it). Frankly there's also a non trivial amount of core language work that's done by people who don't actually work on any of those teams. Getting context can be hard sometimes, but I've done it plenty of times.

Am always happy to chat, my username is pretty obvious from my profile.


Current Google-ish company person here, and this can be just as dangerous as it is beneficial. I was on this team, more than once, where I’m complacent and no one is asking for more from me... so I started helping. I thought I was moving towards leadership because I was identifying and solving the right problems for others. I felt successful.

None of this work contributed to my career path, although it was development work. I felt like a hero, but the people who respected my new work didn’t complete the feedback loop and/or my current leadership didn’t care.

It actually stole time from work that would have gotten me promoted/provided more challenges.

I felt like I lost my role as SME and instead became a jack-of-all-trades.

It was good experience and luckily did not get me fired. When I look back I realize that the problem was the team/leadership’s lack of growth-focus and support. If I had transferred teams or left the company I may have been better off. I say may have, because other than feeling like I wasted a few years learning this, I’ve ended up in roughly the same place I would have been.


2 problems that can cause that, the first of which is by far more common:

1. You haven't developed the skillset to both track and evangelize your impact.

2. The company's review process doesn't properly value out-of-band contributions

I find that when I really look into it, #2 is actually rarely a problem if you are good at #1. As I've worked on getting better at #1 I've found I'm far more comfortable at work, it helps my career, and I still get to just do what my instincts tell me and what is best rather than shift that to what will look best.


You guys should quit wasting your time on this BigCo BS and do something that will actually benefit your real career.

http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html


It's amazing to me to learn that you can help other teams solve problems at Google.

Every big company I've worked for (none of them FAANG), helping another team is a recipe for disaster. You will get your hand slapped, punished, blamed, and basically make your life much worse. Each team is super insulated and tries their best to hide behind their management chain because of this.

It's great that you can feel bored and look for other problems to solve and not just teach yourself something new to stay challenged.


Having spent 7 years working in the Ubuntu community and another 5 now at Google, it's striking to me how Google is internally similar to an open source project.

It's not uncommon to send patches to completely different teams because you need something to work a little bit differently. Or even just because you were there and noticed something fixable and are being a good citizen.

Some parts of the code are nearly abandoned and destaffed, but might still have some users wishing that weren't so. And some parts of the code are only used/improved by a very specific group of people.

Some of this is technology (the monorepo, lots of good infrastructure to base things off of), some of it is management (such as recognizing/rewarding contributions that have "wider impact"), some of it is culture (a lot of Googlers come from or still work in open source).


Those places are the ones who care primarily about tickets being closed, and you probably won't have much ability to be involved in the feature ideation process, and probably won't even have a real way to prototype things before they're all in JIRA.

My place right now is in the middle where much of the absolutely most useful work in the company is getting done because people behave autonomously, but the formal review process has had trouble recognizing that work as it can be difficult to put a number to it. Not knowing the 2nd and 3rd order effects means you can't say "I went over and cleared up this team's misconceptions and saved them a month of work" isn't something you can say because you have no way to know you saved them a month of work, so you just say "communicated and collaberated" which sounds suspiciously like you did nothing if the process hard numbers to avoid things like favoritism.


> Every big company I've worked for (none of them FAANG), helping another team is a recipe for disaster. You will get your hand slapped, punished, blamed, and basically make your life much worse.

This. More work, much of which won't improve your review or bottom line. You get a stack rank from your boss and your team, not the guys two offices over. Then, if your upgrades screw up its on you.

Apropos of a a saying I'm fond of: "not your circus, not your monkeys".

> Each team is super insulated and tries their best to hide behind their management chain because of this.

That's what Mgmt is for, and why things can be escalated as "Mgmt Issues" so that the leadership, PMs, etc. can figure it out.


At Amazon you literally can't get promoted to Senior Engineer (SDE3) without showing influence outside your team.


Big +1 to this

For a specific idea, come help kythe team build out a new indexer (say, rust or maybe swift).


Snoo@? :)


hm. dropped an email in my profile.


I have been in two such developer roles - combined around 8 years. I am currently at the second and every morning I struggle with the idea of not going to office and quitting but this job is what puts food on the table.

I don't even want to be in the software field. Whenever I have tried to think about it, write it down, brainstorm I have come to one vague connotation that I'd be interested in something that's a combination of art/history, architecture, product, UX. I have tried finding masters, PhD in fields that would appeal to me, tried to search for jobs and I have found none. There are some (very remote) - but at my experience level they either look for experience in the field of higher education.

I have to leave this job and I am planning to move to some other software company - preferably some big org where I can look for something that's a fit for me or something closer. But I won't even know whether I should do that. Some evenings I just try not to think about it.


> make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life

Ironically the Bay Area is among the worst places on Earth for improving your social life if you're straight and male. I noticed that you don't live in the Bay Area, you're married, you probably meant a much broader meaning of "social life", so your experiences are likely very different. But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful, male SWE in the Bay Area making $120K+ a year in his 20s or 30s, who should be a magnet for women, turns out to be living in one of worst places because of male-female ratios among singles (and some other cultural factors).

My advice would be work hard, save your money, travel when you can to better locales to improve your social life, but with the eventual goal of permanently moving out when you've saved enough. If you pick your destination within the USA well, dating prospects will improve greatly, and if you look worldwide (and can overcome the language and immigration issues), it could improve dramatically.


I guess I've only lived in the bay area 20 years, but this strikes me as quite dramatic. I know literally dozens of men in tech happily raising families in the Bay Area. It's true the male/female ratios are worse (although we should certainly adjust for the large gay male population). But when I talk to friends who are dating, it's the women who seem to be struggling to find anybody decent, not the men.

Perhaps the problem is in thinking those things mean a guy "should be a magnet for women". I regularly get an earful from women about guys who think they're God's gift to the populace. And one of the first hits for "Bay Area dating as a woman" confirms that: https://violetfog.com/dating-in-san-francisco/

In a section about what she hates most, she writes: "The number of guys there that have a disgusting sense of entitlement and attitude towards dating. THAT was annoying. Often they’re the ones getting such great praise (and pay) at work that they think it translates into them being hotshots outside of work as well. Like they are too good or something. What sucks about these bad apples is that they often come off as charming at first. But alas, the arrogance and shallow attitude always reveals itself eventually. So just run when you suspect that big-paycheck-big-ego persona thing going on. Don’t walk, RUN."


> It's true the male/female ratios are worse

The fact that there are way more men than women in the Bay is a statistical reality, which you admit yourself.

Then you bring an opinion blog-post by a single woman as counter-evidence.

Ironically, all these complaints about "guys there that have a disgusting sense of entitlement" just go to show how picky she is, and can afford to be, in San Francisco.

Nothing in GP's post exhibits an arrogant attitude. He makes the simple observation, that the sort of guys who would be considered attractive and desirable in most other locations, are struggling to get dates in the Bay. This is easily explained by the high male/female ratio, which we already established as a fact.

Given this fact, no amount of hand-wringing will help: if there are far more single men then women, then the women would set a very high bar, and the men below that bar would have to remain single.

There are simply not enough women for all the single men in the Bay. No spectacular feats of mental gymnastics, nor nice-sounding dating tips, nor seeking to blame men for being "arrogant", will get around this reality.

As a final anecdote, I did know women who dated executives and VCs in the Bay. Some of these guys had mammoth egos. Curiously, that didn't prevent them from having far better dating lives than any engineer I knew.


> guys who would be considered attractive and desirable in most other locations

Your conception of what women are looking for in a man might not hew as closely to reality as you think.


You write like "what women are looking for in a man" is some absolute thing, but it is decidedly not! It is highly context-dependent. As an extreme example, there are some places on Earth where simply not being an alcoholic can make you a desirable mate.


Actually, it was the parent post that created the context I was responding in. I totally agree with you.


Hey, don't talk about my home country like that! :)


Exactly. A lot of the single women I know moved here for pretty specific reasons. Maybe he's right that these poor, poor men are exactly what women want in Ottumwa, Iowa, although I doubt it. But I'm quite sure that many of the people who live in the Bay Area are here precisely because they want something different than what they could get elsewhere.


Everyone, literally, is looking for different things. Most ppl try to extrapolate from their personal preference to the whole population, and think their place is somehow unique, but that’s wrong. And, barring extreme inbalances in gender ratio, most people eventually find their match.


In this thread, all people are talking about dating, but looking for a life partner and looking for one night stand are very different things. All genders and sexual orientations look for different things in those two scenarios. A person who would easily find an awesome life partner would have a lot of trouble finding casual sex, and vice versa.


...and might explain some elements of the conclusions.


I think you missed Ps point completely. It was that if the ratios are off, the lower side has more of a supply.

What specifically each individual is looking for doesn't matter. It's supply and demand.


I don't think that's a counterpoint to the comment you responded to in any way at all.


this right here: "Your conception of what women are looking for in a man might not hew as closely to reality as you think."


I'm shocked at the responses to this comment. It is delusional to claim that if all men collectively work harder, they can succeed in one of the most male skewed metros in the United States. This isn't some oil field in North Dakota either, most of the surplus men here are high earning and well educated.

There is a lot of data showing that even with a balanced gender ratio, women are much more selective picking partners than men are. This is for obvious evolutionary reasons. Now, take that and add in a 50% male surplus, and you have a city where most women openly say they only date 6/6'1+ and high earners. This can be verified on practically any dating app with a few hours of data.


> As a final anecdote, I did know women who dated executives and VCs in the Bay. Some of these guys had mammoth egos. Curiously, that didn't prevent them from having far better dating lives than any engineer I knew.

Dating != relationship. Women can have fun too, just dating, and sometimes they are the ones using you just because your ego doesn’t allow you to see it.


>Ironically, all these complaints about "guys there that have a disgusting sense of entitlement" just go to show how picky she is, and can afford to be, in San Francisco

It’s not a matter of being picky. It’s a matter of self respect.


One person's "self-respect" is another's "disgusting sense of entitlement". That's just the way it is.


I am woman, living in area with equal amount of males and females. Being clean and able to be respectful in basic causual communication is pretty standard here. So is not being narcisstic egomaniac.

And my observation of relationships with those high ego men is that being alone is better. Regardless of how much money they earn, they look more like trap then win.

I think that one parallel issue is the low opinion men have of other males. They assume everyone else is dirty and instantly rude and it just is not so.


That is not in fact how it is. Self-respect involves belief that you don't deserve harm. Entitlement involves belief that you deserve good things from other people, generally without proportionate giving in return.


> As a final anecdote, I did know women who dated executives and VCs in the Bay. Some of these guys had mammoth egos. Curiously, that didn't prevent them from having far better dating lives than any engineer I knew.

Considering how many executives and SVPs in tech have been caught in sexual harassment (if not outright sexual assault), you might want to think quietly for awhile about what your definitions and standards are.


I agree with you 100% and have to say that the replies on this particular thread are some of the most toxic I’ve ever read here on HN, and completely indicative of both what you describe as well as my own observations from living here in the Bay for pretty much my entire life.

I live in the South Bay, don’t work in tech, make well under $100k a year, live comfortably and have had no issues dating. I’m a local, white and over six feet tall, so that probably helps, but I’m certainly nothing special looks wise.


Being tall is a huge advantage. Over 6' is tall in the Bay. So is being white. Don't sell yourself short.


The parent commenter doesn't realize just how large of an advantage this is. There's lots of empirical evidence demonstrating that height is one of the strongest preferences women have for men. I have personally made fake dating profiles with the same pictures/bio, but different heights here in the Bay Area. The 5'6 profile did not get a single like in a week. The 6'4 profile had inbound interest from a wide variety of women, racking up more likes in an hour than my real profile gets in 2 weeks.

OKCupid's dataset also shows white men are the most desired on average.


Right. I don't know why pointing this out without whining or complaining about it seems to make people upset. I'm not tall or white, so it's not like I'm bragging. I'm also not trying to use it as an excuse, or to bring others down for having to try less. It just is what it is.


No doubt, and I definitely can’t speak to how it is to date as a short/nonwhite guy other than what I know from my friends. My comments are more directed towards the economic side of this discussion, which started to veer into the “women are all gold diggers” incel-type territory that I’m beginning to hear more often. In my opinion and experience, nothing repels positive relationships like that kind of mindset. Anyway, that’s why I mentioned my salary, which is practically a joke compared to the kinds of numbers people are talking about here.


a programmer friend of mine used to date online. he's not a tall guy and he was convinced that he would never get a date let alone a girlfriend... he started dating offline & has now been with his gf for a number of years! online isn't the only way to go.


The latent shallow male entitlement is gross. However, there is a valid point made that if all the single, unhappy men became cool and attractive, many would statistically still be out of luck. So my suggestion is that in addition to becoming interesting, learning about feminism, etc, they should also recognize the statistical disadvantage as the socioeconomic problem it is, and fight those broader socioeconomic conditions that are causing a massive number of career-obsessed dudes to be dropped into a handful of west coast cities. In the short term that could mean taking your nest egg and moving elsewhere. In the long term we should dismantle the system where a couple of companies collect massive, exploitative digital rents from the rest of the world, thereby necessitating the concentrated labor force within an inherently sexist and exploitative system (capitalism). I also recommend banding together to fight against tech companies' firing disproportionately non-male employees who protest against bad things they do. But that's just my two cents.


"...there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our “human capital” in economic terms) to create something new, whether that’s a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.

But there is also a second way to make money. That’s the rentier way: by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others’ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.

For those who know their history, the term “rentier” conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century’s large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty. These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier’s right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you’ll see rentiers everywhere."

-

Ceptr.org - the most promising attempt I've seen who are trying to better make visible, and then democratize and distribute, the rents.


Yes, absolutely. My one quibble is that I think their point is slightly less valid in that if the men in question got it together to become better humans (and therefore better partners), the imbalance wouldn't be nearly as bad. Partly on the socioeconomic level, because then their companies wouldn't be alienating or excluding so many female employees. But also on the personal level, because somebody from their past might see them as a good catch.

But yes, they should definitely be fighting the system, not getting mad at women and/or society at large. Of course, the whole of incel culture is pretty good at explaining why no woman wants to come near them.


i agree with all of this.


> (although we should certainly adjust for the large gay male population)

Just curious, why wouldn't there be an equivalently large lesbian female population?


Major gay cities aren't necessarily major lesbian cities. The Castro happened because the military discharged gay men from the Pacific theater and a lot of them ended up there - was there a comparable dynamic for lesbians? I don't know of one. And I don't think Atlanta is very significant to gay men.


Exactly. Surprisingly, I can't find any statistics. But San Francisco now has zero lesbian bars, and quite a number of popular gay bars. This is a good article on the contrast in community resources: https://hoodline.com/2016/07/is-there-a-place-for-lesbians-i...


> Exactly. Surprisingly, I can't find any statistics. But San Francisco now has zero lesbian bars, and quite a number of popular gay bars.

Your statement that "a city that has a large group of gay men doesn't necessarily have a large group of lesbians" is accurate, but this is a bad piece of evidence to cite in favor of it. Almost all cities with large LGBTQ+ populations have far more bars and clubs targeted at gay men than at lesbians.

San Francisco had a few lesbian bars a few years ago, all of which have since closed. That pattern - lesbian nightlife disappearing - is pretty consistent across other cities that have large LGBTQ+ populations.


Could be. But it could just as well mean that gay men tend to move to cities in a way that lesbian women don't. Note also that the piece I linked goes well beyond bars.


That does not mean lesbians don't exists. It means they were there all along - just not so visible.


Actually, most research in this area points to the percentage of people being gay among males to be about twice that of among females.


I dunno if we are just rare, or simply not as vocal or active about being out as gay males, on average - but firsthand I’ve seen a lot more gay guys than I’ve seen fellow lesbians. (Much to my dismay...)


There are dozens of us ;)


There's a greater concentration of lesbians and other queer (not cis gay) people in the East Bay — especially those in families, raising kids and so on.


> But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful, male SWE in the Bay Area making $120K+ a year in his 20s or 30s, who should be a magnet for women, turns out to be living in one of worst places because of male-female ratios among singles (and some other cultural factors).

Yes, it's quite simple: there are many more men in the Bay than women, so women have their pick, and they can afford to raise the bar far higher than $120k.

Also, $120k can be a nice annual salary in much of the US, but doesn't go far in the Bay where median house price is over $1m.

Consider just FAANGs in the Bay. There's probably not enough available single women just for every straight FAANG male employee (who would be making more than $120k/yr).

Anecdotally, I know some women in the Bay, working in areas like recruiting and marketing, who are dating VCs and CEOs exclusively and consider dating "plain engineers" to be beneath them.

Fair or not, your "male SWE making $120K+ a year" has become the "common guy" of the Bay. The number of women is small enough that most of them can aim higher.


> it's quite simple: there are many more men in the Bay than women

I’m in Manhattan. The single sex ratio is reversed. (More single women than men.)

Male FAANG employee rants about how they should be magnets for women, but can’t find a date because something is wrong with all women, are equally prevalent here.

They’re all (a) the same rant and (b) as boring as the last one.

There’s a selection effect among well-paid software engineers at large tech companies that explains more of this than local statistics. That or these jobs turn interesting people into those who believe they should be magnets for the opposite sex, which tends to be a turn-off for most people.


> That or these jobs turn interesting people into those who believe they should be magnets for the opposite sex, which tends to be a turn-off for most people.

Tech selects for people who are object focussed as opposed to people focussed.

Most women prefer to date men who are good at wooing and entertaining them. Which means more people focussed than object focussed.

The tech men are frustrated because they are basically their best selves -- financially and professionally successful, able and willing to support a family. Traditionally that would be enough to make them a catch.

But dating women with careers limits the value of their financial support. And they don't have the skills to wow the women socially.

Realistically they can't develop those skills easily.

This is probably going to sound incredibly cynical, but the best advice I've heard for NYC techies is to try to date ballerinas.

They're beautiful and disciplined. But they retire before 30 and have to decide to either start a family or open a studio to start teaching. At that point most of the men they know are married or gay.

So likely to be more willing to overlook the social weaknesses of tech men.


Don Quixote appears from behind the curtain up stage left--his left arm confidently and lustily on his right hip, right arm arcing gracefully over his head like half a rainbow.

There's so much going on in this response, but my favorite parts, in order of appearance:

> The tech men are frustrated because they are basically their best selves

The tech men are frustrated because of entitlement. Handed everything on a silver platter hand-delivered to them by a person of color driving a rented Toyota Prius for half of their monthly income.

> This is probably going to sound incredibly cynical, but the best advice I've heard for NYC techies is to try to date ballerinas.

Leave my goddamn ballerinas alone.

> But they retire before 30 and have to decide to either start a family or open a studio to start teaching.

Most of the people I dance with are software engineers of one kind or another. San Francisco may be somewhat unique in that regard--I wouldn't know, but most of the dancers I know both professional and retired are insanely enterprising and know how to hustle better than most of the people I know in tech.

> At that point most of the men they know are married or gay.

Most of the men I know that dance both professionally and at an amateur level do not identify as gay--some have families--with other dancers.

> So likely to be more willing to overlook the social weaknesses of tech men.

Nope. It's _impossible_ to overlook the social weaknesses of tech men.


"Realistically they can't develop those skills easily."

software skills can't be developed easily either, yet programmers have powered through, persevered, and figured it out. where would programmers be if they shied away from skills they couldn't develop easily?

also, if you have underdeveloped social skills, you are not 'basically your best self'. i believe in the tech men! i believe that they can put their cleverness & perseverance to work developing their social skills! you can do it!


> The tech men are frustrated because they are basically their best selves

> And they don't have the skills to wow the women socially.

Your standard of what qualifies as a man's "best self" is pretty low.


It's interesting how co-occurrent some genetic/behavioral traits are. I read an article about a study of domesticating foxes. After many generations selecting for propensity to come forward when a human puts out food, the semi-domesticated offspring showed a wide array of physical traits associated with dogs in addition to the behavior that was selected for.

Yet... as computing becomes more popular, I expect this stereotype to become obsolete. It roughly applies to myself and many of my friends. My wife calls me a robot. But hey, somehow most of us managed to find a spouse.


Thank you for your anecdote. I'm sure as soon as enough Bay area engineers read it, thousands of women will materialize out of thin air to compensate for the fact that there are 55-65% more men than women in counties like Santa Clara and Marin.

While I don't doubt that some guys have trouble in more favorable conditions, nothing will change the mathematical reality that even if every single man in the Bay found his perfect match, 40% of them would remain single because there are simply not enough women for all the men in the area.


I've been away from the bay for a while, but it's amazing how bad the dating scene is, for exactly the reasons you described. I'm currently engaged to an amazing woman who has only ever lived in working-class suburbs and smaller cities. Her exes and her friends' husbands are shockingly anti-intellectual, didn't attend college, have some substance abuse issues, and/or make well under 6 figures. She keeps telling me how amazing I am as a partner, even though in my mind, I'm just being a decent human being. Engineers in places like SFBA severely underestimate how attractive they would be anywhere else in the country/world.


> Engineers in places like SFBA severely underestimate how attractive they would be anywhere else in the country/world.

I agree completely.

> Her exes and her friends' husbands are shockingly anti-intellectual, didn't attend college, have some substance abuse issues, and/or make well under 6 figures.

Here's what happened:

Guys who are intellectual, attended college, have good discipline, and stayed away from substance abuse and similar problems - they moved to the Bay to get that "six figure job".

The Bay has thus become chock-full of these men.

The few women who moved to the Bay can have their pick. What would be a rare find elsewhere, is commonplace and boring in the Bay.

One of many anecdotes I could cite:

A friend of mine is a 25yo female working in recruiting in the Bay. If you pitched a date as an "intellectual, college-educated man with a good life and a six-figure job" she'd literally laugh in your face. She had 2 different guys courting her at the time, a startup CEO and a VC. She once showed me her Tinder account. Just by swiping 30-40 times, she'd find at least one guy who is an exec or VC making 7 figures per year, and it would usually be a match.

"120k/year"? You'd make her laugh.


> she'd find at least one guy who is an exec or VC making 7 figures per year, and it would usually be a match.

> "120k/year"? You'd make her laugh.

I don't understand this fixation on earnings, I wasn't making half that when I found my partner. Making 7 figures won't get you a girlfriend, but thinking it will makes it likely any partner you do find won't stick around long.

One of two things are happening, either a, all the women you're meeting truly are fixated on nothing but a man's wallet (highly unlikely but possible) or b, you have some seriously unhealthy views towards women and relationships that you should work on before attempting to enter a meaningful relationship.


Women find men with more money to be more attractive. It isn't the only factor, but it is a significant factor like for example height.

> "A man can move himself two points higher on the attractiveness scale we used if his salary increases by a factor of 10," study author John Speakman told The Times.

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2018/01/women-are-more-...


The book "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley goes into depth about how men and women choose their mates, based largely on evolutionary biology.

People treat it like a character flaw for a woman to choose a man based on wealth and status, but why? A woman committing to a relationship likely means pregnancy and that requires resources and protection for years and years.

That's how it's been for hundreds of thousands of years. Expecting widespread birth control and changing societal norms to overcome all those years of evolution in only a few generations seems foolish.


You're right, but the flip side is that men are actively shamed for pursuing their own evolutionary incentives. There are two layers of competition going on, the sexual-economic one and the fluffy interpersonal one, but some people gain leverage by maintaining the fiction that one of them is obsolete. This fiction is enforced by calling everyone who notices it a misogynist or an incel.


Indeed. I don't fault women for preferring wealthy and successful men. I don't fault men for preferring young, beautiful women.


> That's how it's been for hundreds of thousands of years.

Try "millions" :)


I found my wife when I was unemployed. I wouldn't have it any other way. As a result, I remind myself to never forget it, and be extra good as a husband. Relationships are hard enough, if you're using your income (I had none, was on unemployment), or inheritance (I have none) as a carrot, you're in for a rude awakening someday. Apologies to Red Green, but while I'm not wealthy, I'm just a run of the mill software developer in Chicago.. she does find me handy and handsome!


It's not always the money you're currently making that matters. The potential to make money is also subconsciously considered in dating.


Finding a spouse when you aren't well off or rich is the wave. From what I see/hear from my friends, dating is grueling. I've been with my mine for almost a decade.


attempts at explaining macro-scale socio-economics with the kind of game-theoretic arguments in this thread assume you can nudge one factor while keeping "all other things equal". It's hard to do this with perdonal anecdotes, yet that's what all of us have direct experience of.


I'm mostly impressed that anyone on this hellsite is paraphrasing Red Green.


ding ding ding: "Making 7 figures won't get you a girlfriend, but thinking it will makes it likely any partner you do find won't stick around long."


> If you pitched a date as an "intellectual, college-educated man with a good life and a six-figure job" she'd literally laugh in your face.

That literally says nothing about what makes that person interesting or fun to be around.

Thinking that people boil down to salary and education level will make you only able to display those things.

Find a hobby that you like, enrich yourself in ways that aren't measured by the IRS.


>she'd find at least one guy who is an exec or VC making 7 figures per year,

Does she have them audited? Because my "Tinder Salary" is an order of magnitude greater my actual salary.


I assure you, she is quite astute. The Tinder demonstration was just a fun way to show me how many options she has.

For example, with LinkedIn and its profile pics, it's very easy to figure out whether the guy you're chatting with really is the CEO of a hot startup.


I'm not sure if this doesn't fall under the definition of something like "delusory rape" these days


Most startup CEOs don't make much. Are there really very many VCs out there?


> Most startup CEOs don't make much.

Depends on the startup and what stage it is. If it's a successful startup, then the CEO is sitting on a pile of stock that will likely be worth millions. If it's also a later stage startup, then likely he is making at least as much as his senior developers on top of that.

Either way, he's a much better bet if you want to be a millionaire's wife some day. Also, executives typically have expense accounts that afford them a very nice lifestyle _right now_, even if their salary isn't that high. You can be making a modest salary, but leading a jetset life on business expenses.

> Are there really very many VCs out there?

Yes there are. Here's just one random list of them:

http://www.calstartuplawfirm.com/venture-groups.html


Of all the women I know, not one of them aspires to be "a millionaire's wife".


Funny coincidence, I never met such a woman either!

I did meet plenty who just happened to only date men who make high six to seven figures. It was a serial coincidence!


Me too! Unfortunately none of them ever married those men and most of them remain pretty unhappy with their dating lives. Another serial coincidence!


That's a pretty expected outcome when you pay that game.

If you take the sum of all the comments, it goes something like this:

1. Women are disproportionally flocking to a few guys at the very top of the income / success curve. 2. Those guys have amazing dating life, and no pressure to commit. 3. They will go through dozens of women and eventually settle with one. So if they date X women in their bachelorhood, only one 1/X will end up marrying them, and X-1/X will be left disappointed and unhappy. 4. X can be 200+, so that's a lot of unhappy women. 5. Meanwhile tons of guys below the top would love get a date, and can't. They're also unhappy. 6. Evolution isn't optimizing for happiness.


Sounds like a self-selection situation


"How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him"


To contrast this, I think at least a quarter of the ones I know have this as an ambition. Knowing people that do want something or that do not has nothing to do with averages, unless you happen to know everyone :)


I guess I know better / more ambitious women than you. :)


I try not to put value judgements on people just for what they think they want in life, so I don't know that I agree.


I've had shares worth millions on paper that later turned out to be worthless many times... It really need to be a later stage startup with real traction for that to really mean anything.


You and me both, man.

However, it's a different path for top executives versus the rest of us.

If you follow folks at that level, you'll notice that even when their startup fizzles, they tend to come out on top.

There are ways to get paid well at an exit even when your stock are nominally worthless. If you're an executive. Not to mention that if their startup was worth $100m+ at one point, they would likely get a chance to start another.

None of this is criticism, by the way: many of these guys worked harder and longer than most engineers.

They did get disproportionately compensated for it, though.


What are the ways they get paid at exit with worthless stock?


One example: if you're the one who approves the sale, you can arrange for a cushy job with a golden parachute at the acquiring entity. Say, $1m/yr comp with $30m mandatory severance whenever you leave for any reason.

Congrats, you just got paid $30m+ as an exec for an exit that paid nothing to all other shareholders.


if what she cares about is income, that's pretty damned sad.


In her defense, I don't think she only cared about income. But she could easily screen out everyone making less than seven figures, so she started from that reduced pool, then further screened it for personality, etc.


Being a woman dating in the Bay Area is like that gif with the hot dogs thrown at your face. You’ve gotta start cutting somewhere and why not there?


> The few women who moved to the Bay can have their pick.

I don't think so. It's only when males are desperate to settle; living alone and spending their money on their hobbies/travel might be a much more attractive option to them than to bind to an unattractive female that went to SFBA specifically to capture a high-value male.


I think you underestimate the situation haha. Your perception of attractiveness is based on who’s around you. If the average around you is by New York standards a 5, then a 6 is above-average attractive. And a 7 is a solid catch.

Women in the Bay Area can easily score a few points higher than in more competitive cities and the opposite is true for men.


> I know some women in the Bay, working in areas like recruiting and marketing, who are dating VCs and CEOs exclusively and consider dating "plain engineers" to be beneath them.

That sounds more like bullets dodged than a loss (for the engineers that is).


Sure. If that appeals to you, you're welcome to move to the Bay. You'll dodge so many bullets, that you'll forget what a date with a woman is ;-)

More seriously, while we'd love to impose moral views on reality, the simple fact is that when people can afford to be picky, they will be.

I don't know what you value in a romantic partner, but for simplicity, let's assume it's looks. If you arrived at some magical island where it was just you and hundreds of women, and 50% of those were supermodels, would you ever date an average girl?


Maybe. If they were better at fishing than anyone else.


If hundreds of supermodels are competing for your attention, I'm sure many of them would become amazing at fishing, modern dancing, pottery-making, or whatever other random skill you find attractive.


Obviously the point is that you still gotta survive on this island, and the reason why we have diversity in personality, physicality and intelligence is because different combinations of those things matter for survival. And it's unlikely that you would "date" at all in an island with such ratios.


>> If you arrived at some magical island where it was just you and hundreds of women, and 50% of those were supermodels, would you ever date an average girl

I would start acting like an asshole because that would be the only way of keeping most of them from making advances on me all the time.


I have no idea what your point is... i'm talking about avoiding women who are only interested in money or power, i.e gold diggers - that's not a healthy relationship for anyone.


>Anecdotally, I know some women in the Bay, working in areas like recruiting and marketing, who are dating VCs and CEOs exclusively and consider dating "plain engineers" to be beneath them.

No matter ones income, it's better not to go anywhere with that kind of women. Also life tends to adjust this pretty quickly: they can be that picky until their early 30's, maybe even late 20's. After that available options narrow down substantially.


Galaxy brain: maybe the same qualities that make a guy more valuable in the professional marketplace and qualify them to be VCs and CEOs instead of entry level SWEs (interpersonal skills, superior judgement, long-range vision, managerial skills, identifying win-win solutions and building consensus for them, etc) also make them better romantic partners. So the salary is a correlation with an underlying shared root cause, not a direct causation.


Not that I disagree (what you said is almost certainly true) but it's funny how both sides can unite on this Randian take. Horseshoe theory.


Idk, $120k is still a lot. You are still begging the question that money even matters. There's an elephant in the room:

Basically men have vastly overestimated the importance of wealth.

A chart of the importance of wealth would drop off a cliff as you go from third-world conditions to a non-starvation civilization. Then it approaches zero as you get to NYC/SF where literally everyone is rich or else they wouldn't be living there. Guys who get mail order brides are basically arbitraging this (probably temporary) geographical difference in the importance of wealth.


>> Guys who get mail order brides

Are not usually exactly the winners in life.


I like how a guy earning a fairly unremarkable-when-we-adjust-for-cost-of-living salary with a bunch of fairly unimpressive table-stakes credentials: "clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful" (whaddaya want? a cookie?) is meant to be a Amazing Pussy Magnet.

One of the major factors - aside from the gender ratio - behind tech guys not finding partners is this weird expectation that if they shave, clip their fingernails, and don't act like an outright dirtbag that women will flock to them, regardless of whether they have any personal appeal or not.

A lot of dudes in tech are just bores with zero interests and a outsized sense of entitlement to the opposite sex (talking about the het guys, don't know how it works on the other side of the fence). Just to top it off, they expect to be magnets to interesting women, too - these guys are the first to sneer at gold-digging women who are, frankly, their appropriate mirror image. That is, if the only thing you can say about yourself that isn't table-stages normal person stuff is that you're "a SWE making $120K+ a year" who exactly do you think you're going to attract?

Bonus points: deciding that the one thing that's missing from the above picture is being swole, and filling in any extra time not spend being a "respectful male SWE" with incessant iron pumping.


Yeah folks could try on a little humility... when someone is uninterested in you, it's not a personal affront. You expressed interest and they didn't reciprocate. Big deal. When _everyone_ is uninterested in you, maybe you're not interesting. You could think about how to change that, rather than complaining that the world is judging you on the wrong metric.

Do Bay Area men really think interesting women would be irresistably drawn to their unremarkable income and mastery of basic hygiene if they moved to New York?


I’ve been speaking with my girlfriends friends, about the paucity of eligible men in the SFBA. Most of them ask me to introduce them to a nice person. Looks aren’t as important, but having a decent job is. Maybe it’s the age, but I found simply being kind and knowing your target market (women who like kind guys, who are everywhere, and are often smoking hot) works.

Late 30s is a good time to date. I had the same issues as OP describes in my 20s, not in the Bay Area. It was all about how I subconsciously chose to approach things. I worked on myself, was genuine, and have had great success finding a mate up here.

(Not all that attentive, about 50 lbs overweight, fwiw)


> Not all that attentive, about 50 lbs overweight, fwiw

That's one hell of a dating site opener.


Haha.. this is now taking an interesting turn.


Totally agree. Being interesting as a human and working on yourself is so much better than trying to get credit for being "respectful". That's like saying: "look I shower every day!"

Be interesting.


> Be interesting

To expand on this: Develop yourself outside of your work. You are not your career.

People don't really care much about what exact job you have, as long as it provides stability - both financial and mental. You're no good for anyone if your job takes up all of your time, energy and attention. Your significant other should not need to carry your work-related burdens.

Have interests outside of what you do for a living. I got weird looks when I admitted at my previous job that I don't do much coding in my spare time, but honestly the guy I talked to did coding for work and most of his spare time, all the time. I mean good for him if he's enjoying himself but it's just not for me.

Use your intelligence to expand your horizons. Know what's going on in the news and politics. Read books outside of your niche (outside of fantasy/sci-fi, biographies of people that aren't called Steve or Bill, history of countries on the other side of the world). Find people and social communities outside of your industry. Get out of your comfort zone.


What do you personally do to be interesting?


I climb outside, I backpack, I was the first person in my college to do study abroad at a specific smaller uni, I became a beginner in breakdancing (good enough to do some moves at a party, not to perform), I've learned to scuba dive, I've learned to AT ski, I participate in a book club that has roughly a 50/50 gender balance (important for hearing view points and books you might not have), I've spent literally years fixing my dog's horrific separation anxiety, I taught another dog I cared for to close the door behind them, I cross dress about once a year. I can cook.

All of this makes for better conversation on a date, or to get a date than what you do for work or how much you make.


I personally moved to locations that don't have 50%+ more single men than women. That seemed to have made me a lot more, uhm, "interesting".


You could literally be the only man in town, if you're not the kind of person other people want to date, they'd rather be single.


Any pointers to a list of those locations?


Almost anywhere that isn't a major tech hub.


New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Nashville, Austin, Dallas and many more.


Come to New Orleans. The city will probably be more interesting than you and you'll be forced to compete.


> What do you personally do to be interesting?

People who do what they enjoy and try new things, instead of trying to be interesting, tend to be interesting.


Accept that you are the way you are and like the things you like. When people talk about what they like, engage with them. Be a human being.

From experience, this will already put you so far outside of the usual spectrum of what people meet that this is more than enough. There's a nice side-effect that you don't need to feel like you need to "do things" to be interesting, which really isn't a healthy stance to have towards yourself.


I'd also say that pushing your comfort zone is healthy behavior and will likely leave you a more well rounded person.


A general advice would be curious in multiple things in different domains (tech, sport, politics, literature etc) be well articulated, confident and most importantly look happy.

My anecdotal advice is to change environment. Depending on where you move to the demographic (men/women ratio), race preferences and what is considered as interesting changes. As an engineer in engineering university, I had more luck on dating apps focusing on women from non-tech field with different men/women ratio. As a half-asian guy, I had way more success in an Asian country than a predominately white country. (independent from race/age of the women)


Become a multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person.

Starting with exploring genuine interests which have maybe not been 'listened to'. Being a bit adventurous (determine if things you've been curious about you actually care about), and trying new things (discover and identify new areas that exist) which could end up being interesting to you.

From what I've seen, the key to being interesting is weirdly being more of "your true self".

(not sure if any of that is actually helpful)


> Become a multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person.

According to census statistics, there are 1.63 single men for every 1 woman in Marin County. 1.34 single men per single woman in San Mateo County. 1.55 single men per single woman in Santa Clara County.

So I really like your advice; if every man in the Bay became a "multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person", they would transcend the boundaries of plain arithmetic so there would be enough single women to date every one of them!


The advice is for an individual, not all men collectively. But yeah the advice is not "be interesting", it's "be more interesting than a typical man in your area". The issue you describe is very real though.


My point is that it will be really hard for straight men to date when there's 130-160 of them for every 100 women.

Yes, each one of them could become ultra-competitive about it, and crawl on top of the others to be among the fortunate 60% who get dates, instead of the 40% who don't.

But do you really want to live in an area where 40% of men can't get a date because there's simply no women available to them?

We also haven't discussed the downsides to these fortunate 60% men. You worked on yourself, became interesting, and got a girlfriend. However, she knows with 50% more men than women in her area, she can easily replace you. That may make the relationship less pleasant than you think.

"Just become more interesting to overcome all adverse effects from 50% gender diversity" is unfortunately quite naive.


Solving the dating problem was not the question.

> "How does one become more interesting"

Sure, you can change your environment to be more *relatively interesting. But that was also not the core of the question as I understand it.

Rather, providing a method or tips to be more OBJECTIVELY interesting today than your yesterdays self is something useful in any kind of 'dating market'.


How to become more interesting (as a guy in the bay area):

- Make (significantly) more money (than most other guys in the bay area)

- Be more attractive (than most other guys in the bay area)

Making $120k in the bay area obviously isn't impressive. Neither is being fit without being on gear. It's all about the other guys around you. Both quality and quantity. These things would make you interesting in other parts of the country, or outside of the USA. Not here, though.

Now how about $500k? You can afford a starter home, a nice car, custom-tailored clothing. Plastic surgery if you think you need it.

You're presumably good at something that you're passionate about if you're being paid that much, even if it's "just" software engineering, and that's something people like. You can even date other software engineers who will be impressed by your skills and knowledge. Yeah the gender ratio sucks, but this is also the best place in the world to make your dual-FAANG-engineer-income power-couple dream come true.

Come up with something that isn't (video/board)gaming, cycling, bouldering, or photography, that you do maybe once a month and say it's your hobby. Yoga is a decent choice.

Grats, you're now interesting. Assuming you don't have any physical or psychological dealbreakers that can't be overlooked no matter how rich or ripped you get, that is.


Your definition of interesting might be the most interesting thing in this comment.

I would not say that any of that makes you particularly interesting. Some of it might make you attractive to certain people, but I think that's quite different from what was originally intended by "interesting" in this thread.

"Say it's your hobby"... I suggest actually finding a hobby. Because it will make you happier, not because it will make you "look interesting".


>but I think that's quite different from what was originally intended by "interesting" in this thread.

Is it? Being interesting is a competition. You are competing for the interest/attention of others. How interesting you are depends on how much better or worse you rank compared to others, in regards to the factors that make a person interesting. Relationships, friendships, jobs -- it's all competition for limited resources.

>"Say it's your hobby"... I suggest actually finding a hobby. Because it will make you happier, not because it will make you "look interesting".

Obviously you should have hobbies for the sake of personal fulfillment, and I don't see what would make you think I feel otherwise. But your hobbies are also part of your personal brand, and a factor in making you interesting (or boring), so it's important that you project as someone who has interesting hobbies (whether they actually qualify as hobbies or not, depending on the time and effort/money that you invest). Right? People list their hobbies on dating profiles. People (usually) talk about their hobbies on first dates. It's not uncommon for hobbies to be a discussion during job interviews.

>Some of it might make you attractive to certain people

Yes, hopefully (but not assuredly) attractive to certain people that you want to attract in the first place.


Your view of the (lack of) intrinsic value in the enjoyment of hobbies is off putting. Maybe try a hobby that you enjoy just for the heck of it rather than to check a box on your personal brand? Guaranteed that being legitimately interested in something outside of work will make you more attractive to a potential member of your dating pool. It doesn’t even matter what it is necessarily!


Not sure how you got that impression. I like my hobbies. Your presented hobbies != your actual hobbies. I'm just sharing advice that will potentially better your odds.


The entire concept of "presented hobbies" is what we are taking issue with.

What wwould this better your odds for? Short-term dating success perhaps. I'm pretty sure there are better long-term strategies for happiness.

Be yourself, like what you like (unashamedly), and you will likely attract people into your life who like those same things, and indeed you.


What do you have against short-term dating?


My point exactly.


So shallow, where do I start.


Universities have dozens to hundreds applications per available seat, good jobs have more. So competition here is relatively moderate.


I like traveling to experience different cultures and personalities, getting out of your comfort zone can be very rewarding. If you have the means, organizing social events in a safe space for other people to join is great for creating connections and making friends. Host a potluck dinner, or go on a roadtrip, invite random people. Who do you find interesting? Try to be that person


[flagged]


If those men are transplants, isn’t the demographic skew partially their fault?


Yes, if you move to an area that's known to have dating demographics badly skewed against you, don't be surprised when your dating life there is disappointing.

However, when we have a discussion about Bay Area dating, and most comments blame men for "not being interesting" and completely ignore, deny, or fail to even mention the gender imbalance, I don't think it helps men to make informed choices.


The fact is that either because of infanticide or nature there are fewer younger men in the world so you’ll have this problem in most places.


> fewer younger men

I'd expect fewer young women?


Yes that’s what I meant to say.


I think it’s also interesting to point out that the kind of person who hears “improve your social life” and thinks “that’s impossible because there aren’t enough women willing to date me” is probably dealing with some self fulfilling prophecy.

When I think of my social life I think of my community and the people in it. Board game nights at my friends’ apartments, playing destiny 2 together, going canvassing with folks politically aligned with me. I’ve met so many interesting platonic and romantic relationships by intentionally building community first and my romantic life second.

If your entire socialization scheme is build around winning at dating and you come from it with a scarcity mindset... you’re the problem.


wow, i'm just sitting here imagining there are 150 applicants to 100 jobs and reading a response like this. "you need to work harder - a lot of people are just not that talented to employers - why aren't you outcompeting the others?" this seems straight up victim blaming.

if there are 150 applicants and 100 jobs, there are 50 people who miss out. waging war to "one up" those other 149 (or 99 i guess) is certainly an avenue of possible pursuit but is likely to lead to misery IME.

alternatively, removing yourself from a systematically horrible situation is probably pareto optimal. if there are 100 jobs and 80 applicants, you're suddenly in a way better situation.

if you make six figures and can work remotely, the world is literally your oyster. there are opportunities to arbitrage your income and freedom and create the life you want - but it starts outside SFBA.


Hacker News is full of advice for people attempting to get successful outcomes in situations where there are 20,000 applicants to 100 jobs, so I'm amazed that a discussion of how you can improve your outcomes under a 150:100 ratio is now "victim blaming".

Also, newsflash: not getting attention from the gender(s) of your choice doesn't make you a "victim". We're back to the entitlement thing, I guess.

But yes, moving out of the Bay Area will help. However, I'd hazard a guess that unless someone moves to somewhere where a six-figure salary makes them a minor princeling, your problems may follow them. Because a boring dude in SF or the Bay is still a boring guy in Des Moines or Scranton.


I suspect most of them were told (by their mothers, continuously for the first 20 years of their lives) that this was in fact the way to land a good woman. Be a nice clean cut guy and earn $120K a year.

If you know so much then what's your prescription for them?


Well, first of all, lose that sense of entitlement. It's hard to think of much that's less appealing than petulance.

It's also a pretty great way to blind yourself to what 'league' you're actually in. A number of my tech friends have wasted an extraordinary amount of time chasing women absurdly out of their league because they've been convinced that "having a decent job", "being well-spoken" and "eating with their mouths closed" somehow puts them in the top 3% of desirable men. Really, no.

Second, go have a life. You know, other activities outside work? Socializing? This is important anyhow. Preferably do activities because you're interested in them and socialize with people you like, not because you're there to "pick up chicks". Nothing is more tiring than dudes relentlessly on the make in every situation.

This isn't guaranteed to work... especially with dire male/female ratios (although not living like a schlub probably evens the odds a bit). And plenty of people are just really unattractive, uncharismatic, whatever. Not sure what to do then.


> lose that sense of entitlement

When you are told you need to meet specific criteria to achieve a goal, it's not entitlement to expect those criteria to lead to that goal. When trying to get people to listen to what you are saying, try not to start with a put-down.


I'd say it's precisely entitlement to expect that fulfilling criteria will lead to a goal. Entitlements like that come from pervasive societal messages, and getting over them is hard. You can't see it until it's pointed out, and that is always going to come as a blow.

It's even harder to fix the overall messaging than it is to realize it in yourself. But each person who realizes that they have been sold an entitlement, and gets past it, is one more person who can say, "No, all of the assumptions you've been sold are wrong."


You're saying that "if someone tells you some entitled garbage, and you believe it, it's not entitled garbage?". So essentially it's not entitlement because someone else told you?


friend, i'm afraid you've been lied to. it's not your fault. we've all absorbed loads of lies. when i was a teenager, i thought no guy would ever want to date me because i wasn't skinny or "pretty". a number of humiliating experiences drove that home. but over time, it turned out to not be the case at all. i had to revise my understanding. and i had to not give up or get grumpy about it.

the good news is now that you know that you've been sold some bad goods, you can start to figure out what the real story is. and only good things can come from that :} there is some great advice in this thread, especially this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977225


When you are told something that is wrong, holding onto it after you learn that it is wrong is entitlement.


Who on earth (in USA I should say) actually listens to their parents in this matter?


These tech guys who's only relationship is with their mother? I'm pretty sickened by reading all the comments on this post. So many incels it's not even funny.


Ah yes chauvinistic men who feel entitlement to "pussy". You are what's wrong with the world. Women are people, not objects.


I’m going to guess they won’t have an answer to your question of how single men in the Bay Area working on themselves and “becoming interesting” will suddenly make tens of thousands of single women materialise in the Bay Area.

It was merely a rant about how they felt people shouldn’t feel entitled to anything and that expecting to be able to date if you’ve got your life in order is too much entitlement.


This is a strange response, mostly a wilful misreading of what I wrote. But yes, having your "life in order" isn't actually all that shit-hot, and yes, "expecting to be able to date" if you're not very interesting is actually "too much entitlement".

Because last time I checked, "expecting to be able to date" involves the decisions of other people and you're not really generally entitled for other people to do much more than treat you with decency and respect. Not, necessarily, want to jump your bones. Sorry.


Why do you need to be “hot shit” in order to date? Why isn’t being able to provide for your SO emotionally/physically/financially sufficient?

By your standards I’m not hot shit but my girlfriend loves me so I’m wondering why I should even care what you think?


It's weird you keep cropping up on this thread interpreting me saying "women are not going to flock to you just because you meet some basic criteria so it is foolish to start behaving that you are entitled to this" as "obviously, philosopher1234 cannot possibly have a girlfriend, q.e.d".


I claim that being kind, having a stable job, and capable of love is enough to find a woman with those same qualities. I think it’s weird that you keep running around this thread telling men they’re not good enough in such a vicious tone. It comes across as bitter


OK, once more: at no point did I ever suggest that people can't find love if they don't have much more than table stakes things like "clean fingernails" and "stable jobs" and "capability for love", only that they should not feel entitled to attention from the appropriate gender.

I'm curious as to what's driving your serial misinterpretation, if anything. I suppose it's possible you're just having difficulty with parsing out arguments and reasoning about them (is English your first language?), but it seems just as likely you're on the insecure side. You keep cropping up and asking complete strangers on the Internet to validate your relationship.

So, ok. Dude, you're probably fine. Although it's not a guarantee; there's still a possibility that your girlfriend runs off with Mick Jagger, or a rock-climber who works in a cafe who has $18.23 in his bank account, or a temperamental chess player with a huge schlong who bathes once a month, whether he needs to or not. Keep your eyes peeled at all times!


How are you not getting this?

This is not a problem of interestingness. This is a problem of skewed gender ratios. In India and China there are way more men than women. That means that some men will remain without partners regardless of what they do or how interesting they become.

That's their problem you might say. Sure, but only if you ignore the negative consequences of young men being unable to find partners.


OK, so you're still going, too. Neat.

The analogy to India and China is pretty good, aside from a few tiny differences, like the fact that most single males in the valley we're talking about intentionally came there from somewhere else, are hugely wealthy relative to poor Chinese and Indian workers, and that it's ever so slightly easier to cross a county line to somewhere less bizarre than Santa Clara than it is to emigrate out of India or China.

It's funny how I can post a ranty-but-true thing about how the world actually works (i.e. "having some table stakes attributes will not make you a 'pussy magnet'") and just get bombarded by people like you complaining about the dreaded ratio and philosopher1234 who clearly is wondering whether his girlfriend is about to leave him for a rock-climbing jazz musician who doesn't bathe or something.

All these dudes come flooding into an area to work in a dude-dominated industry and collect Big Valley Salaries and somehow this is a problem that needs to be worked out? If it's that big a problem, leave. Geez. How hard it that to figure out?


So now your solution is for them to leave and go elsewhere. That's fine, it's workable.

I just objected to this idea that they should work on their interestingness and that doing so would somehow solve the problem of them finding someone. I think you acknowledge that even if they all become incredibly interesting, they wouldn't all be able to find partners.


If there’s one thing I know about dating it’s “don’t take your mom’s advice.” So little of it appears to be grounded in reality.

Wearing dress shirts instead of t-shirts was a good idea though.


[flagged]


Why is being a competent, stable, kind adult not enough to be in a healthy relationship? Is it better to be mcjagger than mr Rogers? What I bring to my relationship isn’t primarily mystery or entertainment or coolness or “being interesting”, but an emotional connection, stability, and love. Everyone here is talking like that’s not good enough and I don’t understand why. Clearly it is enough for my girlfriend and it’s what I want from her as well.


> Why is being a competent, stable, kind adult not enough to be in a healthy relationship?

Because no one owes you shit. If you don’t like your circumstances change them. Either change yourself or change your surroundings. You are not owed a relationship of any kind, for any reason. Being a single man in the Bay Area is pretty awful because of the ratio, even if you are reasonably good looking, professionally successful and confident. It’s no fun being a young professional woman in New York City either. The ratio is the ratio; it has its effects. People give women marginally more lip service sympathy but they do exactly as much to actually help. Nothing.


Clipping nails is probably all you need from that list. You can still be unshaven (provided your stubble looks like man stubble, not pubes) be a bit of a dirtbag, earn slightly less money and get more women. No one gives a shit if you are well spoken, you can have a silver tongue without using the Queen's English, in fact it helps if you enjoy abusing grammar.

As for attracting interesting women you actually wanna marry. Yeah you should probably have interests outside of tech. If all you are interested in is tech that makes you really boring because it's one of those subjects with no spillover. If you're an artist people might not appreciate the technicalities of mixing oil paints but they will enjoy looking at your paintings. Tech is impenetrable unless you are also in it. No one gives a fuck about that graph problem you solved that just made your distributed system more scalable because they don't understand half of those words. Imagine two people speaking a language you don't speak to each other and all they want to do is talk in that language. So boring.


Dating in the Bay Area as a male engineer with average (or worse) looks is extremely easy if you're a white (or white-passing) FAANG employee (or you work at any other company that is obviously paying you $300k+ in the bay) who is willing to date PRC citizens.

Gold-digging isn't relevant imo given that they also have tech incomes, and generally have rich families overseas to boot. I really don't understand why most guys here pass on them. The only reason I ever get from my friends when I ask is "I just don't like fobs". Whatever, more for me.


For anyone else wondering what "fobs" means.

Oxford dictionary plural for: A chain attached to a watch for carrying in a waistcoat or waistband pocket.


I believe it is an acronym for "Fresh Off the Boat", i.e. an immigrant. It's a slang term and I personally don't use it too much but have heard it used fairly often.


I'd argue that the modern definition has nothing to do with immigrant status, and is entirely about whether or not you can pass as a native English speaker. It just so happens that most people who have accents are immigrants, and you can reasonably assume that anyone who didn't grow up speaking English as a native language is going to have an accent.

You are not a fob if you moved here from China at 9 years old, didn't read or speak your first word of English until then, and have no discernible accent as an adult.

No one would call a Hong Konger with a HK English accent a fob either.


> you can pass as a native English speaker

Also clothing :-)


> I like how a guy earning a fairly unremarkable-when-we-adjust-for-cost-of-living salary with a bunch of fairly unimpressive table-stakes credentials: "clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful" (whaddaya want? a cookie?) is meant to be a Amazing Pussy Magnet.

It's obviously not the case in the Bay Area, but it is in a lot of places. To be honest, I was a bit shocked with the kind of mismatched couples I saw in San Francisco. Lots of appealing men with less appealing women. Ratios do matter. Also, a SWE salary is not unremarkable in most of the country (look up salary statistics).


"so-so women"

Wtf dude.


I'm not a native speaker, didn't mean to be offensive. I just meant that there's a lot of couples where the male half seems to score quite a bit higher on attractiveness, career, appeal, etc. I should note that this observation was also shared by my wife. Changed the wording.


Don’t apologize to people who are attacking you. It just encourages them.


Maybe in addition to be good looking and earning money, that dude also was not looking for trophy wife and had different preferences. Dude sounds like catch.


I'm not talking about a specific man and physical attractiveness is just one of many aspects. In aggregate, it seems reasonable to believe that the gender imbalance causes men to lower their standards.

> Dude sounds like catch.

That's sort of the point.


The interesting think for me is that all discussions about relationships on hn boils down to money and looks (gym for guys, I guess makeup and diet for girls).

And the idea of match is "willing to let me pay for her". There is no other standard for suitable partner ever mentioned. No expectation of shared values or similar livestyle (except valuing looks). No expectation of mutual support.

And the experts on what women want are people who "dated" over dozens of people last year - meaning none of them trying for long term stable relationship.

And everytime I read those discussions I kind of think I would not want to date them either. Mostly because they primary think in hierarchies instead of relationships and because I would not want a guy that would use his money as leverage over me.


It gets a lot easier to understand when you realize that most women are looking for a life partner while most men are looking for a sex partner. You are more careful with life partners, so there will always be a surplus of men available for dating looking for sex, and most of them will fake looking for a life partner just to get more opportunities since there are so few women who are into the same things.

This means that for you as a woman dating is first and foremost about separating life partners from sex partners. Your advice goes in that direction. But it is totally worthless for men, most women they meet will be looking for a life partner so they are not hard to find. Instead men face the problem that most women are very reluctant to date them, so men mostly need advice how to get more dates.


You'd be surprised at just how many women are looking for sex partners rather than life partners. But women are taking a lot more risks when they have casual sex: the chance of pregnancy, a higher chance of disease, a higher chance of being physically harmed. There's also, to be blunt, a higher chance of really bad sex.

So women apply a higher standard to their casual sex. They want to know that somebody is going to be kind and considerate. That's going to take several dates, which means they're also looking for somebody who's interesting over the course of several evenings. And once they've found that person, they'll often want more -- not a lifetime, but weeks or months.

Maybe that turns into a commitment, but the stereotype that every woman is looking for a ring misreads the situation. If you go on each date assuming that sex is completely off the table for the first week, you'll find that a lot of women are willing to have sex after that without visiting a judge or priest first. And being genuinely interested in them during that time, rather than just counting down the days, will improve your odds.


Which would be ok if they subsequently did not complained constantly about loneliness and being single. Partner for regular sex is relationship still, as much as partner for any regular activity.

And complained about women they date being primary interested in them paying for them. Like, he trying to attract her primary on money, who is going to take that offer?

If males look for sex date and women look for relationship, you have mismatch. And no group should feel angry or entitled about the other not being interested in them - they want fundamentally different things. In that case, he is not getting date because he is player and women around happen to be not interested in that.

And then he sees another dude in long term relationship with a woman that seeks that and is all offended about unfair world.

And also I kind of thing that if this is the need, prostitution should be an option. It is kind of same thing, except transaction is clear from get go.


I think the open secret is that prostitutes don't count, because the sex isn't about having orgasms, but about having one's merit validated. They must earn the thing that they cannot buy. Sex is the ultimate compliment, being chosen by a woman who dubs him worthy -- ideally, the most desirable woman (as perceived by other men). And for many, the more the better -- a second time doesn't count as much.

They generally don't get that, and will give other reasons why they can't just hire somebody. But I believe that's the real reason: it's the one thing that they cannot buy, and therefore matters most when they have all the money in the world.


This way, it simultaneously objectify women making us basically boardgame victory token and simultaneously giving women too much power or too much consequence of having sex.

The assumption that the decision to have causual sex is somehow result of valuing the dude is imo wrong.


Indeed, another common false assumption is that sex is something women don't want, especially casual sex. They're invested in the idea that sex is something a woman has to be bribed into, preferably with a lifetime commitment to her and her children.

Not only is that incredibly demeaning to women, it's self-defeating. If they could just believe that many women actually enjoy sex for its own sake, if they can have it without being abused, harassed, and stuck alone with the consequences, they could get themselves laid a lot more.


thank you for this comment. I've been in the Bay Area for about a year, and it pretty much encompasses all my dating experience here


Does this mean that womens aspirations are wildly different than men in SV? How do they manage to be significantly more interesting than men? What do they do to become ‘crotch magnets’?


Lifestyle design and the wider world is stereotypically antithetical to most engineers. If you’re not one of those, and even if you are, you should often deflect the “so what do you do? (how much do you make?)” question with a humorous contradictory “title.”

I know a guy who makes $350k and has a security clearance but wears white socks, is overweight, eats with his mouth open and is super awkward. That’s not a “catch,” in women’s eyes, unless he owns it without the usual creepy awkwardness, shame and/or insecurities.

Sense of humor, directness, interests outside tech, goals in life, socioemotional self-awareness and demonstrated relentlessly-resourceful go-getterness is what makes women run. And don’t be so damn predictable.

PS: skip Tinder unless you’re a 19-year-old sports player or an 20-/30-something model.


> male SWE in the Bay Area making $120K+ a year in his 20s or 30s, who should be a magnet for women

here's your problem


Agreed. Money is a step function. You need to make enough to live comfortably. But after that, having good interpersonal traits is everything.


I saw this circle jerk and have to say:

I and the vast majority of my friends grew up in the Bay Area. The vast majority of those I went to college with (and studied CS or EE or whatever) ended up working in the Bay Area. Almost all of them have girlfriends/fiancees/are married.

None of them are CEOs of hot startups lol. None of them are unnaturally attractive either. Just regular ole average programmers. :)

I dunno what's going on but I will take the circlejerk with a giant mountain of salt lol.


My own observations of the Bay Area dating culture is that:

1. Lots of people in their early to mid 20s who aren’t interested settling down.

2. Lots of people who are career focused and not interested in settling down.

3. Lots of people who are students and not interested in settling down.

4. Lots of people who are already settled down. Long term, stable relationships are very common. Marriage, less so, but not uncommon.

5. A higher than average population who will have their parents arrange a marriage back in India.

Honest the whole social situation feels like an extension of college - not much opportunity for match making.

People don’t move to the Bay Area to find a spouse. They move there for career opportunities.


I see a lot of the opposite in the south. So many people want to settle down relatively young. I'm got shit to do with my life first.


> the Bay Area is among the worst places on Earth for improving your social life if you're straight and male

Why does social life only mean dating?

There are tons of social circles in the Bay Area. Hobbyist groups, aficionados of all stripes, non-profits galore and strange entertainment options. There is a diversity of bars and restaurants, and California’s unique outdoors are close.

Perhaps it would be more rewarding to focus on those, and be a little more passive when it comes to dating while you build up your interests.


> respectful

Serious question: why do you think being "respectful" has any positive correlation with being a magnet for women?

I can't prove the "chicks digs bad boys" cliché is scientifically accurate, but as the only convict I personally know is both objectively ugly AND a magnet to girls half his age, I am pretty sure the converse is wrong.


https://pipubs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/The-Dark-Triad...

The Dark Triad personality: Attractiveness to women

It has been suggested that the Dark Triad (DT) personality constellation is an evolved facilitator of men’s short-term mating strategies. However, previous studies have relied on self-report data to consider the sexual success of DT men. To explore the attractiveness of the DT personality to the other sex, 128 women rated created (male) characters designed to capture high DT facets of personality or a control personality. Physicality was held constant. Women rated the high DT character as significantly more attractive. More- over, this greater attractiveness was not explained by correlated perceptions of Big 5 traits. These findings are considered in light of mating strategies, the evolutionary ‘arms race’ and individual differences.


This applies to males in general in the bay area. Not just the white ones. I got fed up with the loneliness and left the country entirely. Had a girlfriend a month later after picking from several whom were interested.


This is the basic premise of Dateonomics [https://www.amazon.com/Date-onomics-Dating-Became-Lopsided-N...] - the author looks at dating through the lens of gender ratios of college-educated people in different cities.

Outside of SF though, the situation is likely reversed - many more women than men are graduating college, and people tend to want to pair off with people of similar educational achievement.


Really?

My advice, stay in the Bay Area until you get your head screwed on straight.

If you think you are a "magnet for women" that very attitude repels any woman with enough self-respect to see through the bravado.

Concentrate on liking yourself enough that being single doesn't bother you and next thing you know....bam....there she'll be.

Or not, in which case like the person you see in the mirror each morning. Get there and the rest is easy.

Sincerely,

Single by choice (Female) Software Development Manager in the Southeast US.


Or maybe changing your own notion of being a "magnet for women" because you have a job might improve your social life, just saying


Here is my advice, as a married engineer, for those who are having difficulties in this area:

1. Your fatalistic attitude about m/f ratios (or whatever sexual orientation you fancy) is the least helpful and accurate response you could possibly have to dating travails. This is not a game. Nobody's keeping score. Statistics by itself won't land you the relationship you crave.

2. On the flip side, finding a relationship isn't just a test you need to hack. There's no formula to success. Stop thinking that a good salary, or being clean-cut, or avoiding substance abuse, are what you need to land a date – regardless of where in the world you look! For one thing, people date against these types all the time. For many other potential partners, they're table stakes at best.

3. You will have the best luck if you think of your potential romantic partner not as an automaton to be gamed, nor as a resource you ought to be entitled to, but simply as a human being with interests and needs that may align with yours, or not. Forget salary. Forget trying to look interesting. Be genuine, and care, and look for partners who appreciate that.

3a. (corollary) If you think of potential partners as only interested in some Scandinavian ideal that is tall, blonde, good-looking, and makes way more than you, then you are almost certainly projecting your own shallowness and anxieties onto them. You are failing to engage them as human beings. Stop doing that.

3b. (corollary) If you think female software engineers are just not cut out for this engineering stuff as a whole, you are probably going to have a really rough time trying to court them -- to say nothing of how miserable you are likely to make them. It will be nigh impossible for you to engage them as human beings with interests that deserve your full respect and support.

4. If you can't find the partners you want on Tinder, or in the marketing org at work, then (and it kind of dumbfounds me that I should have to explain this) don't look for a date on Tinder! Or in the marketing org at work! Get out in the world. Make connections. Join clubs. Have friends introduce you to friends. Stop thinking like a Silly Valley hacker, and start thinking like a human being.

5. Stay far away from Jordan Peterson, MRA, red pill, and all of that. It's not that there isn't a good idea or two in there somewhere, but it's all drowning in a toxic stew of entitlement, self-loathing, and objectification of women that won't get you where you need to go. If you can't discern between the good stuff and the bad stuff, best to steer clear altogether. Go read some Anne Lamott or something and flush that stuff out of your system.

6. If it doesn't work out, move on. Do not come crying to HN about how tough engineers in Silicon Valley have it (because facts!). Do not obsess over them and hope they'll turn their eye later on. C'est la vie! Be the troubadour who sings about their romantic woes with a twinkle in their eye.


a great and detailed reply. really appreciate it <3


there are many ways to improve your social life that do not involve dating. Don't limit yourself.


> My advice would be work hard, save your money, travel when you can to better locales to improve your social life, but with the eventual goal of permanently moving out when you've saved enough. If you pick your destination within the USA well, dating prospects will improve greatly, and if you look worldwide (and can overcome the language and immigration issues), it could improve dramatically. The Bay Area will seem like a bad dream.

I just created my HN account to emphasize this point. After 4 years in the Bay Area, I've come to the same conclusion. I've been saving money for 9 years now & should be at the $1,000,000 mark within 2 years. First 5 years of saving in Los Angeles got me to $200,000, and the last 4 years have pushed me to $700,000. Assuming Trump is re-elected, my portfolio should hit the $1,000,000 mark within two years.

A million bucks isn't much here, but its a sizable nest-egg in most places in America. Saving money in the Bay Area is much easier to do than anywhere else. I plan to move to a rural state as soon as I get to a million. The misery of living here has to end at some point.


With 1M USD, a really good place to live would be Buenos Aires, Argentina.

OK, this will sound like I'm from a travel agency, hahaha, but here's why:

If you are single, spending just 1200 USD per month here you can live a middle-high class life, renting a cool and spacious apartment in a nice neighborhood, good health care, gym, car, dining out. (To give you an idea, most of the middle class singles would spend half that amount...)

There's a very nice tech scene (lots of startups, and several unicorns), where having a work exp. in SV companies is an instant door opener.

Climate is temperate, (lots of sunny days year round, average weather 8C winter / summer 29C).

Huge restaurant scene, very cosmopolitan city, with ethnic restaurants of all kinds (lots of euro, american and asian origins). Also, some of the best meat in the world, at very good prices.

Lots and lots of cultural activities.

Huge mass transport network. You really don't need to own a car, (but I prefer having one, just for convenience... specially if you want to improve on your social side). European looking city. But as a most big cities, it can get chaotic in rush hours depending on where you live.

And lastly, considering your quote: you have LOTS of pretty girls, that love dating foreign guys.

Although I should warn you there's very few Asian-origin girls... and almost no [black | Indian | Middle Eastern] girls, comparing to the Bay Area. It's mostly euro-descendants or latinas; so depending on what you are looking for (if you are that specific/picky) it might be a concern.

It's the kind of place where with 1M, you can afford to not work actively anymore (e.g. living off rental income, or investments abroad).


Move to South East Asia instead. Burgeoning tech scene, some incredible nature, dating is considerably easier, both with locals and other expats, health care is first-rate and a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper ... "a rural state" sounds like all the worst bits of living in the US.


>Move to South East Asia instead.

No thanks, I prefer to live in a free country.

>"a rural state" sounds like all the worst bits of living in the US.

I don't have the level of contempt for my fellow Americans that you have


> I don't have the level of contempt for my fellow Americans that you have

I was going to ignore this as an obvious troll, but I'll take a stab at it. Rural Americans aren't the problem, America is the problem, but some of that is made up for by the cities.

Rural America has the same terrible public transit, the same grotesque healthcare problems, generally appalling internet and cellphone, the same incredible incarceration rate, the same terrible problem with opioids, the same terrifyingly divisive politics, the same endemic racial divide, the same problem with gun violence as the rest of the US, except that some of the cities have made some headway with these problems.

If y'all lost New York, LA and the Bay Area, GDP would fall by ~25%, and you'd be just another upper-middle-income country. America's greatness comes from the cities.


Ah so because someone else like a non-American place, he is having contempt for his fellow Americans? That's so polarising and typically what gives Americans such a bad name abroad.


I'm from a rural state and while I've been to I've been to over 12 countries and lived in 3 US states, my rural home state is the best kept secret in the world.

My wife is from Latin America, and while it's cheaper down there, none of those countries are as good of a deal as the rural US. More developed, safer, better public services. Can be nearby a major city for work.

I do like southeast Asia, my cousin's wife is from Thailand and I have a lot of connections there through her, they own a chain of hotels there. But I would prefer Latin America. It's a western culture for the most part, which if you're from Europe or the Americas, is less jarring in more ways than people realize. There's some indigenous elements, which actually enhances the culture, they're very cooperative and team players. I love Latin America, at least as much as I love Anglo America.

Just wanted to add two more cents in there, because there's good things about every place. Everything in life is a trade off!


Out of curiosity, where specifically in SE Asia would you consider living (or actually do live)?


Bali and Thailand (Chiang Mai and Bangkok) are fantastic.

Medellin in South America as well


Singapore is a great choice.


I've visited a few countries in SE Asia and could never see the appeal of living there longterm, at least in the metropolitan areas. The food and living costs are cheap but in return you get terrible air quality and lack of clean tap water.


Costa Rica is where I landed. Pretty nice. Let me know if you need advice.


I don't think Costa Rica is in SE Asia though..


You don't have to live in the cities. A luxury villa in e.g. Phuket with views of the ocean and water purification system and other international-standard amenities can be bought for what you'd pay for a small condo in SF or Palo Alto.

I'm strongly thinking of doing this with the family when I retire as well.


Just out of curiosity, why do you say "Assuming Trump is re-elected, my portfolio should hit the $1,000,000 mark within two years."?

Do you believe the stock market will get bad if he doesn't win the election? or is it the other way, i.e. if the does get re-elected, the market will be better so it will take you less than 2 years to reach your goal?

I've never heard this take before so I'm genuinely curious.


Apolitical answer:

Markets prefer political stability. Average annual S&P 500 returns are around ~7% adjusted for inflation, but ~12% when a President is in his second term.

Political answer:

A Trump loss would be presumably be to one of the self-avowed socialists running which would certainly crash the markets.

Furthermore, even without a market crash, a socialist implementing mark-to-market capital gains taxation while also doubling the long-term capital gains rates (15% to 32% for me) would drastically slow down my march towards $1,000,000.


I see. Interesting what you say about returns during second terms. I'll need to read more on that.


> A Trump loss would be presumably be to one of the avowed socialists running

Oh bless, the tendency in the US towards labelling people still right of the centre by most countries' standards as "socialists" for being left of the Republicans is cute.


I'm not American, but the Democratic party self-describes as social-liberal.

Of course people can agree or disagree with the ideology, but only you here seem to have attached stigma to the word.

(Though the same could have been said for 'fascist', which certainly now has widespread stigma attached, and most proponents have stopped self-describing as such.)


> I'm not American, but the Democratic party self-describes as social-liberal.

Social-liberal isn't socialist. I live in a liberal-social democracy, but very few workers own the means of production here.

> but only you here seem to have attached stigma to the word.

American society as a whole has attached a stigma to it. Claiming otherwise is either disingenuous or ignorant, I'll let you take your pick as you listen to the dulcet tones of Ronald Reagan disclaiming the dangers of socialised medicine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrlDlrLDSQ


edit: self-avowed socialists


Further up in the thread he said he wanted to live in the USA because it’s a Free Country too, so I’m assuming he’s not being entirely serious.


Don't move anywhere without visiting several places for at least 1-2 weeks each. Trust me on this. You may have a picture of a place but being there can be very different.


Not so sure I agree, I moved to Beijing, China having never spent a second there, probably the best decision I made ever. (Though, I had no pre-conception on how it would be like prior to landing...)

While no longer living in mainland China, I still haven't left Asia (nearly seven years on)

Sometimes pushing yourself right out of your norm/comfort-zone can really help you find yourself.


> If you stay at Google, make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life. If I'd've stayed, I could have comfortably raised some kids with my wife by now - but that's still on the todo list.

Uh oh. Unseen Risk Fallacy

Just because you don't experience risk, doesn't mean it does not exist. The company just hides risk from you, but it's still there, culminating without feedback.

As raising a child is a 19+ year project and the OP has already a few years of not stellar performance and risk - if not dealt with - grows exponentially (risk factors attrackt more risk factors).

So the stay in place is actually a very risky proposition. One huge bet, without much feedback.

As the OP is Young and doesn't have kids or other major spendings a much safer strategy would be to try different gigs. With his resume then (Google, lots of other gigs) he can prop. return to a low maintenance job at a big company at one point anyway.


Speaking of fallacies, how about the one where parenthood increases your risk of underperformance 'exponentially', or is in any way a 'risk factor'. Check your bias. Parenthood is as likely to make you better at your job.


And how about the strawman? GP didn’t argue that parenthood may make OP lose his job, but that he already is in a position where he might lose his job due to underperforming previously. And if that happens, he’s unquestionably better off without kids.


Is he really in any risk of losing his job? I do not see how either your or OP came to conclusion.

I have met people who were under impression they were performing poorly, but actually they were doing great work. They just were disinterested in the job, which is a different issue.


The point is OP won't know if he it at risk, and yes Imposter Syndrome exists, so it's true that we don't know whether he really is at risk or not. But having kids still raises the stakes a lot.


> Parenthood is as likely to make you better at your job.

Have you got any evidence to back that up?


I’m explicitly not making any claims about the affect of parenthood on performance in saying that in the absence of any evidence, it is as likely to make you better as it is worse. The burden of proof lies with the GP, who sees it as a risk.


I highlighted the claim that you did make and asked you to respond to that.


My point is that I didn’t make a claim, I refuted GP’s by saying that either outcome is equally likely as there’s no proven link between parenthood and performance. If GP wants to claim there’s a negative causal link, the burden of proof lies with them.


You didn't refute GP, you refuted a strawman. And snidely.


> Uh oh. Unseen Risk Fallacy

a bit off topic, but couldn't identifying fallacies in arguments be automated? how much better would the discussion be if comments were labeled with likelihood of fallacy?


Given that this thread is the only instance of the phrase "Unseen Risk Fallacy", I'm not too sure that it will work as well as you'd hope. Fallacies are subtle and even in the best of cases only point out holes in someone's argumentation, which doesn't tell you much about the conclusion.

If anything automatic labelling of fallacies just risks running foul of the fallacy fallacy.


This would be a tall order for any NLP algo. I would hazard a guess and say no, not yet.


Which company you are working right now? I almost get a chance to join Google Sydney but failed at the last round. If there is any other company cooler than Google I will definitely want to try to apply.


You remind me myself a few years ago: a talented, but bored slacker who didn't see any point in investing any energy into that project. Turns out I was right: the project didn't go anywhere after I left and investing any extra time would be a clueless thing to do.

So what's changed since then? Have I found meaning in work? No! I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what body language to use to make the desired impression, what to say and what not to say. My managers think I'm a high performer who also makes valuable social contributions to our team and this is reflected in pay rises. I see my mission at work in carefully educating the overly enthusiastic co-workers by dropping a few seemingly random hints or observations that make them think and challenge their beliefs.

Work is just work and unless you're curing cancer, you shouldn't put any effort into making some billionaires richer. Just do the minimum, get your paycheck and appreciate the fact that you don't need to worry about money. Very few people in the world have this level of freedom.

But life is quite a bit more interesting than it seems. Learn applied psychology to understand what drives people. Learn about all these LLCs, corps, trusts and other fun stuff. Talk to a lawyer and try to start your own company. No need to leave your current job: you can use the gained knowledge to hide traces, while still being very legal and very cool. Even if you get caught, use the learned psychology tricks to negotiate: you may even find yourself in a VP position as few people can covertly pull this type of stuff. Even if it doesn't work, there is nothing to lose: 50 years later the only thing you will regret is not taking the risk because of some silly non competes with a company that no longer exists. Learn some Buddhism and some Tiberian phylosophy: it gives a very interesting and different outlook at life. Learn how pilot an airplane: like I said, there is nothing to lose.


This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for while in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year, no stock options, without any hope of early retirement or owning a decent home without a 30 year loan or financial assistance from their parents.

You guys don't know how good you have it. The behavior of slacker Googlers described here would have gotten them instantly fired in any European company(yes, the "you can't fire people in Europe" is just a meme).

Reading OPs problem and some posts here where people are too bored of making ludicrous money left me with a bitter aftertaste that life really is unfair and success in life is more linked to the lottery of birth and opportunities available to you than any amount of hard work. Not hating, just saying.

Good luck to you guys and hope you find a calling for a fulfilling job or a hobby that gives you meaning or purpose in life.


> This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for

Don't feel too bad. As far as I know, only Google and Apple lets you get away with this kind of slacking. Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix certainly don't.

Also, SWE out of college definitely aren't making enough to buy much more than a condo.

That being said, you're still right. I go to a lot of international software conferences, and I when I talk to devs about their work, they are just as smart, passionate, and hard working as the people I've talked to here in the states, but they are getting paid a lot less.

I read a salary report in South Africa and they asked me what I thought, and my first thought was, "You guys need to get paid a lot more".

I hope that with the rise of remote work, this evens out.


The max I negotiated in Europe was $125000, an ok start up salary was maybe $80000 and I am currently - with lots of non-money benefits at around $70000.

What makes me most sad is that fostering the web tracking industry - tech + marketing - is so lucrative. I have such a hard time understanding this world - it does not make much sense any more. This lying and scheming around collecting all your data and activity for the next VC funded ad playground.

And I'm kind of irritated, how people can spend their lives working for mostly investors, who benefit much more than every (even well paid) gear in the machine.

Aren't we as a society smart enough to start treating humans with a bit more respect and not just seeing them as wetware to extract value?


> fostering the web tracking industry

because consumers don't want to pay for anything. It's easier to extract private data, and sell that to a corporation for a lot of money, than to extract a small premium from each user (which is like squeezing blood from stone).


Yep. This battle was lost way, way back in the 90s when we collectively decided that everything on the Internet should be free.

I think it's one of the great lost opportunities in human history.

I don't know what the "correct" course of action would have been, instead of making everything ad-supported and mostly terrible. Some kind of very very seamless micropayments? Maybe there was no "correct choice." Maybe "free, but awful" always would have won no matter the alternative.

But man, this outcome sucks. The internet turned out to be just one more way to squirt advertisements into our eyeballs.


Micropayments were tried, or at least planned, almost right from the beginning of the web, but no one found a way to make them catch on.

See error code 402 in the HTTP spec: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec1...


marc andreesen refers to this as “the original sin of the internet” https://podcastnotes.org/2019/08/31/andreessen-crypto/


I think you could argue that this very battle was lost far before the 90s... Advertisers and marketers have been exploiting and targeting the mediums in which most consumers paid their attention too long before the Internet was around. Inevitably the Internet was going to have ads seep in because it garnered the majority of consumer attention


Watch VR when it (or rather if) it takes off. Then ads will truly be squeezed into our eyeballs in the most literal sense.


It's never taking off on the scale of the internet itself.

It just doesn't pass any kind of common-sense test. People don't really want to spend large portions of their lives wearing goofy headsets, seeing things nobody else can see. Even if (when) we shrink the screens down to the size and weight of regular eyeglasses, I don't see it. It is not compatible with anything else... you have to completely cease all other activities and utterly devote yourself to your VR experience, sealing yourself off from the world.

VR definitely delivers a pretty awesome experience when done well, don't get me wrong. I think it will hang around and have its fans. But, game-changer? Never.


This is my gut feeling too.


Brave Browser has micropayments for exactly this Ads-vs-Micropayments rationale


> The max I negotiated in Europe was $125000, an ok start up salary was maybe $80000 and I am currently - with lots of non-money benefits at around $70000.

I'm currently at $160k (as a contractor, assuming 5 weeks of per year). Could have had more, but I'm currently in low cost of living country (former soviet block), so any move would be offset by increase in taxes and costs of living.

You can make good money in Europe, it's probably just harder here than in the US.


Datapoint: I'm currently making £145K a year in the British office of a FAANG company as an E4 engineer 2½ years after graduating college.

I'm able to work 10–18 most days, but I do have to have some results eventually. I know of people in this office who got dismissed for not having good enough impact.


10-18 hours a week or 10AM - 6PM work schedule?


10am–6pm work schedule. That's ~7 hours of work with ~1 hour of lunch.


Thanks! Pretty cozy hours. Do you feel your work is more than you can handle?


Can I ask what you do (and where)? That's absolutely insane money for former soviet states, probably equivalent of >>1 mil in the bay area.


Poland, big data developer and architect for a multinational finance company, that's offshored some of its IT to Poland.

For them, $160k is for sure more than they've intended to pay when they opened offices here, but there are just no qualified people who would do that for less (as qualified people f off to London, Switzerland etc. and get paid even more), so in the end they hire me and people like me. We're still cheaper than equivalent talent in company's home country.


Europe? Could you specify country?


That's a huge salary for Europe, where probably the highest paychecks are in London. I'd say it's probably a large US company, and OP is probably very senior.


Germany.


You are looking at the elite of the elites. How many developers work for google in silicon valley? I am sure there are developers in Ohaio that get paid non stellar salaries, also have a mortgage and by the time they are 45 they worry about the future a lot. On Average yes the German developer makes less but probably has better job security , work life balance etc. You make it out as if American developers live a stress free life


I agree. Clearly, not every dev in the US works for Apple or Google. Plus, simply comparing the raw income is flawed as well. I agree with your assumption that overall, German developers have better job security and most definitely the work life balance aspect. I'm a developer myself and I don't know anyone around me who regularly does more than a 40h week. This is excluding those that have started their own company and the occasional deadline of course. Not to mention that our cost of living is definitely not as inflated as it is in SV.


I never understood how a developer making 40-60k euros could survive in a big city like Berlin, until I visited. People are complaining rightly about increasing rent prices, but they're still extremely reasonable, at $1100 a month. Groceries are /dead cheap/ compared to the US (-30% to -40%), and the food quality in grocery stores is frequently quite better.

You get 6 weeks of vacation, and don't have to worry about going to the doctor.

Compare that the the US, where you can be earning nearly 200k, get a few weeks vacation, save some money but everything feels temporary. Go to the doctor too much? You're let go for not meeting deliverables. Need more time on vacation? No. Don't have time to enjoy living where you're living because you're at work dawn to dusk? Well thats the price of not having to worry about rent.


These things can't be underestimated. Coming from a much more capitalistic country to the Netherlands (allow me to assume it's similar to Germany) - the prospects of leading a relaxed life and raising a family here are very good. Yes, it's less competitive. Yes compensation is worse than SV. but if I had to gamble where developers are leading happier lives I wouldn't go with SV (despite the superior weather).


Slacking in Apple? From what I've seen, Apple engineers probably amongst the hardest of the FAANG - probably less so than Amazon if I had to guess, but I know my Google, FB, and Netflix friends do not work nearly as hard.


It probably depends on the team. I know some that work really hard, but I know others who really coast along, even more than at Google.


For the engineers who want to have an impact on stuff, if you’re skilled and your ideas are good and you can convince others about that, you can be given as much impact as you can eat. There’s a huge spectrum of how much impact people opt to go for. Apple is a good place to come if you want to change something about how a billion people use some technology. And generally Apple is cool with people shipping those ideas in as quick a product cycle as they can figure out how to get it done. I’ve seen multiple colleagues take something from idea to keynote (or shipping, keynote is just the most visible way in which that happens) in 12 months or less, within the first year or two of arriving. Some of my colleagues do this yearly. You probably don’t get to do that coasting, so it’s up to you.

If you want to coast, you generally don’t work on teams that ship new product. Apple’s a big place. There’s totally teams that are good fits for people who want to have less direct product impact and be off the critical path, but I wouldn’t say that’s the common case.

The best analogy I’ve heard is that working at Apple is a pie eating contest.

And the reward is—more pie.

Each person has different feelings about how much pie they want to eat.


Right, to be clear what I'm not saying is that all Apple engineers are slackers -- far from it.

Just that from what I can tell talking to many FAANG workers (and working with a bunch of them who came from other FAANGS), Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to, Google also being an easy place to do it.

It's why most of the people I worked with left those places -- they got tired of the slackers.

I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon. And I never saw anyone get away with slacking at Netflix.


Totally get you weren’t applying the same brush to everyone!

> Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to

You are the first person I’ve heard this one from! I’m almost pleased to see some balance? I worry we have the reputation of being too grindy too often!

I think this can be very org dependent. I wonder if most of the people you know are clustered in a specific part.

> I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon.

Weird. I have. We seem to have very different experiences.

Also whenever I’ve talked to people who work inside Facebook I just. I just couldn’t. I’m certain I’d go stark raving depressed so quickly there. The froyo on campus is nice though.


The joke (while I was there) was that Apple engineers went to Google to retire.


I worked at Apple. I saw all kinds of things, but never slacking. Quite the opposite.


https://www.faang.org/

Acronyms really need to be phased out, as I highly doubt you mean Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes. I'm guessing it's the 2nd result?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Apple,_Amazon,_Netfl...


you must be new here


I'm just horrible with acronyms because I work in IT and the health industry, previous the security industry. They all have acronyms and the same acronyms. So they all mean different things to different people. Acronyms are a lazy person writing and you have to be "in the know" to know what they stand for. 100 years from now, no one will be able to understand them.


"communicate so that everything you say can be understood 100 years from now" seems like a terrible standard to hold conversation to.

What is "IT", by the way?


Information Technology.


Facebook hires tons of zero passion 10am-4pm engineers. It might not be deliberate slacking but it’s definitely not hard working.


"Zero passion 10am-4pm" doesn't necessarily describe not working hard. You can only do three to five hours of sustainable deep work a day unless you're a freak of nature. Usually anyone saying they do more just pads it out with breaks on Hacker News or Facebook, or has failed to automate the repetitive work in their job. A focused, organized engineer can pretty well exhaust their sustainable capacity plus do their overhead in 10am-4pm. As for zero passion, why do you need passion? And what does it have to do with not slacking?

Facebook makes you demonstrate your impact to the company twice a year. You would be hard pressed to be a slacker long term there.

The work does appear different because at that scale you spend a lot of time tracing out what's there, figuring out context, and trying to figure out how to make a change without bringing down everything else. If you're used to a small company or a small codebase where you spend most of your time writing new code it seems less productive, but it's mostly just different.


Slacking means doing the minimum required to get by. It doesn’t mean doing nothing and getting fired. I was replying to the parent comment idea that engineers at Facebook work hard because in my experience they do not. Which is fine. Slacking in many ways is optimal.


Yes, passion and slacking are not mutually exclusive. I am very passionate about the industry I'm in and the importance of the type of work I do, but....


I met two FB engineers a few years back. They seemed average, at most. But one quality stuck out (we spent half a day together at an event): They seemed to be excellent at following company rules.


That's what top schools teach you - conform 100% to the assignment requirements or there is no A/A+ for you. Also, most companies "get what they measure", so figuring out which metrics are visible and preferred is the way to go in large corps.


What does 10-4 have to do with anything? If you don't have significant equity, putting in more hours on a daily basis just makes you a tool in my opinion. There is more to life..


I'm not sure which team you are talking about because many people here in Ads are working 9-9-6.


And many people in ads are certainly not working that schedule, and discourage those around them from doing so since it slows everything down long term.


“The best minds of my generation...”


...are probably working in a particle acceleration lab or something. I know the quote.


> I know the quote.

The quote is from “Howl” by Allen Ginsburg, a poem about burnout (among other things). That’s applicable to a report of people working a 9-9-6 schedule, a recipe for burnout.


I'm speaking specifically to this quote which seems to have drawn from it and hardly seems separable in this case. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” As if the FAANG-type companies are somehow the centerpieces of modern intellectual activity, which is such a tech industry thing to assume.


For what it's worth, I don't work in the "tech industry" exactly.

Rather than being the centerpiece of intellectual activity as you put it, it would seem the vast majority of the "best minds" are employed in the field. Rather than more necessary pursuits, more people are applied to making us click advertisements and applied to the surveillance of our browsing habits and other activities. It's not just the FAANG companies. The city I live in is flooded with small ad-tech startups who are going to "revolutionize the world". On top of that, to hear the ad-tech teams are probably the only teams at FB that are working a crazy schedule speaks loudly. Very loudly.


Especially when it's burning out on something like ad-tech


Is it the performance review cycle pressure promoting such hours? That's firmly in the burnout territory even with high (500k+) comp...


Are you? If so, why?


what if they're hard working + highly efficient?


Be like a friend of mine in Argentina who works remote on U.S jobs. He's from the U.S and moved there, so he speaks perfect English, and Spanish but he make enough in a month to live for the whole year. He bought a house, has a nice smart girlfriend much younger than him. He's doing very well.


Yeah...as someone who recently relocated from a third-world country (South Africa) to a first-world country (Canada) I'm just going to go ahead and tell you that while the costs of living and property in third-world countries sound great there are a lot of negatives that don't make up for it.


Argentina is not a third world country.


Neither is South Africa. Their standard of living (in the right areas) is probably comparable.


Hmmmm. The murder rate in Argentina is 5.1/1000, lower than the United States. South Africa's is 35.9/1000, making it the 9th highest in the world.

"I'd love to retire to South Africa but I'm allergic to something in the air - bullets."


> in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year

There is so much wrong in this sentence.

First, there is no more “meat grinders” in the US than in Europe. I worked at Microsoft and Criteo in Europe, and the slacking there seems to be on par with what OP describes.

You mention 40/80k per year being pitiful? This kind of remuneration puts you in the top 10%/5% of France population easily. If your partner manages the same level of salary, you should be even better in the top.

> no stock options, without any hope of early retirement

You are dreaming. The kind of stock options you get in big tech companies is not what you think. You can expect some hundreds/thousands dollars per year, that need 3/5 year to vest until you can have them in full. European companies would traditionally prefer to give a bit of extra money rather than stock options.

> early retirement

....

> owning a decent home without a 30 year loan

What are you talking about... you earn 40/80k per year. The mortgage rates in France at the moment are amongst the best in the world. You should be able to get a loan at 1% for ~500k for 15 or 30 years without any problem.

Also, please, bear in mind that you cannot directly compare US and EU salaries. Your 80k€ gross in e.g. France should be the equivalent of $150k for a US worker; if you account for the same level of medical care and retirement savings. Not much of a difference after you realise this.


> Also, please, bear in mind that you cannot directly compare US and EU salaries. Your 80k€ gross in e.g. France should be the equivalent of $150k for a US worker; if you account for the same level of medical care and retirement savings. Not much of a difference after you realise this.

What makes you think that? As to retirement savings, American retirement payments replace 70% of working income on average, versus 60% in France: https://www.etk.fi/wp-content/uploads/PaG2017EN.jpg. The US retirement system is one of the better ones in the OECD. Like the U.K., Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden, the U.S. has a two-pillar system, with a public pillar and a defined contribution (i.e. 401k) pillar. The public system alone pays out about as much in absolute terms as in France. (60% of French pre-retirement income ~= 40% of US per-retirement income.) Adding in the tax-advantaged defined-contribution component (but excluding other private investment income) makes the total income replacement one of the highest in the OECD.

Of course, at the end of the day, a programmer is going to be a “net contributor” to the retirement system in both countries. The French person will pay (percentage wise) much higher social insurance tax to get a bigger (percentage wise) public pension check, while the American person will make a 401k contribution plus a lower social insurance tax. At the end of the day, that doesn’t have any effect on the comparison of 80k euros being less than $150k, because retirement savings will come out of both numbers.

As to healthcare, programmers are going to be among the 65% of American workers who get healthcare through their employer. That means that, on top of their salary, they get additional compensation in the form of employer-paid healthcare premiums. Meanwhile, the French person will pay for healthcare in the form of higher taxes out of that 80k euros. Although Americans spend twice as much on healthcare as French, that isn’t relevant to this comparison, because for the American the additional part is paid by the employer on top of the $150k. It’s not something you subtract out. (Put differently, the 80k euros versus 150k comparison understates the difference, because the American salary includes $10-15k in additional health benefits.)

Finally, cost of living is about the same in France as in the US.


You are completely missing the point here. Not only are you trying to argue against things that I did not say, but you are also comparing things that cannot. What Europeans call "gross" salary is NOT what Americans call "gross" salary. And you are mixing them together, which is exactly what my comment was trying to prevent.

> the comparison of 80k euros being less than $150k, because retirement savings will come out of both numbers.

No, the 80k remuneration is AFTER half the retirement contribution.

> the French person will pay for healthcare in the form of higher taxes out of that 80k euros

No, most of the healthcare is actually in the employer part, which is already removed from these 80k.

In Europe, what people call "gross" is the employee part of the income. This part already had the employer part removed, which contains a part of medical care and retirement. In US, especially with 401k, the employer part is pretty much non existent until the employee triggers a contribution.

What it means is that on the 80k that a European will call his "gross" salary, he will in fact have been paid around 140k, with 60k going to his mandatory retirement/medical care for the employer contribution. The taxes left on the 80k are only the employee part.

People in Europe usually don't add up the employer contribution part into account in what they call their "gross" salary because it's a mandatory part and often not displayed on the payslips.

This is not how it works in the US. The $150k that employees refer to as their "gross" income did not had the employer contribution deducted yet.

I am not _at all_ trying to compare the retirement system of US versus EU, or saying that one is better or not or whatever. All I'm saying is EU gross is not comparable to US gross, as these numbers do NOT contain the same deductions.

In your post, you are _consistently_ mixing the two gross numbers together, which is very wrong.


In both countries, there is an employer contribution and an employee contribution. In both countries, “gross” income excludes the employer contribution. In the US, it also excludes employer-paid health insurance premiums. In France, it excludes the employer-paid health insurance tax.

As to the precise mix, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that more will be paid by the employer in Europe. In both countries, medical is paid mostly by the employer, and deducted before the $150k/80k euro number. Both countries have a similar employee-paid social security rate (6-7%). As explained above, the base Social Security payment will return as much in absolute terms as the French retirement system. Any 401k you contribute to will return a lot more in retirement than what you would receive in France.


You are mistaken, because you do not take into account the whole contributions that are deducted between gross and super-gross. Medical care is just one of them and it adds up to WAY more than 8%.

Here is a break down of what that would look like for a French employee:

(1) Starting with a super gross of 130k EUR / year ($145k):

- Deduct retirement contribution

- Deduct health care contribution

- Deduct family contribution

- Deduct public housing contribution

- Deduct unemployment contribution

- Deduct professional disease contribution

- Deduct employee formation contribution

- Deduct elderly contribution

- Some other contributions

(2) You end up with a gross salary of ~80k EUR / year ($90k):

- Deduct employee contribution to all the above

(3) You end up with a net salary of ~50k / year ($55k).

You can do the computation yourself from the calculator on the french government website:

https://www.economie.gouv.fr/entreprises/simulateur-cout-emb...


The same thing is true of the United States as well. The $150k salary is going to be after:

1) Retirement contribution 2) Medicare/health insurance contribution 3) Unemployment insurance contribution

At the $150k salary level, the following will also be provided as benefits before the $150k:

4) Short and long term disability insurance 5) Family leave

A gross salary of $150k is going to be more like $175k including those taxes and costs.

In California, on a salary of $150k, the net paycheck will be like $90-95k, or $80-85k if you max out your 401k contribution. (If you do that, your retirement benefits will be much more than you would receive in France.)


> A gross salary of $150k is going to be more like $175k including those taxes and costs.

So, I checked and indeed there is a small fraction of gross/super-gross difference in US salaries. But that should just be 6% total medical/medicare. Far from the 45% you often find in Europe.

> if you max out your 401k contribution

I don't think accounting for employee/employer triggered retirement contributions should enter the comparison here... Because it exists in pretty much every country, and it depends on what the employee wants to spend.

> If you do that, your retirement benefits will be much more than you would receive in France.

France has exactly the same as US 401k, since 1970, it's called a PEE. It's tax free and company contribution can go up to 3:1, it's limited to 25% of your total income though. There's also the more recent PERCO which is pretty much the same thing but can be cumulated, so you can go over 25% if you want.


> A gross salary of $150k is going to be more like $175k including those taxes and costs. So, I checked and indeed there is a small fraction of gross/super-gross difference in US salaries. But that should just be 6% total medical/medicare. Far from the 45% you often find in Europe.

It’s 7.65% social security + Medicare, plus health insurance, plus parental leave. On average, employers contribute $14,000 for health insurance for a family: https://www.kff.org/health-costs/press-release/benchmark-emp.... For someone making $150k thats 9.3%. For the average worker with employer provided health insurance, that might be close to 20%.

> I don't think accounting for employee/employer triggered retirement contributions should enter the comparison here... Because it exists in pretty much every country, and it depends on what the employee wants to spend.

Defined contribution accounts are one of the pillars of the UN model for pensions. Many European countries (U.K., Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway) rely on them as an essential part of the overall retirement system. (Basically, they impose a lower retirement insurance tax and let you invest the money yourself.) So it should definitely be included.

> France has exactly the same as US 401k, since 1970, it's called a PEE. It's tax free and company contribution can go up to 3:1, it's limited to 25% of your total income though. There's also the more recent PERCO which is pretty much the same thing but can be cumulated, so you can go over 25% if you want.

My point is that the base Social Security payment, which is mandatory, will already provide you the same pension as you would receive in France. So you don’t have to decrease the 150k for 401k contributions to make the comparison even. But if you do account for 401k contributions, you’re going to get more retirement money than in France.


I'd like to point out that employer side taxes (all the things between "gross" and "super-gross" in your terminology) are very bad whether they are happening in France, the US or anywhere else.

The only purpose of levying them that way instead of as traditional taxes on the employee is to deceive employees as to their true effective tax rates. To the extent that these taxes are higher in France than they are in the US, it's only a demonstration that France's tax system is being more deceptive.


About France's tax system being deceptive, I would highlight that France makes it even more deceptive by having different regimes for different categories:

for instance, nurses or lawyers in France feel that the state levies from them a disproportionate amount of the super-gross (about 70%), and that these categories (I took 2, but in fact this is true for all "independents" in France) pay more than the rest of the population... which is not true, it is simply that the fraction of income that is levied as taxes is more obvious to those categories.

A regular employee does not even see most of these levies on their pay stub (it's called the "charges patronales", i.e. employers' contribution, but it really is a portion of wages that is socialized: this is money that belongs to the employee as wages, it's not something that belongs to the employer that pays it for the privilege of employing a person), and in reality what nurses/lawyers/independent perceive as outrageous taxation is just them paying "self-employment" taxes (as it's called in the US).

These taxes are there for good reason, but they are indeed masked from mere mortals. It would do a world of good for these things to appear (by law) on pay slips, for it would make people realize that the many public services that seem to be free are in fact very much not free at all. Indeed these public services (which are pretty good in France, IMHO) cost an arm and a leg, yet the system is rigged to make them appear free. If that's not deception, I don't know what is :)


Hmm, this is certainly interesting, but if I do the calculation for Germany for example, 80,000€ "gross" income comes out to a cost of about 96,600€.

https://www.nettolohn.de/rechner/gehaltsrechner-fuer-arbeitg...

Certainly relevant, but there's still a decent gap between 96,600€ ($108,165) and $150,000.


I admit I did the computation 80kE ~= $150k from the top of my head, it’s not super accurate and will depend on countries and the status of the employee (different status imply different employer deductions).

In France for instance, people will insist on having the “cadre” status, which require more employer contribution and also has implications on how their liabilities toward the company are judged. This should raise the bar to $150k.

Edit:

I did the computation for France and end up with 130k EUR super gross for a 80k EUR gross. So that would be an equivalent of $145k. Not far from my guess.

I used the french government calculator to compute the exact values: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/entreprises/simulateur-cout-emb...


I don't know anyone who calls take-home (net) pay gross salary in Europe. I have lived and worked in multiple countries.

And the actual gross is definitely displayed on the payslips.


Let me try to reformulate OP's comment. In many European countries, there are three deduction levels: (1) the net salary, after all taxes and health and social care deductions, (2) the gross salary, after all mandatory employer contributions to the health and social care systems (3) the total cost of an employee to the employer (the English equivalent of the term used in Czechia would be "super-gross" salary). OP's point was that first, in the EU, there is often a big difference between (2) and (3), whereas they are very close or equal in the US, and second, gross salary usually refers to (2) in the EU and to (3) in the US.

That said, I don't think that the difference between (2) and (3) is as big as suggested by the OP even in the EU, at least in the countries that I'm familiar with.


Gross salary usually refers to #2 in the US, to, and, contrary to the upthread suggestion, just as in Europe, there is an “employer portion” (which in the US includes some of retirement and retirement healthcare, but not current healthcare—that is, specifically, federally half of the tax for Social Security and Medicare,—plus, a portion of the cost of federal and state unemployment insurance) which is not included in gross salary because it is paid out of employer taxes rather than employee taxes. There are also sometimes employer-provided benefits that while part of total compensation are not part of gross salary , and may or may not be part of taxable income; some portion of employer-provided healthcare cost is frequently part of this, and, though this is almost entirely a public-sector concern now, some portion of employer pension costs also frequently would be part of this, where a pension exists at all (adding these employer taxes and benefits to gross salary isn't the total cost to the employer of the employee either, as there is overhead and other employer costs for employment that that still excludes.)

It is true that the spread between #2 and #3 (when limited only to the required taxes and any benefits not part of salary, which seems to be the intention) is typically greater in Europe than the US, as the supported social services are greater.


> I don't know anyone who calls take-home (net) pay gross salary in Europe. I have lived and worked in multiple countries.

That is not what I am saying...

There are basically 3 stages of income in Europe: employer gross -> employee gross -> employee net.

Most Europeans refer to employee gross as simply “gross”. There are still the employee contribution part to be deducted before the net, but the whole employer contribution has completely been removed already.

Payslips as well as employment contracts usually display the employee gross. That is why the real total compensation including the employer contribution is rarely displayed anywhere in Europe and people forget about it, thus creating the incompréhension of this whole comment thread, where people compare incomparable incomes.


Yeah fair enough then, that's true - misunderstood your comment.


I totally agree. Having lived through both systems and countries with similar salaries than the one you mention. France is a scam. Europe is a scam. Companie are not entitled to anything they make you either enter some traditional companies with very little benefits (definitly no 401k, discounted movie tickets at best) or they make you enter startup world giving you shitting fictional "stocks" that definitely won't make you a millionaire even if the company hits a multi-billion dollar valuation. You know what else? people managing, doing PM, all the soft skills jobs are better paid in france than dev jobs and better viewed overall. unlike in USA where people pay for the technical skills, engineers compensations in europe are low. somehow we still an old country dominated by old money and the rule that only the elites can get chunks of the companies even tho they are not the one slaving. There are a few exceptions to this but those companies moved their HQ and their core in USA to get away from all this BS. such as Datadog or even Docker. oh and regarding price of accomodation paris is much more expensive than NYC. new york not being only manhattan and brooklyn for people who like to compare even modern apartments in LIC sell for half of what a 200year old apartment would sell in paris.


It's curious that you say that, I searched for comparisons between New York and Paris[0],[1] and NY comes on top. Are this inaccurate? I'm genuinely curious

[0]:https://www.expatica.com/fr/housing/buying/buying-property-i... [1]:https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/paris/n...


Have a look I picked similar sized appartments 44sqm: LIC (10min ride from midtown) for 600k$ a : https://streeteasy.com/building/5th-street-lofts-5sl/6d

PARIS 15 (family neighboorhood - the furthest one from the city center - 20min) for 600k$: https://www.seloger.com/annonces/achat/appartement/paris-15e...

and I can find much much cheaper in Queens if I move 10min further in something older.


> The kind of stock options you get in big tech companies is not what you think. You can expect some hundreds/thousands dollars per year, that need 3/5 year to vest until you can have them in full.

Did you mean tens/hundreds of thousands per year? Vesting monthly or quarterly? Because that's what "big tech companies" pay just in stocks in the Bay Area.

https://www.levels.fyi/


> Your 80k€ gross in e.g. France should be the equivalent of $150k for a US worker

I hear this a lot, but if you're earning $150K in the US, you almost certainly have 100% medical coverage. At least, I do, and everyone I know does. The US medical system is broken, but it's OK for high-income earners. It's the low-to-middle income folks who are really hurt by it.

> retirement savings

Again, if you're earning $150K in the US, you probably have a nice 401K and stock options. If you're smart with your money, you can probably retire in 10 years. Again, anecdotal, but I know many who've done just that.


> I hear this a lot, but if you're earning $150K in the US, you almost certainly have 100% medical coverage.

I'm not sure how true this is anymore. I made a bit more than this at Microsoft, and my medical benefits were "100% covered" by Microsoft. But that still amounts to thousands of dollars in deductibles and copays per year out of pocket.


I worked at Microsoft, and didn't have that experience. Maybe it changed? When were you there?


I was there from 2013 to 2019. I remember right after I joined in 2013 they stopped offering their PPO plan and moved everyone into an HDHP.


Ah. Yeah. I left right around then. :) That explains it. Still, everywhere I've worked since MS has given me 100% coverage, albeit sometimes indirectly (e.g. via a company funded HSA plan, etc).


Just to be clear, I don't want to enter any kind of comparison between EU and US pension/medical systems here!

All I'm saying, is that contribution to e.g. a 401k will be done after the $150k (even though the employer will contribute with e.g. 1:1 ratio).

Whereas in EU the retirement contribution is already done before the 80k euro. Actually, MANY other contributions will happen before that 80k EUR.

Thus, you cannot compare _directly_ EU and US salaries, you need to adjust for a rough estimate of everything that was already deducted from the EU 80k!

This is why I mention that it is more _fair_ to compare EU super-gross against US gross, because both are expressed before the heavy medical/unemployment/retirement contributions.


Whereas in EU the retirement contribution is already done before the 80k euro. Actually, MANY other contributions will happen before that 80k EUR.

Exactly same thing is true in the US. 401k is on top of Social Security retirement benefits. Employees pay 6.2% of their salary (up to $127,000 cap) into Social Security, and the employers pay matching 6.2% on top of the gross salary. The 401k is in addition to Social Security benefits, and the Social Security benefits are already higher than the French retirement benefits.


>there is no more “meat grinders” in the US than in Europe. I worked at Microsoft and Criteo in Europe, and the slacking there seems to be on par with what OP describes.

That's very specifically anecdotal. Not everyone in Europe works or has the opportunity to work at big wealthy corps like the ones you mentioned. Europe is not as clustered as SV so the quality and pay of jobs varies immensely on your location. I can assure that outside such monopolies like Microsoft where the money comes in regardless if people work or not, the meat grinders are real.


> Not everyone in Europe works or has the opportunity to work at big wealthy corps like the ones you mentioned.

Because you think 90% of people in the US works in 'big wealthy corps'?

You probably have a skewed opinion based on what you see on hacker news. For the overwhelming majority, the condition are pretty similar to what you describe: A SCRUM point driven job, where you just implement whatever boring BS you are asked for a product you most likely don't care about, with a mediocre pay, and no job security.


Oh come on, there are good companies and bad companies in every industry.

If you've managed to end up at a bad one you've only yourself to blame.


> You can expect some hundreds/thousands dollars per year

This is not correct. A senior (meaning L5-L6+, nothing crazy) engineer at a big public tech co will get 6 figures yearly in stock compensation in addition to their salary.


Sorry, but this is urban legend to me. No saying it does not happen, but that is definitely a very special case.

I manage a team of quantitative developers in a Hedge Fund and do between 50 and 100 interviews per year, at senior level. I have head hunter compensation report on the candidates. I see regularly candidates from Google, Amazon, and finance industry. I very rarely see 6 digit bonus for big techs. My experience is that they have a high fixed salary and low 5 digit bonus.


> head hunter compensation report

You should ask for a refund. Senior engineers at FANG in the Bay Area will typically make over $100k/year in stock. Total compensation of $300k-$400k is pretty normal, and includes salary, stock, and bonus. Netflix is an exception; compensation is mostly or all in cash.

The flip side is that, even with $350k/year income, you probably still can't comfortably afford a nice 3-bedroom house in a good neighborhood to raise a family (unless you've already been working in the Bay for a while and saved up a big nest egg, or your spouse makes a similar amount and continues to work full time while you raise a family).

Since I moved to the Bay Area, I've realized the high salaries aren't worth it to me. If I were still in my twenties, I could make it work, but as it is, I'd end up paying a truly absurd amount of money for a small, over-priced house, and my entire paycheck would go towards paying the mortgage for the foreseeable future. So I'm looking to transfer to a non-Bay Area office ASAP, even if it means a pay cut.


;_;

You know what sucks? I have to pay ridiculous rent for a house in an LA suburb and I make only a fraction of that lol.

Dang!


If it's any consolation, most engineers here are not senior/staff engineers and they make less. Rent here is very steep (~$3500/month is the median price for an old 1-bedroom in San Francisco), but the home prices are really insane.

Also, there are many companies and start-ups up here that pay much less. Lots of people scrape by, and lots of people move away.

I personally really like LA (which is not something I can openly admit up here) and hope to transfer there or to San Diego.


I grew up in the Bay Area, and while I miss the culture, I do not miss its homogeneity. Los Angeles is truly a world-class cosmopolis, but it can be grinding because of the entertainment buggers. San Diego to me is a better alternative, and where I would go to raise a family. In the meantime, I enjoy the abundance of world-class cultural opportunities in a late 80’s 2br with garaged parking for $2350/mo in West LA!


We don't get six digit bonuses. I'm in the high end of the range the parent posted, and I've never seen a six digit bonus. However, I do get a high five digit (cash) bonus, and around 250k of stock comp on top of my 250k base salary. I don't think of the stock as a bonus. It's just part of my compensation.

Honestly even the bonuses are not bonuses the way bank people normally think of them. I have family that worked in corporate finance and they described not uncommon situations where a bonus would be more than all the rest of the compensation for a year. And it was highly variable. Meanwhile both my bonus and stock comp have been steadily increasing, but not in a variable way. It's a pretty consistent 5-15% per year.


I didn’t say anything about a bonus. These are stock packages.


You're probably not from the bay, check levels.fyi


The parent post was referring to stock-based compensation (ie. RSUs), not bonus. This site might be interesting: https://levels.fyi/


Yes, I can confirm that stock-based compensation at brand-name Bay Area tech companies is significant. Those numbers definitely match what I see anecdotally.


> You mention 40/80k per year being pitiful? This kind of remuneration puts you in the top 10%/5% of France population easily.

These numbers are surely off. Must be more like 40%/10%. And I'd bet that a double-digit percentage of devs earn less than 40k and only very few earn 80k. Factor in that this is a job that is concentrated in big cities with a high cost of living, and these numbers don't look that great.


Average net salary in France hovers at 2300€/month, median net salary is ~1800€/month. At ~3200€/month you're straight in the high 10% from official statistics.


Anything I found suggested slightly higher values, but maybe official stats can only be found by googling in French?

Either way, I think all the GPs were talking about gross values. So if 1800 net is, say, 2800 gross, that is 35k/yr. In that case 40k is fairly close to the median and probably not in the top 25%.


Indeed. :)


This guy (parent) took two data-points and extrapolated like he had just figured out how two continents work.


>> You mention 40/80k per year being pitiful? This kind of remuneration puts you in the top 10%/5% of France population easily.

That just means the rest of the population is poor, not that you should accept less. This is called a fallacy of relative privation. So what if you have to subsist on ramen and can't afford a place to live with less than an hour and a half of commute. Think of all those starving children in Uganda instead. That's how the ruling class shits in your head with propaganda.

As a professional you should be able to accomplish the minimum of: raising a couple of kids, buying a residence, putting quality food on the table, and sock away enough to not be poor when it's time to retire. You should aim to make more than enough money to do all of the above while maintaining a first world lifestyle.

If you're not able to do that in your profession, that fancy college degree is materially worse than a plumbing or electrical trade school certification.


I make $42K in Sweden (not in IT), and it's comfortably high middle class. My wife doesn't even work full time and it's still enough for us to live comfortably within our means (own a house, two cars, one kid, etc.)

If I'd been making $60K my wife could stop working. At $80K she wouldn't have to work and we'd still be moving into "new BMW every three years" kind of money.

$80K goes a lot further in Europe than it does in the US.


Are you able to buy real estate in a decent location? Because if you can't, you're not "high middle class". Housing is not a luxury.


Yes, we are able to buy real estate in a decent location. We live not far outside Stockholm where prices are really high compared to the rest of the country, and we had no problems buying our house.

My salary is ~twice the median income for this area, and by any measure we're at the upper end of middle class by Swedish standards.


Not far outside is a very lax definition. A 500K Mortgage (affordable with aforementioned salaries) gets you a 2 bedroom in good neighborhoods in Paris, 3 in lesser ones. Sure, if you're ready to go 20 km away you can get a rather nice house at that price (say 100-150m2 with a garden of variable size), but at the cost of commuting 30min-1hr everyday.

Anyways, I wouldn't consider someone establishing outside of an european city (esp when working there) "high middle class". If you can't afford central housing of your choice, you dont qualify.


A 2 room apartment in central Stockholm, 40m2 starts at $303000 right now (that's a current listing).

https://maps.app.goo.gl/PnrNuo2k3LsgaeG89

That apartment is 44km as the crow flies from my house, 55km by car (45-50min of driving).

Is your definition of "high middle class" really if we're able to afford central Stockholm housing?


Don't forget public transportation which is non existent or bad in many places in the US, a 30-45 minutes on a Stockholm Metro or train takes down the prices significantly. Those 300,000$ can buy you a nice semi detached and you won't need a car on a daily basis.


On 42K/yr pre (crazy) tax? Tell me more about how that works.


American who has spent 16 years in Europe (Ireland, Netherlands, Switzerland).

> $80K goes a lot further in Europe than it does in the US.

I would like to see evidence supporting this assertion. Luxury meats are about the only thing I can think of that are more expensive stateside.


We pay $100 per month for daycare which is open 6:30 to 18:30 if we need it for that long.

School costs us nothing out of pocket.

Our grand total out of pocket medical costs for our kid thus far (turns 4 in March) is around $500. Including any medication we've ever bought for him. Half of that $500 went to spending Monday through Friday at the hospital when he was born, in a hotel style room with three meals a day included for the both of us.

We didn't need private health insurance for that, nor have it provided by either employer.

We also received 480 paid parental leave days to be split between us (90 reserved for her, 90 for me, the remaining 300 at our discretion).

That's some evidence right there. I have no numbers from the countries you mentioned though. The difference there could be smaller.


yeah surely your family has good dental for paying only 500$ medical costs.


I didn't say dental, or "family". I said we paid $500 for our son's medical costs, not for the whole family.

His dental is completely free until he turns 23. Same as for anyone living in Sweden.


Depends where in Europe you are.

$80k in London as a single 20-something is great and you might be able to save a little while living central, while for a family of 4 it'd be much tighter and you'd live further out of the city.

$80k in Manchester and you'll have a comfortable life as a family of 4.

$80k in Poland and you'll be laughing in a luxury flat somewhere with no financial worries.

Europe is a large place and for the majority of countries and cities that is enough money to live extremely comfortably.

As for evidence, the average median salary in Europe is 16943€ or $18,947. The average salary in the US is three times this amount so sure - it goes 'a lot further in Europe'.


$80k a year in the US (assuming you live outside of a few of very high cost of living locations) will easily net you a new BMW every three years, esp. given that they're much cheaper than in Sweden.


What’s your source on BMW prices? Afaik, cars are about the same price in Sweden and the US.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Check the VW Golf comparison. I also did a quick search for a BMW i8, the price in Sweden was ~10x in SEK than the price in USD (1 USD = 9.41 SEK), and I don’t know whether taxes were included in the US price, probably not.


In the US, the MSRP for new VW Golf is around $22k, so you can probably get one for $20k or less if you shop around the dealerships. On top of that $20k, you'll pay sales tax, which is 10% in most expensive places, and usually something like 6-8%.

When comparing BMW prices, don't look at some weird cars that nobody buys like i8, look at popular BMWs. For example, 2020 BMW X5 here costs something around $70k, depending on the features.


While I agree with you on some points, the cost of life in European countries is not the same as USA.


The taxes are also much higher in Europe, especially on those compliant "upper middle class" techies we're talking about here. For anyone with basic understanding of arithmetics it's not even a question that EU techies are woefully underpaid, which is why all the good ones work in the US or for EU subsidiaries of US companies which actually respect the engineers.


I don't believe this is the case. In central Europe (Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary) you can have < 20 - 25% effective taxes even including basic health insurance. In german speaking countries (Austria, Germany) you get twice the salary but that goes with higher taxes. AFAIK in US just the health insurance is very expensive.

EDIT: (using the most tax-effective form of employment, which most of the time is working as a contractor. Being a full-time employee comes with so much higher taxes in EU)


> AFAIK in US just the health insurance is very expensive.

In the US, someone like a programmer would get their health insurance paid for by their employer as additional compensation on top of their already much higher salary. The vast majority of Americans either get health insurance through their employer or are retired and are eligible for Medicare. Employers on average pay 82% of premiums for a single person, leaving on average $1,200 paid by the worker. For someone like a programmer, it’s common for employees to pay the whole premium. When you look at US salaries, that additional compensation is on top of the reported salary. So although health insurance is very expensive, you’re mostly not paying it out of the reported salary.


I believe the deductibles on that insurance will also be much, much higher, though, than most systems in Europe.

So out of pocket expenses for the Amercian are going to be much, much higher.


> So out of pocket expenses for the Amercian are going to be much, much higher.

Not in comparison to the salary difference: https://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/OECD-Focus-on-Out.... About $500/year difference between USA and France.


> AFAIK in US just the health insurance is very expensive.

Health care, housing, education, retirement are incredibly expensive in the US. Day-to-day life in the US is also quite expensive for most Americans. Most people in the US are in massive amounts of debt with little to no savings.


> Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary

The salaries that are considered "acceptable" in those countries would result in a _negative_ effective tax rate in the US. Tax rate alone is not everything. It's a combination of pretax pay and the effective tax rate that you need to be considering.


For washing dishes, yes. But senior developers make around $60k in major cities. Throw 19% all-inclusive tax rate on top of that.


Those same people would be making $250-300K in the US, with about 25-30% effective tax rate (depending on the state), and healthcare mostly paid for by the employer. Assuming they're actually senior and get paid that much in Eastern Europe.


I'm not sure they would. $60k is just typical salary for someone with 5-10 years of experience in ex. corporate Java. They are not stars by any strech of imagination, just solid performers.

Outstanding people make $120-160k - and here I agree, they would probably make twice that much if not more at FAANG in SV. But, their taxes would be at 35-40%, and housing would also be more expensive. I've often considered moving to SV (I'm making $160k in Poland). According to my calculations, I would be saving up to 50% more money there, but for me that's not enough to move to the other end of the world - not to mention the gruesome immigration process.


In the UK, someone on £80k ($105k) will pay £25k ($33k) in tax. That includes healthcare

In the US, someone on that amount in Denver will pay $29k in tax.

That's not an extraordinary difference, even before you factor in health care costs.


It's an extraordinary difference when you look at what proportion of engineers (outside of London/Finance) earn £80k in the UK vs $105k in Denver.


That isn't a tax thing though - payroll/income taxes are roughly the same.


> arithmetics

true, but you should calculate everything- highly subsidized education, public transportation and medical, generous grants for students, more vacation days, long parental leave etc.


Except plumbing or electrical trade school certification doesn't help you achieve that either


At least you don't need to spend 4+ years on a degree that's not worth anything.

Don't know how accurate this list is, but I'm pretty sure an electrician in my area wouldn't even want to get out of bed in the morning for 40K euro per year.

https://www.buildingtalk.com/tradesmen-around-the-world-whic...


Most tech workers in the US aren't at Google or making Silicon Valley wages.

HN's description of what it's like to work in tech sounds likes a fantasy world to me.

Yes I make more than a European at $100k living in the US midwest... but I have to work hard every single day, in an open office, with my boss sitting in a desk right behind me. Most jobs are still a grind. This guy is probably a high-performer who wonders why everyone else is so incompetent because he doesn't try and still looks good. That's more winning the talent lottery than anything else.


>everyone else is so incompetent because he doesn't try and still looks good

I'd argue against the "talent lottery" idea. Over the last 10 years as a software dev I'd argue that the 10x "rockstar" dev certainly exists, but it's almost always a case of situation/environment matching an already-moderately-talented employee extremely well.

I've seen a lot of slackers suddenly explode into a powerhouse when given the right conditions. "The grind" is very rarely the right conditions.


Yeah I've been anywhere from like 0.5x to 10x in my career. Guess what changed? Sure wasn't my IQ or work ethic.

Generally, the "10x devs" are the ones who got to do the initial greenfield work. They are the ones who understand the system, including all the undocumented domain knowledge that has been embedded into it over the years.

Ironically this actually rewards incompetence at times. If you do that greenfield work, and make a perfect system that is easy to comprehend and maintain, you will not have an advantage and will not be a "10x" engineer. You have to make the system work, and make the bosses happy long enough to earn their trust... but don't make it too easy for anybody else to come onto your team and be productive.

Of course, this incompetence is also created by management sometimes. Let's say you are a very competent dev who has the desire and talent to make a nice greenfield system that is easy to scale and maintain. Well, management will surely make sure this does not happen 90% of the time because of changing requirements and unrealistic deadlines.


>Generally, the "10x devs" are the ones who got to do the initial greenfield work. They are the ones who understand the system, including all the undocumented domain knowledge that has been embedded into it over the years.

I think this is exactly right. Especially when working on large projects with complex business logic.


I've seen one "10x" developer in my career. The way he worked was basically to leave a massive wake of data corruption, technical debt and bugs that other people would spend months fixing. Management will never notice, because everyone just accepts these things as part of doing business, and doesn't ask any questions about where it comes from or whether it was the right tradeoff. The tech debt itself doesn't bother me that much, but it always bothered me that he never took any responsibility for creating or fixing it.

However, the idea that there's a strong correlation between productivity and salary is totally a myth IMO. Getting a strong salary is all about being pretty competent, and being able to pass an interview. Once you're in to a high-paying company, mediocre competence (or slightly more) is all you really need. Me and the guy I mentioned had the same pay and the same job title, he was just having a bit more fun.


    I've seen one "10x" developer in my career. The way he 
    worked was basically to leave a massive wake of data 
    corruption, technical debt and bugs that other people 
    would spend months fixing.
Amen. I've known one real "10x" developer in several decades. He was truly something of a savant.

I also worked with another alleged 10x developer. He was quite good, but was also given the bulk of the greenfield work and left a massive trail of technical debt in his wake.

    Management will never notice, because everyone just accepts 
    these things as part of doing business, and doesn't ask any   
    questions about where it comes from or whether it was the right 
    tradeoff. The tech debt itself doesn't bother me that much
The tech debt absolutely bothers me. It is so destructive to productivity and morale.

We had mountains of technical debt in an overstuffed monolith app. Our test suite alone took close to an hour to run and was flaky.

Management was openly hostile and derisive about attempts to address this debt. They were not engineers so it was like a laughing matter to them. "You want to have a portion of the team focus on something other than SHIPPING? Are you mad?"

Idiots. Some of the smartest idiots in the world, but idiots.


I've also worked with only one truly "10x" developer and dozens of "10x through technical debt" ones. I've very often had to finalize the famous "last 20%" of their projects which is a fun place to be in. "I thought it was almost done?"

There was one guy who worked extremely hard and extremely thoughtfully who was a master at low-level and high-level languages. Kind of a John Carmack type. But these people are like unicorns who you meet once in a career.


     I've very often had to finalize the famous "last 20%" 
     of their projects which is a fun place to be in. 
     "I thought it was almost done?"
Yeah, and then management thinks you are a mere 0.1x or 1x or 0.01x or whatever because you're moving so much more slowly than the "10x" person.

In a fair world (or a fair workplace) I wouldn't mind doing that kind of work. Ideally, I'd say "I'm willing to do whatever it takes to ship good code! Hell, I'll mop the floors or go fetch sandwiches if that's what the team needs at that moment!"

But at this point, I really try to avoid it. Unless your manager is attentive and technically savvy enough to recognize the hell you're wading through, it's basically just career suicide. The 10x person gets farther and farther ahead of you. At the end of the month he's got 100 commits and has shipped 5 features and 9 fixes. Meanwhile, you've done some fraction of that.

When I have junior devs tackle a mess like that, I make sure to put extra effort into recognizing the difficult work they are doing in cleaning up somebody else's mess. I make no claims of being a good senior dev or a good manager or anything like that. But I try to do that one thing right at least.


I think 10x engineers do not actually exist, but maybe 0.1x engineers do, and when a 1x engineer is in such an environment they may seem like 10x by comparison.


I think both 0.1x engineers and 10x engineers exist.

0.1x engineer: one of my friends works at a certain government contractor. One of her coworkers had difficulty understanding short circuiting in evaluating boolean statements, everything he writes she needs to fix, he thinks XML is a programming language, and it's just a huge mess amongst a huge list of other complaints.

10x engineer: Actually, he's still in undergrad. I was his TA for a VR class and he made a pretty great clone of Beat Saber before it was released just from watching the trailer, and in under a week. He's never heard of Leetcode, yet is absolutely comfortable with interview questions (well, I decided he didn't need practice after asking a few questions...). He's had an internship at a FAANG and finished his project early and got bored. I introduced him to a few of my other friends in the industry and they are intimidated by him too. He's this rare combination where he has the theoretical knowledge of CS, but also excels at actual engineering work.

Both 0.1x engineers and 10x engineers just feel like they re on a "different level". I don't know how else to describe it .

As for whether or not looking for 10x engineers is practical, I don't think it is.

1) It took me way too long to confirm that feeling (i.e. I imagine interview questions alone aren't enough; you have to see the engineer working).

2) I imagine most companies don't even need a 10x engineer to build the product they need.

3) They're too rare. How do I know? Because (a) none of my friends have felt that before meeting him and (b)the whole industry is still debating on whether 10x engineers exist.


> 2) I imagine most companies don't even need a 10x engineer to build the product they need.

So true. 99% of businesses are CRUD and "complex-because-of-humans" business logic very rarely needs someone like Michael Abrash as a chief scientist to get the job done.


They do. However, they can do 10X work only in deep work env, I.e. private office, no email, no meeting, etc.

Once you put the 10X eng in regular work settings, he will quickly become 1X or 0.1X


There are different ways of making teams more productive than doing just technical work.

For my own anecdote, I often can fix a lot of bugs/feature requests that come by in < 10 minutes, and often will. As soon as it is revealed that another dev will start contributing who has no prior experience, I stop most of that work and let that person take on some of those tasks & do the leftover ones. Mentorship/growing developer capabilities expands capabilities long term, even if the dev ends up moving to another project.

I also spend the most time in meetings of any IC on my team - reducing how many ICs are in meetings frees up their time to learn and grow.

I often float ideas to people for approaches to problems and designing apps/systems/features - I’ll also let others do the same. However, I also often take a light touch and leave ultimate decision making to others so they can gain that experience even if I disagree. Letting others take ownership improves the team’s capabilities.

There are many ways to expand productivity of those around you that even those who aren’t as technically gifted can do. Leadership is a very underrated part of being an engineer IMO. I do all these things as a mid-level engineer in title, but gained massive respect from management & senior ICs where they come to me for advice/ideas. I don’t fall into the trap of jealousy that others are getting credit/hampering my ability to get promoted because my work speaks for itself & I celebrate when others do well - I have no reason to feel insecure, and so help unlock my team’s productivity by removing that ego in my actions.


I'm a believer in everything you just said!

It takes a very healthy work environment (and attentive management) for this kind of work to be noticed and rewarded. Unfortunately it's not often the case.

I have tried to take this approach many times and a lot of companies/managers absolutely do not value it.

Broadly speaking, it only works if management is really involved in the day-to-day (more like hour to hour, really) process of what you're doing. Then it is easy for them to see that you are lifting up those around you and elevating the team as a whole. Without this involvement, a "mentor" and "leader" winds up looking simply like "a guy who doesn't ship enough" to management.

At my last job, management was very... absentee. There was a shortage of management and this was a bottleneck. They relied on metrics too heavily (stories shipped, etc) and didn't understand the actual processes... who was mentoring and elevating others, and who was "highly productive" but was also leaving an absolute trail of technical debt in their wake.


I feel your pain there, definitely experienced it at most prior companies. Unfortunately good engineering management is uncommon in our industry :( .


It's a shame when management fails at understanding this aspect of the game because I feel like it's one of the simplest ones to understand.

Appeasing clients? Balancing profit/loss? Juggling fire-fighting and feature-shipping? Recruiting? Hiring?

Hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.

Listening to your developers, who generally just want to be productive and generally know more than anybody else about how they can be productive? (If not, why did you hire them, if they don't know how best to do their jobs?) Understanding that technical debt exists and exerts a massive drain on future productivity?

I feel like those are the easy parts of the job.

Of course, the onus is on developers to communicate these things well. Otherwise we can't blame management for not understanding them. But I have never seen process break down because developers weren't talking. It always seems to fail because management isn't listening.


EXACTLY. Nailed exactly. Strong individual performance, ime, is a product of the right conditions allowing me to do my best.


Slacking is also a matter of motivation or the lack of it essentially, whether the "slacking" is a conscious act or not.

A "universal" 10x developer would be fairly rare to mythic even if restricted to a single complete subdomain like say Backend or Embedded development.

Well unless you had a massive skill discrepancy like say a team of a class of middle schoolers and a 10 year veteran software engineer but that would be a pedantic edge case like comparing the foot speed of a centarian and Usain Bolt. Technically a valid measurement of range but not generally useful.


> I've seen a lot of slackers suddenly explode into a powerhouse when given the right conditions

They must have had a powerhouse manager


No, that’s not generally true in Europe. It depends solely on the company. During the first 12 weeks of fatherhood, I worked two days instead of five and my perceived productivity stayed the same. As an expert slacker and procrastinator, you can slack in many places.

Salaries in IT are generally very good in all European countries and if you manage your salary well, you’ll buy a house when you’re in the mid-thirties.

But there are many companies and developers that do extreme low-balling when it comes to money. I saw people paid 40% less than me, delivering much more value. But at the same time, they were so loyal with their employer, they didn’t even ask for a pay rise.

Myself, I’m the opposite, my Cv looks great and if a company wants to hire me, I manage to push the first salary offer usually by 20-30%. Instead of a promotion, I stay for 2-3 years and then just apply until a company gives me another 20-30% more.

My salary tripled since 2003.


Also, let’s not forget about the extreme cost of living difference between the Bay Area and europe. SWE from google aren’t easily buying homes here, especially if they want to live near their work.


Do you mind talking specifics? So 50k/year to 150k? Or 120k to 360k/year?


Which country and domain are you in?


Finance IT with a history in multiple German-speaking regions.


I don't disagree with you but that's probably some survivor bias there in your original post as maybe the finance IT bubble in the region you're in pays well but that certainly that doesn't apply to most dev positions across Europe as you originally stated. To put it another way, you're probably the exception, not the rule. :) But I agree with everything else you said, thanks for sharing.


I worked as a software developer for companies all over the world: Brisbane, Sydney, San Francisco (working remotely from Moscow), The Hague (Netherlands), London then Berlin. The markets are very different in each country.

Moscow is the worst for developers but at least cost of living is low. I feel that Australia is similar to the US in terms of income but it's a less liquid market; low supply, low demand. But the low liquidity of market meant that if you were patient and negotiated well, you could score AUD $900 per day contracts (about $620 USD per day). The cost of living in Sydney is much lower than San Francisco though so I had a really good lifestyle and was still saving money.

In The Netherlands, it was difficult to find contracts above EUR 450 per day (about 500 USD). On the plus side, the government offered big tax cuts to foreigners so you ended up paying less tax than the locals. It felt like I had more disposable income.

London market was tough, it was difficult to find good contracts. I did see adverts for 600 GBP per day in software finance sector but it seemed like I needed personal connections to accesss those. Recruiters were always trying hard to pull me away from the contract market to a lower paid full time opportunity and I felt that I had less negotiating power in spite of having more experience than when I was living in Australia and Netherlands.

Berlin for me was not that great but difficult to say. I moved there because I had already agreed with the company and it was a long term career move. I worked there for 2 years and quit recently. The job market is difficult because they don't usually show salaries or rates on the adverts... This means that companies have more negotiating power and don't care that much about attracting top software engineering talent.

From my experience, countries which pay software developers the most have the best software developers and you can see it in the final products - The experience of using online banking in different countries was interesting.


In cybersecurity here in Australia you get 1,200 to 1,300 per day as a security architect.

I agree with the above, it is a “low demand, low supply” market as you always end up working for the same big companies.

I’m at Google Sydney now and my total compensation is 300k (AUD), while anywhere else in it’d be just under 200k


For Stockholm, ~750 USD/day outside finance is common and easy to get. Baffles me that the rest of Europe seems so much lower, and even London.


Regarding London, the 600+ GBP per day contracts are definitely not only for insiders. You probably didn't have the right experience in their eyes. Regarding finance specifically, the industry has its quirks so they like to get people who worked in finance before - otherwise, it can be a bit of a culture shock.


>> Regarding finance specifically, the industry has its quirks so they like to get people who worked in finance before

I had almost 8 years of experience as a software developer at the time and I did have some experience in the finance sector (but a small startup). My resume looks pretty great, one of my open source projects is quite popular (over 5K stars on GitHub) yet I did not even get asked to an interview.


I haven't worked in finance startups, but big finance is extremely heavy on processes, bureaucracy and security (accomplished via processes and bureaucracy). That's why they like people who worked in big finance before and didn't quit soon after joining (as some do) - it proves that you can deal with this frustrating environment.


Thanks for sharing. Although anecdotal, more posts like these would be very useful to gauge the markets.


This is just my experience, but that isn't true at all. I work in the US for a huge European based Multinational with an HQ is Western Europe, Dev offices in Western and Eastern Europe, US, and Asia. There are plenty of devs all over the world who are slackers, but who know how to play the visibility and politics game well enough that they are perceived as high value.

I've worked for two other Multinationals and with consulting and partner firms in Europe and Asia. Some people are amazing and work really hard, and some know how to make themselves look good and get fancy positions (e.g. senior architect) where they slack off and keep themselves busy selling themselves by attending meetings. At one place I worked there was constant frustration that our European colleagues had no sense of urgency or motivation at all.

I think the point dhuyrv is making is that in many situations, you can take advantage of the fact that most people don't really know the difference between what you actually do and what you project to others. In many jobs (no matter where you are in the world), playing the game of selling yourself can do more for your career and salary than writing code.

All of the above is anecdotal of course.


>but that isn't true at all. I work in the US for a huge European based Multinational

That's very specifically anecdotal. Not all cities in Europe are hot markets flooded with big corps like this one. Not that you're wrong, but your experience doesn't apply everywhere.


I was responding to your comment where you said "The behavior of slacker Googlers described here would have gotten them instantly fired in any European company."

There are a lot(!!) of European Multinationals, plenty of which are the typical slow moving bureaucratic mess where people who are good at meetings, presentations, and big talk end up moving up faster than people who just work hard.

In that sense, there are plenty of cities in the US where the software jobs are terrible, the pay is mediocre, and you work for employer who simply tries to squeeze as much from you as possible. That's one of the reasons there are so many people who migrate to parts of the US where they have more job options and better employers.


Europe indeed has plenty of slow moving multinationals where one can slack off, the difference is they're slacking off on crap salaries while FAANGers slack off for high six figure salaries. :)


You can fire people in Europe if they are slackers.

Why is this considered a bad thing? I’d suggest that working with capable colleagues is a great joy.

I do agree on the pay though. For some reason the US has ludicrous salaries. Every time I go to a conference in the US I feel like a pauper by comparison.

Especially hurts when talking to a junior engineer you can basically dance circles around that’s paid more than twice as much. But meh, good for them, I think I still prefer universal healthcare, sane leadership, and the knowledge that my CEO is making at most 4 or 5 times as much as me.


> and the knowledge that my CEO is making at most 4 or 5 times as much as me.

why do you prefer that? just curious


The salaries of CEOs of European corporations are nowhere near as extravagant as in the US, but still they're closer to 25-50x salary of a senior dev (quick googling returned salaries for European CEOs in the $3-6m range)


Depends on the size of company you are working for. I know for certain that most I’ve worked for didn’t have the budget to pay millions in salary to the CEO.

Though I guess the same limit would have applied in the US, I think the way people look at it is different.


> life really is unfair and success in life is more linked to the lottery of birth and opportunities available to you

No offense but, you're just now realizing this?

That's literally life in a nutshell. Random chance. You of course have to rise to the opportunity, but that's often not difficult at all. It's getting the opportunity that is hard, but almost entirely a matter of dice roll. Accept it, and do your best in life.


If it makes you feel better, op is not representative of developers in US. He is not even representative of people at Google or other big tech. Most people do work their ass off, some even on weekends and holidays. You are looking at a "lottery" winner and thinking life is unfair to you. In this case its not even lottery because such slacking off in your most productive young years severely limits your career choices when the party ends. Outside of top 10 big tech, comp is not too different from what you get in Europe.


Europe is big and very diverse place. Uber driver in midwest (US) makes more than a senior dev in Spain, Italy or Greece.


An Uber driver in the midwest US can die from a simple treatable disease (or ruin himself financially) because he might not have health insurance.

   Europe is big and very diverse place. Uber driver in 
   midwest (US) makes more than a senior dev in Spain, 
   Italy or Greece.
You can't just do a simple currency conversion to compare them, because the costs of living are very different.

A senior dev in these countries will have a nice standard of living. Much better than an Uber driver in the midwest US. As an Uber driver you would be very lucky to even make money considered "middle class."


OK, broken US healthcare aside, even in above mentioned countries - uber/taxi drivers income is quite comparable to devs salaries.


I don't think you are correct.

Uber drivers make only slightly more than what is considered a living wage in most cities. For example, an Uber driver makes around $20 per hour in NYC. So maybe $40,000 per year.

Source: https://gridwise.io/how-much-do-rideshare-drivers-make-in-20...

However, that is NOT a lot of money.

    Is $15 an hour enough to live on? Not in New York 
    City. MIT researchers’ estimates of a true living 
    wage in New York City range from $16.14 an hour 
    for a single adult, to $21.55 for two working parents 
    with two children, to $39.93 for a single parent with 
    two children.
Source: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-fix-nycs-broken-...

Keep in mind that a one-bedroom apartment in NYC costs about $3,000 a month!!! An Uber driver would work 150 hours a month just to pay for that! He would still need to buy food, clothing, healthcare, etc. This person cannot remotely think of raising children as an Uber driver. Somebody making $40,000 per year in NYC would probably need to share housing with roommates or family.

Source: https://ny.curbed.com/2019/6/3/18650949/nyc-rent-prices-zump...

Are developers in other countries able to afford their own apartments? It looks like senior developers in Athens, Greece make about €36,500/yr.

Source: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/athens-senior-software-en...

However, cost of living in Athens is so much lower, it is not even funny. It looks like a 1BR apartment costs more like €500-800. This seems easy to afford for a senior developer. At least, it is much easier than our poor Uber driver in NYC.

Of course, I just picked Athens as one example. But are you telling me there are places in Europe where senior developers can't even afford their own apartments?!


> life really is unfair and success in life is more linked to the lottery of birth and opportunities available to you than any amount of hard work.

Of course it is. My life is one example. Working in a third world country I was working like crazy and I had many of my customers in Europe and US F100 companies say that I am the hardest worker and I am way better than their employees. When they came to know how much I was paid they were in complete shock. My company too used to ignore the appreciations because if they do then they would have to pay me more! I worked in the company for 12 years. Moved to another smaller company and the cycle repeats there too and have moved out after 1.8 years in it.

It is a lottery alright. That is why you had gold rush and mass migration in search of better life. Lower migration barriers and majority in poverty motivated them. It is difficult to make this decision now as there is a feeling of OK pay and a bigger migration barrier.


Workers working for FANG in the USA also have much better quality of life than Americans in general.


Do you think this is true in Google’s European sites too? I have a hunch this is more of a Google thing than a US thing. I can assure you that plenty of engineers in the US grind away too.


I don't know but I think it could be a SV thing as it's probably a supply/demand issue. If FAANG corps in SV tolerate such behavior then it's because they can't find better people due to strong competition for talent. Google in Europe pretty much has no competition at its level and there are way more devs looking for quality work so it can afford to be way more selective with who they hire or keep. Supply and demand. Just my $0.02.


I think it depends on where you are in Google as in what team/org. I haven't seen much of what this original poster describes on the teams I have worked on. My limited anecdotal experience, however, is that people work less at the European offices than in the US.


Interesting. Ime, euro Googlers tend to be somewhat more productive. They may put in fewer hours but they seem to be more focused.


I would probably agree on that. My limited experience is that the European teams and engineers are very productive.

Maybe Europe gets better engineers there because of less options.


> This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for while in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year,

I've been in this industry here in America for 20+ years and most software developers don't enjoy such a easy time.

Burnout is common. I personally feel like I have been in a "meat grinder" for about 22 years.

Working at Google is VERY different from working at most companies.


> Reading OPs problem and some posts here where people are too bored of making ludicrous money left me with a bitter aftertaste that life really is unfair and success in life is more linked to the lottery of birth and opportunities available to you than any amount of hard work. Not hating, just saying.

This is of course true, which is why I much prefer European social democracy "loser wins some" to the US "winner takes all" approach.

But people born with luck don't tend to realise it

You were born in the west. You didn't starve as a child as the rains failed, meaning your brain didn't develop even if you did live to see your 5th birthday. You had access to clean drinking water. You went to school, you learnt to read and write. You didn't get drafted as a drugs mule age 8. You weren't forced to murder someone as an initiation rite age 15. You didn't have to risk your lives crossing rivers and seas to get to a safe country to work for $10 a day with no safety or rights because you were in the country illegally.


For what it's worth, these jobs do exist in Europe as well (I'm slacking off at a 100k+ € swe job in central europe right now!). I had high paying offers from the US in the past, but in my opinion the higher overall living standards, smaller wage gaps, and better social/political structures more than outweigh potential earning benefits.

In any case: If you're willing to move, consider eg Zurich, where a lot of big, high paying companies (google, FB, ibm, Oracle, apple, ... ) are hiring. Very high standard of living, very low taxes. London is similarly plastered with high paying jobs. Berlin has tons of interesting startups. Paris is great and has good food. Last time I was job hunting, I got high paying offers in all of those cities, so it is definitely possible


I do feel London is somewhat underrated in this discussion, for a senior Rails position I find quite a few startups willing to pay 80-85 GBP, that's not that far off from the U.S if you factor in cost of living. But yes - Belgium, France and Germany don't offer this type of money.


Well, if you look at the cost of living in SV the salaries aren't that insane. Buying a house is challenging on a Google salary in that area depending on level.

If you get in right out of college and live meagerly, than yes, you might be able to retire early if you leave that area.

If you actually want to build a life in the Bay Area and buy property, you will probably have to work at least 20 years to have enough for retirement or get promoted high enough where you really are making a lot of money.


> you will probably have to work at least 20 years to have enough for retirement

A whole 20 years? Cry me a river.


What I gave was a best case estimate if someone was really diligent, saving very aggressively, investing wisely, and contributing the maximum amount to retirement accounts.

As someone who has been working for over 20 years and the last 10 at Google, I am not close to retiring and I don't believe the compensation at Google is that much greater than other software jobs, as my previous compensation was comparable.

So what am I saying, yes, you might be able to retire early if you work at Google a long time and are very diligent, but you probably could do the same at most other software jobs in the region.

If you really want to make life changing money at a FAANG company you have to get promoted to a certain level, which isn't easy, IMO. Otherwise, your life isn't that different than any other software engineers.


> As someone who has been working for over 20 years and the last 10 at Google, I am not close to retiring and I don't believe the compensation at Google is that much greater than other software jobs, as my previous compensation was comparable.

You're probably well above the average comp at your level ( assuming L6+ ) given how much G stock has appreciated over the past decade though.

> So what am I saying, yes, you might be able to retire early if you work at Google a long time and are very diligent, but you probably could do the same at most other software jobs in the region.

The biggest advantage of these large companies is that the stock units + refreshers + stellar stock performance compounds wonderfully over time. Most other workers are chasing 5-10% raises every few years with poor 401k matching, no free food and no stocks so the gap widens over time.


I'm personally not L6+ and totally agree that if you can get to 6 then your compensation changes drastically.

At my previous company, I had stock options which had I held onto them would have been roughly comparable in value to my current stock grants.

But I agree that the biggest advantage over other companies are the stock grants, which have much less risk than supplemental compensation at other companies.

The moral of the story is that one really has to get to L6+ at Google to really earn money that one couldn't earn elsewhere.

IMO, that can be difficult depending on what projects you work on, your soft skills, and ability.

I routinely get solicited about jobs that have quite a bit higher compensation than Google's, particularly in finance.


I wish Toronto, Canada would pay such salaries.. Our COL is just as high, yet the median salary range for SWE is ~80k. Buying a house in TO proper is ~1.5M at the moment..

Honestly, folks in SV don't realize how good they have it.


In comparison, The median SWE salary is around ~123K in SV with a median home price in Mountain View of ~1.6m.

IMO, there are better options than SV. I would much rather be working in an area like Austin with a much more reasonable COL with a relatively small drop in median salary.


> The median SWE salary is around ~123K

A lot of the wealth is SV isn't from reported base salaries but from the issued company stocks (see levels.fyi for a subset )


20 years out of school still puts you retiring in your 40s ...


See my comment above. Basically, this would be challenging to do even at Google depending on the level you get promoted to and requires total dedication to the above, i.e., saving aggressively.

I think the advantage of getting into Google right out of school is that you can start on that path right away.

I didn't get to Google until working for over 10 years at other companies and as such and I wasn't really planning for such a goal so, for me personally, I will be lucky if I can retire when I am 60.


Most people are looking at never retiring at this stage. Retiring in your 40s puts you in a very exclusive bracket.


See my comment above. I think this might be rare even for most Googlers, but it is possibly doable depending on on the person.


These dudes exists in Europe too. Rendering whole meritocracy argument moot. I have come to believe that the real sexism in tech gap is in how low performing man can be without harming his reputation of performance - people give them seemingly infinite benefit of doubt. And how little can he know without damaging reputation of knowing a lot.

(Not that woman can't abuse this or that - but she can abuse different things. She can't make herself look 10x worker with so little.)


EU salaries have more to do with their tax structure than anything else.


Not really. US taxes aren't that much lower than Europe.

The reason is supply/demand. There's the lack of VC funding and also due to the market size, European tech companies don't generate nearly as much value as the US ones and the few ones that do don't have any meaningful competition so there's no need to pay high salaries.

Take the US defense sector alone. That's generating so many high paying tech and consultancy jobs that EU employees couldn't even dream of.


> The behavior of slacker Googlers described here would have gotten them instantly fired in any European company(yes, the "you can't fire people in Europe" is just a meme).

I've seen multiple people doing that or worse in London. Now that I think of it, it was in an American company though...


Seems like a trade off between the functioning health care system and affordable education and sane time off and and leave policies for you Europeans...and the significantly higher salaries here in the USA.


At least you weren't born like say during the Hundred Years War... :)


That war was fought by slackers and procrastinators much worse than OP.

"- Men, we need to take that castle!

- Oh come on! It's already August, no way we can take it before fall! The roads will be muddy! Let's try next year!! Or next decade!!!"


> Reading OPs problem and some posts here where people are too bored of making ludicrous money left me with a bitter aftertaste that life really is unfair and success in life is more linked to the lottery of birth and opportunities available to you than any amount of hard work. Not hating, just saying.

Just FYI, large US tech companies have offices in Europe and they also hire people from Europe to work in their US offices, so if you really want it, "lottery of birth" is not an insurmountable obstacle.


First of all,

That seems overly dramatic. I can only speak for Germany but I think 60-80k is more realistic. I think as a good university graduate in IT you should make >50k as that's the entry level pay for someone working in academics which is a decent middle-level salary to benchmark against I'd say.

If you account for vacation days, expected work hours and extra costs (medical etc.). I think European jobs aren't bad. If you really want a house, you also have to compare house prices in the Bay Area to wherever you make the 60-80k in Europe. My guess is that you'll find quite the dramatic price difference and in areas in Germany, where housing is expensive, the salaries are also higher (from talking to a friend, Bosch Munich pays I think 20% more than Bosch NRW iirc).

It's also not illegal to start your own business or do consulting where you can charge pretty nice prices depending on your field of expertise. Usually not as an entry level job but it's not unheard of.

Buying a house and paying it off also isn't impossible depending on where you live. 500k usually give you a decent option. 25 years @ 20k / year isn't really impossible (especially as you'd otherwise pay rent and given current interest rates). And quite frankly you can find good options in the 300k range a little outside metro areas.


This is why we have religion ;)

Thou shall work hard, get equivalent reward in this life or next one.

I tried to become religious before but I am too stubborn to do it. We all want some purpose in life, distractions can work temporary or forever if you want them to with cracks appearing often needing to be filled.

Personal advice for myself:

- Live and compare relatively with lookout for opportunities.

- Focus on self than any 'societal' or 'familial' duty crap. You want to become the best you, it doesn't matter what happens to others. Make a list of people that you care about and forget the rest (includes HN posters).

- If I fail, then x is to blame. Diversion of blame but not autopsy. Live blameless or regretless.

- Don't think you owe anyone anything but everyone owes you.

- Focus on present with vague long term plans. No need to get upset over something you can't predict. Give yourself reward for completing any short term goals.

- Build a consistent favorable moral system. Once you are done, you don't need to question it. Follow it till the day you die or something breaks.

- Remember you have a choice to live or quit. (Sometimes it helps you gain control back to pull through things)

I am currently building a framework that incorporates above for me, I am going to make it favorable for me and then forget about how I got there. I will believe that it is rational as oppose to religion therefore enabling me to put trust into it and follow it blindly.


"I will believe that it is rational as oppose to religion therefore enabling me to put trust into it and follow it blindly."

The irony..


Actually, that post was meant to be sarcastic going towards the end but I see it is not as obvious now looking at it. :/


Ah didn't even expect such anymore on HN as of recent years :D


it’s worth pointing out that large US tech companies hire international applicants and sponsor work visas for these folks. i get that not everyone is willing/able to make the move for various reasons, of course.

edit: applications -> applicants


Except that work visas are virtually impossible to get these days.


The US would probably get a flood of extremely high quality applicants if they only fixed a few basic social services.


It’s really just Google (and similar big cos), not a US/Europe divide


Only in Google probably...Other companies aren't that kind.

And remember the tech haven't had a downturn like in a decade. Hard to tell if this kind of slacking will endure one TBH.


well said


>I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what body language to use to make the desired impression, what to say and what not to say. My managers think I'm a high performer who also makes valuable social contributions to our team and this is reflected in pay rises.

i.e. the Gervais principle [0]

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...


Real question - is this possible to do as a woman? I often feel like the games of the office, especially the engineering office, are much more naturally suited (and familiar to) men.

I've known people who seem to coast to leadership positions (showing no aptitude, and often, even interest in them!), people who are automatically first pick whenever a promotion becomes available almost from the moment they walk in the door... and they've always been men.

Although I've never been on a team led by a woman, in practice it feels like when I'm on sub-teams with other women they function quite differently; the style is "cooperative dyadic relationships that are more emotion-focused and characterized by unstable hierarchies and strong egalitarian norms" is a pretty accurate description and empirically observed to quote[1].

It's also something I've observed directly - for instance, the women's communities I'm part of (be it WomEng, or outside of work) have a very large number of leads, who each lead a small aspect of things, e.g., there might be one person who is in charge of scheduling; another who sets the agenda, and a third who runs the meeting itself. Hierarchies come and go on an as needed basis, it just... operates very differently overall. A recent reorganization of communities requested that the communities all have 2 clear leads, and it was only WomEng that had a problem with that (one that almost dissolved the community as a result)

It often feels that my biggest secret to continued employment is that I'm very good at talking to HR, which has been, again in practice, entirely women. Women view me as a strong contributor and highly capable; men view me as "untrustworthy" and lazy. At my previous job, I basically had to have HR in my one on ones to "translate", for instance.

It's like two very different games; playing the men's one is unnatural and surprisingly difficult. My gut feeling is that this has more to do with personality differences that tend to exist between men and women, and not, say, sexism directly.

Anyway... have you seen women play this game well? If so, how? Where did they learn, and what?

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-...


Women definitely have it harder, as they have to work pretty hard just to be seen as contributing.

The golden rule is though, the tricks still work, and doing real work is usually one of the least efficient ways of making yourself seen as contributing. As they say, 'play to the rules they set out'. As a general rule, the metrics that people use within companies to determine performance are hopelessly bad, they will reward easy but visible work far more than hard and important but also not that visible work. As such, optimise your moves to peak the performance figures they're looking for, which almost always have very little to do with what actually needs to be done to keep the company performing well.

The women I have seen succeed have used the exact same tactics, perhaps with a bit of extra assertiveness and extra work put in to look the part as well, for example virtue signalling professionalism via clothing etc, which men don't usually have to do because of the awful patriarchy. Just my thoughts, anyway.


Not only does what's best for the company not matter, but what is stated in the rubrics doesn't matter so much either. Interestingly, how the rubric itself gets interpreted seems to vary; for the right people, it's a list of guidelines and the things you do well stand out; for others it's a checklist and the things you didn't do are emphasized. For some people (not me, though other WomEng complained about this) doing things that are part of the rubric at higher levels doesn't help you if your boss finds a gap at the current level; for others it gets you promoted fast. In the former situation people have shared experiences like "it's great that you really helped with the interviewing process, but why didn't you use that time to write more code?"

There was actually a huge debate about the interpretation on slack, and no conclusion was ever reached even on something simple like "Is this a checklist or not?"

In my experience doing what my boss tells me to do paradoxically leads to the worst outcomes; I've determined the best strategy is to ignore him entirely. For instance, he sort-of threatened me with a PIP, claiming a list of explicit things I hadn't done; I fired back with a list of all the times I'd either done the things, or asked him for the opportunity to do the thing (often repeatedly, with no action on his part, and documented that it was so). That fizzled out very fast.

I think the real origin of the confusion with him is that he's getting pressure from a level or two up; he is very concerned with how my work appears to his lead and his skip lead. The indirection layer is the problem. He came up with a list that was divorced from reality since he hadn't honestly been paying attention (otherwise he'd have mentioned it before), and boy did that blow up in his face (nobody won in that situation, but he definitely lost).

No joke; he retracted the huge list and said, basically, forget all that - don't play with your phone at your desk so much, and we'll be fine. Appearances are what matters.

Regardless, spending energy trying to figure out what he wants just leads to worse outcomes for both of us. Not that it matters; I've figured out the optimal strategy in my position is to simply hold off a PIP and then milk the internal transfer process to get to the position I want. My goal is to be an EM, which isn't technically a promotion at my level, and so it's a lateral move I can make that somehow has nothing to do with what my existing team thinks of me (as long as I'm not on a PIP, of course!)

Oh, and my other strategy, if I was to decide to remain an IC, is to manager shop. Especially after the huge discussion (with no resolution whatsoever!) on the subject of interpreting the rubrics, it feels like the trick is to simply find a manager (ideally a woman) whose interpretations line up with what you do naturally. My habit of investing in communities of women is always going to be of minimal help because they're all so low level (because tech is like that), but oops, it matters to me, so invest in it I shall - why not shop around for a manager who values community engagement? Most are primarily concerned with pleasing their skip lead which community engagement doesn't do, but there are some who value it.

BTW Virtue signaling via clothing is really difficult, because being attractive is good, but the more attractive you are the less competent you are seen as. Actually, this is generally true; being seen as feminine is being seen as attractive is being seen as less competent. There was a big NPR podcast on the subject of voice; how a lower voice is seen as less attractive but more competent, but it's easy to go too far and seem "bitchy" or undesirable. The flipside is true; a higher pitch is seen as attractive but ditzy. That's generally true across aspects of presentation, especially in male dominated fields.


I kinda stumbled onto a viable "build" for this game by being a socially awkward neckbeard, but female. No makeup, conference t-shirts with jeans and hikers, video games and 4chan for water cooler talk topics. I get automatically considered more competent than I actually am.


It helps if you work for the right company. Some are looking to bend over backwards to bring in and promote women engineers so they can showcase their newfound diversity. A higher up at my company was literally suggesting women hiring quotas (not sure how that's legal but whatever).


Thanks for the link. This is awesome.


Great read! Thanks.


This comment is pure gold.

I found Scott Adams' recent books and Daniel Kahneman's work profoundly influential in changing my "observed personality" (i.e. the psychology I project to the world), and making me an order of magnitude more effective in dealing with work issues/co-workers.

Please share a few books (or perhaps authors/youtubers) that you learned from. Thank you.


Can you elaborate on the observed personality thing? How do you do this?


E.g.: I'm a jeans & t-shirt kinda guy. However, I now dress a little more formally (business casual) because it leads to better outcomes. I've not gotten around to wearing suits even though that would be even better.

A little more strategic: I usually wear at least one item of clothing with my employer's logo visible on it. (Gives off a "corporate citizen" vibe.) A far cry from the recent past when I'd carry a laptop-bag with my ex-employer's (and a competitor of my current employer's) logo on it.


What if you're at an overly-corporate place being the jeans & t-shirt person?

Throughout modern history tech founders used this to great effect against suits.

My theory is that radically different dress from the norm (whether dressing up or down) can be advantageous provided you remain utterly confident and bring value to the table.


Being utterly confident means people will assume you bring a lot of value to the table, whether or not you do. The signals you give are usually the first and some of the strongest ones that people look at. Of course, if you're a total charlatan, you'll be exposed eventually; but you'll get much farther with excellent confidence in mediocre work than you will with wavering confidence in excellent work.

That said, I almost always stand out in my manner of dress, and it's bought me no particular advantages. It would surprise me if "the tall girl with the great outfits" was not a good enough description to get most people in my area to identify me. Still, being visually recognizable confers no immediate advantage, beyond that whenever I meet people they remember me and have seen me around before. (I just love fashion, so I do it for me more than anything else)


Taleb talks about this in Anti-fragile. Rock Stars can wear whatever they want and it doesn't hurt them in their career. In contrast a lawyer or accountant could seriously hurt their career showing up to work with an unusual outfit on.

In the Software world you can have it both ways. Showing up in sweatpants and a vulgar t-shirt may cause people to think you are so good that you don't have to care. But also to think that you will never be in management


> I've not gotten around to wearing suits even though that would be even better.

The danger with suits is that we're at a point in society where wearing a suit conveys an image of helplessness, not power.

Nowadays, people mostly wear suits when they're throwing themselves at another person's mercy. Wearing a suit means you're on your way to a court appearance or a job interview, not that you're some powerful executive. At every company I've ever worked for, the only times I've seen our executives wear suits has been when they were on their way to or from a meeting with investors or potential investors (and honestly, asking investors for money is basically another kind of job interview). Even at my current company, which is fairly conservative, every time I pass one of our C-levels in the hallway, they're almost never wearing a suit. I'm more likely to see the CEO in a sweater, really.

An article on the subject: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/9/30/20869237/suits-contr...


Lol... You had to read a book to realize that dressing nicely and repping your company might be a good idea?


I think this is actually pretty foreign in a world where jeans & tshirt is seen as the default.

If you look at how everyone dresses though, you’ll find a clear flow from grunts (tshirts) to managers (shirts & slacks) to leadership (full suit).

Everyone is conditioned to that, so just by dressing differently people now perceive you as something different.

Of course there are exceptions, but it’s generic enough that I think it applies everywhere to some extend.


lol, yeah. Partly because at my workplace jeans & t-shirts are common, and repping the employer is seen by some as "being a kiss-ass".


I'm sure that was literally the only thing mentioned in the book...


Anything more substantial than dressing up? That seems obvious to me and not something I'd need a book to tell me.


In general, being charming helps. Charm/charisma is just being fully engaged in a conversation with a person - no looking around the room scanning for someone you'd rather talk with, don't interrupt them and actually listen to what they're saying, and offer geniune compliments (infrequently).

Don't be an insecure people pleaser who needs lots of external validation. It's ironic, but a lot of people-pleaser behaviors come across as needy and annoying. If you're at a happy hour with coworkers struggling to get a word in, instead mentally take a step back and try to listen. I've found when I do this it makes my words more impactful when I do speak.

There's a youtube channel called "Charisma on Command" that has a lot of good advice, but I would take it with a grain of salt. Personally, I started with working through my low self-esteem before I found that channel, learning how to be more proactive, how to set boundaries and not be a pushover, etc, so the confidence is real and the social/charisma changes came naturally.


Not the parent poster, and this may or may not be what they were referring to, but FYI, there is an entire field of thought called "Impression Management" which may be of interest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_management


which scott adams books? loserthink?


Start with "How to fail...", then "Win Bigly", then "Loserthink". "How to fail..." is the most important IMHO.

Also, read up on this: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/


Second "How to fail.." and "Gervais"; didn't find "Win Bigly" or "Loserthink" very useful.


> Talk to a lawyer and try to start your own company.

And if you have success, grow and you need to hire, then be aware of employees who preach to "not put any effort into making riches richer and just do the minimum!"


If they contribute and the company grows, who cares if you're paying them for their 10% or 110%? But I'll read your comment as a half-joke so forget what I said :)


I already have a team working for me and I don't understand why these people should exchange more time than necessary to make me financially independent.


I second this as well. If you're really the type who's talented and motivated, then don't waste that talent and motivation on making someone else richer. Start your own thing. If you don't know how, then learn how. And if you're too afraid to do it, then spend your spare time on a hobby. Become a proficient pianist, learn to cook, run a marathon, anything other than making someone else richer.


What if you're poor and basically homeless without a salary?


Then you are definitely not contributing too much to making someone else wealthy!


>Work is just work and unless you're curing cancer, you shouldn't put any effort into making some billionaires richer.

The same thing applies at small software companies. I find there are a bunch of family members and friends in the managerial positions who barely even turn up to work, and have no clue about programming or the work involved in the products that are making them their money.

>Very few people in the world have this level of freedom.

If you were honest with yourself, this is probably just coping with making a decision or living a life you know is wrong. People seem to have made a sport of dreaming up what life is like for people in various "third world countries".

Anyway, my opinion for all programmers is treat everything like a war. If you are working at a small company, you should start duplicating their products at home in preparation of using your inside knowledge to launch a competitor. If you are working at a large company, you can do the same on a smaller project. You can also start thinking about how to invest the money you make in getting out of there from day 1.


> I see my mission at work in carefully educating the overly enthusiastic co-workers by dropping a few seemingly random hints or observations that make them think and challenge their beliefs.

Your mission is to make enthusiastic co-workers less enthusiastic? Why?


> unless you're curing cancer, you shouldn't put any effort into making some billionaires richer

As someone working on that particular problem, I really wonder how I would deal with someone like you in my team. Maybe a bit flips due to the problem and you actually do work? I wonder what I would see if I married your resume with this post.


> deal with someone like you in my team

Well - how are you measuring your team members' success? If they are successful, (and this is ignoring the domain they're working on), does it matter what their motivations are?

I wouldn't think you'd "deal" with them any differently, as long as they're hitting targets.


This concerns me greatly:

> I see my mission at work in carefully educating the overly enthusiastic co-workers by dropping a few seemingly random hints or observations that make them think and challenge their beliefs.

You see, a number of the folks on my team are what we internally call "vested". That is, they or an immediate family member have or have had cancer. They are fighting for their lives, quite literally. Someone walking around saying "you know, don't try too hard, it's probably not worth it" isn't a little annoying, it's the straw that could break the camel's back.


> Tiberian phylosophy

How to pass the Kobayashi Maru test!

> Wikipedia: The objective of the test is not for the cadet to outfight or outplan the opponent but rather to force the cadet into a no-win situation and simply observe how he or she reacts.


Oh, i assumed "Tiberian phylosophy" meant the teachings of Kane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_(Command_%26_Conquer)


I started to agree with you, but this took a different direction.

In general, it's smart, informed work that matters. Not grinding yourself down hard work. I feel Ive developed enough good intuition and judgment over the years that I'm capable of making well informed, strategic input to my organization that is infinitely more valuable than grinding away in PRs or tickets all day. I feel successful, it benefits my company far more than me just grinding away on "work", and I have balance and satisfaction from my work.


My dude, I hope you realize that you're only one crappy and traitless newly hired manager or technical leader away from being extremely miserable at your job.


With a bad manager being miserable at your job isn't really avoidable.


Curious why do you say that?


Because such an unimaginative character will see no value in your input and will ignore everything you have to say, perhaps even going as far as excluding you from the decision making process and withholding information from you, therefore undermining your position within the organization. Don’t think it can’t happen to you, because it can.


I totally agree with this. I had a dream job vanish after just 3 months after two bad people came in. If that happens, just quit FAST if you can.


> Work is just work and unless you're curing cancer

This sounds bad. But it is so true that people ignore it all the time. Big companies like Google asked their employees to do measurable contributions to the projects in order to be promoted in the performance review, while most projects don't have any measurable/non-measurable contribution to society. Some of the projects are even neither benefit to the society nor not profitable, they are completely pointless, and just wait to be abandoned years later.


Certainly that’s one way to look at life. In contrast, I try to always treat people with respect, work my hardest, be honest, and have love for family and friends.

Having a healthy amount of skepticism for your employer and job is a good thing. But operating as a sociopath that sees everyone else at work as someone to manipulate in order to enhance your slacking abilities just seems exhausting. I think being a truthful and good person is the better plan.


As someone who has glimpses into their own sociopathetic tendencies.. its less exhausting understanding that humans are really just slightly less dumb primates.

That said I'm very low on that totem pole, and am easily pulled back into human behaviors with e.g. a surprise bonus. I have worked with sociopaths who have fully embraced themselves and it's nothing short of amazing how they can bend time and space around them to make people insanely productive


Fuck that attitude. This is why I'm considering switching careers.


Can you elaborate on the pyschological tricks and how you pull it off? How do you come off as a high performer?


I'd refer you to the small book called the gervais principle.


"professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks"

You are my spiritual brother!

Same here...

I was really motivated in my 1st and 2nd job after leaving uni. Then the gravity kicks in, realized that noone wants me to work extra hard as that only makes other people look bad.


Just lean into that. Start automating peoples jobs or making their jobs irrelevant. The management will take note of the concerns of the others and put you in your own group. Now that you have established that you are 5x more productive than the other employees while only making 20% more, management will not care if you slack off and only work 5 hours a week.


>I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what body language to use to make the desired impression, what to say and what not to say. My managers think I'm a high performer who also makes valuable social contributions to our team and this is reflected in pay rises. I see my mission at work in carefully educating the overly enthusiastic co-workers by dropping a few seemingly random hints or observations that make them think and challenge their beliefs.

Tell use more.


... are you me?


Imagine the hellscape we'd live in if everyone followed this advice. Sociopathy doesn't scale very well.


This.


I think you underestimate your value to the company.

“All I do is copy code from the internal codebase and patch things together until they work” — this is exactly what established tech companies mostly need from their engineers. They want people with enough CS competence to not fuck things up while patching together new solutions from the institutional code soup that everyone knows how to navigate and review.

If you can do this reliably at 10% of your capacity and don’t have ambitions of applying creative solutions with unproven tech, you’re a real asset. Don’t leave rashly unless you’re genuinely bored or frustrated.


You didn’t read his whole post. They’re bored. Their value to google is high enough to keep them employed but the job is beneath their capabilities.

The failing for google is not providing this person a path to do more or at least understanding their ambition to do more.


Their value to google is high enough to keep them employed but the job is beneath their capabilities.

That's what we call "the perfect job." It pays the bills, but leaves you the maximum amount of (mental|emotional|psychological|spiritual|whatever) energy to work on the things that really interest you ... outside of work.

Of course different people will approach this differently, but I don't want my job to be interesting. I don't draw any sense of self-worth / self-satisfaction / joy-in-life / etc. from my job. My job is just a means to an end, where that end is to pay the rent, pay the electric bill, buy food etc. I have enough other ways to achieve those other things, and an "interesting" (and by extension, "demanding") job just gets in the way.


For me personally, being bored at work actually leaves me more tired at home afterwards. I'm working on something so boring at work now and I can't handle it. It's just going to kill me very slowly over the course of the next month.

Now for your second point, I completely agree--I don't want to feel like my job is my worth or joy in life, and it isn't. But at the same time, I wouldn't take a job at an assembly line even if it paid $1M a year.


That's why you work on your side projects at work. I plan and design and write in a text editor my personal stuff all the time. It's just a text editor so it doesn't look suspect.


make sure it stays on personal accounts and equipment to avoid ownership issues but ianal


Or better work on gpl code, then it's s win win I think.


Agreed. Boring jobs leave me unhappy and increase the odds I'll quit and move on.

In fact, I've changed jobs roughly every 2 to 3 years precisely due to boredom.

It sounds nice to be able to get by day-to-day in a full job but it's not a good fit for me personally.


> but leaves you the maximum amount of (mental|emotional|psychological|spiritual|whatever) energy

That's probably not the case. It looks counterintuitive but being bored and feeling unmotivated at work can leave you at the end of the day with much less energy than an very intensive but interesting work.

Your 2nd paragraph makes sense for a person like you, but I'd guess that the OP is one of those different people, for who self-satisfaction at work is a key thing.


That's probably not the case. It looks counterintuitive but being bored and feeling unmotivated at work can leave you at the end of the day with much less energy than an very intensive but interesting work.

I actually agree with you on that. With the caveat that this is true if you do (by choice, or by inclination) really want your job to provide self-fulfillment / self-actualization / blah / etc.

What I'm not sure about, is whether or not that is a personality trait which is basically fixed and can't be changed, or whether this is something where you can make a conscious choice to change. I think it's the latter, because my own subjective experience has been that I used to be more of the "if my job is boring that leaves me feeling dis-spirited" or whatever, but over time I found that I cared less and less about the "day job" and more and more about what I chose to focus on outside. But I'll freely concede that this just one anecdote, and that what makes sense for me may not work for others.


Thanks for this follow up. Really got me thinking.


Pro-tip: don't tell or show this sentiment to a potential employer if you ever look to switch jobs. This is probably the worst possible mindset for an employee to have from employer's perspective.


- Investment Bankers get paid handsomely to reformat power-point slides and pitch decks

- Management Consultants get paid handsomely to clean spreadsheets and make nice charts

- Software Engineers get paid handsomely to copypaste a couple of lines of code here and there.

Lots of these people sacrificed their youth to get into the right school and work.

But still a lot of them are stuck with menial task for years and years.

In the end, you don't get paid because you're so damn smart - you get paid for your time, and the assurance that you won't fk up things.

A lot of the interesting work sadly doesn't come before years down the road, after you've proven yourself, and made it through the promotions.


BILL Ooh, uh, yeah. I'm going to have to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there. Yeah. Uh, he's been real flaky lately and I'm not sure that he's the caliber person you want for upper management. He's been having some problems with his TPS reports.

BOB PORTER I'll handle this. We feel that the problem isn't with Peter.

BOB SLYDELL Um-um.

BOB PORTER It's that you haven't challenged him enough to get him really motivated.

BOB SLYDELL There it is.

BILL Yeah, I'm not sure about that now.

BOB PORTER All right, Bill. Let me ask you this. How much time each week would you say you deal with these TPS reports?


TIL - the bobs had a surname


99% of jobs are boring. You're just solving other people's business problems after all.


Yah, that's why you're paid well, because why else would you do it? If you want meaningful work get into research or work at a uni, but don't expect much money.


Precisely.


> The failing for google is not providing this person a path to do more or at least understanding their ambition to do more.

That's not a failure of Google. People need to be self-driven.

People who want to do more should talk to their manager about it, or pursue other opportunities within the company, or leave. Google and all the other big tech companies offer plenty of things to do for ambitious people if they express an interest.


Google and the OP are failing in different ways.

Google is failing to identify and extract more valuable labor from OP.

OP failing to manage their emotional engagement is a separate criticism.


> Google is failing to identify and extract more valuable labor from OP.

Google is doing a pretty good job extracting labor value in general. If they miss a specific individual who doesn't seem very motivated (to the extent of being a self-described slacker), I wouldn't view that as a failing. Ambitious people generally make themselves noticed, and trying to extract ambition from every slacker in the company is probably not very rewarding.


It's impossible for an organization on Google's scale to recognize everyone's potential perfectly, and match them with a perfectly challenging and rewarding position. At the end of the day, even Google has mundane jobs still need to be done.

The fault is on OP here, for not moving on earlier. FAANG is not the end all be all of software development. Consider joining a startup where you'll have a much larger influence over critical pieces of the software stack.


Regardless of what their understanding of Big O is, Google still needs a lot people to do CRUD work or make another mobile app, like any other company.

The issue seems to be hiring the highly educated and entitled to do boring but necessary work. GSUs can only motivate people so much.


I think it is just an optimal solution for large companies with disposable income.

A company I worked at hired smart engineer with a masters from Berkeley, and then tasked him with breaking down cardboard boxes and other mundane tasks. The fact that they were grossly overqualified for any of the tasks was a advantage because they were flexible, and reliably needed no oversight.

If money isn't an object, why not get the best tools possible.


Because those 'best tools' are easily bored and feel entitled to more?

Look at the political discourse spewing out of Googlers at the moment. It's bursting at the seams from internal ideological friction.


>They’re bored.

Welcome to working.


phone it in while starting other businesses. Work on developing enough passive/semipassive income streams to replace your full time job.

Follow your passions.


You don't realize how good you have it:

1. you work for a company that is an excellent resume booster outside of the valley. I'm from central texas and most everyone I know in tech has worked at Dell and once complained how boring it was to work at Dell. The moment they decided to move away from Austin their Dell experience made them very hot commodities to non-Austin tech companies. Every day you stay at Google the more valuable you become.

2.you presumably make enough money to not worry about your monthly Bills and probably have enough to save as well. At age 28 you are well ahead of the vast majority of 28 year olds from the last 100 years. Not saying you should be content but still...

As others have said you have a great opportunity to do some new things, both in terms of mental and financial capacity. Nevermind learning more tech stuff...get a hobby. Try different things to make you the kind of person you've always wanted to be. Most people are not able to do that because of stress at work or stress about money. You seem to have neither.


> Nevermind learning more tech stuff...get a hobby.

100% agree. A lot of young tech people seem to go directly from school to career level job without developing hobbies/interests outside of work. While that’s fine...you should at least see if activities outside of work/dating/breaking up appeal to you.

Buy a mountain bike, get into woodworking, learn about bird watching, or anything else that interests you. Maybe getting more enjoyment outside of work will make having a chill job an asset instead of a source of stress.


Every programmer / tech person I know desperately tries to define themselves by the hobbies they pursue outside of work, myself included. My tinder bio is just a bunch of interests.


Not sure anyone has put k8s on their tinder bio though


Absolutely someone has.


k8s and chill?


I think this highlights the fundamental problem with hiring at many large companies. They think they are getting the best, but are they? They sure are overpaying for their employees.

I think if OP isn't motivated enough to learn, excel, and build cool things on the side while he has a catered life at google, I don't think she/he will put in much effort elsewhere? That intrinsic motivation isn't there. And it honestly doesn't make sense to leave, take a pay cut, and hope that you will be given responsibilities to do new things that require learning. If you haven't been learning new things on the fly, you missed years of practice trying new things, and they won't give those responsibilities to you.


So much salt in here, geez.

I have issues with the leetcode hiring process. I think it is unfair to people with performance anxiety and that there is much more bias than people realize, in terms of the demographics of people making hiring decisions.

But I think this reverse circle jerk about FANG is so silly. Its super subjective, but having worked at a couple and having worked at a multitude of non-FANG organizations, it's hard to argue that people there are not pretty impressive. You could say this about any elite institution. Who is to say that Harvard is getting the best?

As far as the overpaying, FANG companies are not even the highest paying. And moreover, they pay a salary that is a function of a market and the value generated by employees. Are NBA players overpaid?

I'll probably get a little downvoted for being a bit defensive, but I really think the backlash is getting a bit out of hand. Yes, large tech companies are not the end all be all. Yes, you often wont work on the coolest thing. But compared to the work that 99.9% of people on the planet have to do every day, it's pretty spectacular.