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> Stay in your job for 15 years because you like the people, the work itself or some particular perk? When you finally leave, your next job will pay less than if you had hopped around each 2 years. That's if someone wants to hire you.

This is so true, and the weirdest thing in the world to me. Especially in tech, you get really heavily punished for staying at a job more than a few years. To the point where, in interviews, you are asked why you stayed so long. Why would you penalize someone who might make a long-term commitment to your company? You're basically flushing all the training and institutional knowledge they hold down the drain.

I've been at my current job 13 years (although I have advanced through multiple titles in that time). I may be slightly underpaid, though last time I looked a few years ago it was about average for the area. I've considered leaving occasionally, but I like the people I work with and the work most days is interesting and engaging.

Moreover, I'm content. Maybe I could get more money if I job-hopped or moved to a place like the Bay Area. But why? I'm comfortable now, all my needs are met, I have plenty of disposable income, and my family is happy. We never want for anything.

We have this weird aversion to people being content. There's a lot to be said for stability.

Maybe the ability to be content is not that common and people who just cannot do it are secretly envious of and angry at those who can? For example, I've never been content in any job (barring some honeymoon periods or particularly interesting short episodes). It's pretty much always a grind to get that paycheck at the end of the month. At this point, I don't think I could be content with any job. It's possible that I've chosen a wrong career and have broken myself over years of working in it - hard to tell.

> > Stay in your job for 15 years because you like the people, the work itself or some particular perk? When you finally leave, your next job will pay less than if you had hopped around each 2 years. That's if someone wants to hire you.

> This is so true, and the weirdest thing in the world to me. Especially in tech, you get really heavily punished for staying at a job more than a few years. To the point where, in interviews, you are asked why you stayed so long. Why would you penalize someone who might make a long-term commitment to your company? You're basically flushing all the training and institutional knowledge they hold down the drain.

In Germany, the mentality is different. If you switch jobs after few years, you have to give very good reasons - for exactly the outlined reasons.

> We have this weird aversion to people being content.

As an immigrant I feel this is quite an American thing - there's always talk of your _career_, your _pursuits_, your _goals_, interesting things you did over the weekend...

I’m American and I consider much of this attitude to be deranged and frankly a form of mental illness. Unfortunately pretty much everyone has it (including me at times) so I don’t talk about this opinion that much.

Seems to be more a problem of expectations than anything else, people are too focused on being successful than being happy, on having it all.

I would gleefully take a pay cut to have a 35h work week _if my wage still allows me to eat out once 3x a week_, but I will work 40h + commute and feel always exhausted until I get there. See how easy is to fall on that trap.

A lot of people take whatever jobs they can get, and their pay barely covers their housing/food/childcare/medical expenses.

The caricature you are offering only really works for overpaid tech workers.

Ah yeah, I'm definitely overpaid because I don't go home and choose to work instead of spending time with my friends or skip weekends out to work more contracts.

Yeah, that's right I'm over paid. Eat a bag of biscuits you assuming flesh bag.

I'm giving up parts of my life to make money, and you expect me to want less than what I'm making?

Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how provocative another comment is? We're trying for something better than internet default here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

why not make it a habit to talk to a stranger on the commuting train?

Because that can be a terrifying prospect for some.

In many parts of the US this is so out of the norm that people would be freaked out by you trying to talk to them (SF, NYC for sure but even in Chicago which is supposed to have that Midwestern friendliness... it'd be weird and often unwelcome)

This is not the case. Y’all just don’t know how to small talk.

I think I am sympathetic to your point-of-view, but I'm not sure, because it seems (to me) that you are maybe conflating a couple of different costs.

Let's start at the numerator - you appear to be calculating life "happiness" (according to some internal metric) vs ... cost. You appear to be calculating costs as being:

  - Not making more money because the degree did not lend it to making more money

  - Social approbation for not making more money 

  - Missed revenue (income) because time spent with family/childcare

  - Social approbation for not taking the higher-ranked (and labeled as such) gig

  - Missed economic opportunity (income) for work-social reasons or work-enjoyment reasons

Is that right? I'm not sure what social approbation (or that of your SO) means to you, but this seems (generally) to be a pretty clear trade-off of doing what you want vs. making more money by doing what society is willing to pay you for?

I mean - I'm a fan of doing what you like - but surely you don't expect society to pay you to watch Jerry Springer and smoke week all day at home munching down on pizza, right? How is this different?

Am I missing something?

The society does not pay you. The company does, and many bigger corporations have a ton of impossible b.s. projects that are essentially a waste if time for anyone who is not a boss counting the number of employees.

I just found something very indicative of the current times: in Ask A Manager (a blog about work where the owner answers questions from her readers) someone is afraid that not working during the evenings or the weekends is going to hurt their job prospects. The article has been published today.

https://www.askamanager.org/2019/07/can-you-advance-professi...

> However, lately the tension between those two is so high that any small decision towards living the life you want to live may very well end in financial misery for the rest of your life.

This is definitely an uncomfortable truth that isn't talked about very often, and the information age seems to exacerbate it.

>Choose a degree that appeals to you, where you will learn what you like, instead of one which acts as a stepping stone for a higher paying job?

>Become pregnant, and/or plan to work fewer hours for some time to take care of your kids or any older relative?

>Stay in your job for 15 years because you like the people, the work itself or some particular perk?

>However, lately the tension between those two is so high that any small decision towards living the life you want to live may very well end in financial misery for the rest of your life.

Are you expecting society to reward you for making ultimately selfish choices aimed at maximizing only your own personal happiness?

I'm expecting the penalty not to be so disproportionate as to persist 15+ years after the choice. Also, most of these "choices" are not so selfish.

In the case of the degree choices, I know plenty of people who have jobs with a much higher social utility than mine, yet make much less and suffer long periods of unemployment (I'm thinking about, for example, people whose job is to educate people from marginalized communities).

In the case of taking care of other people, I just can't fathom how would you find selfisness in stepping out of a job in order to take care of other people.

And about staying a lot of time in a job, it can definitely make you incredibly productive, and in all cases I know in tech it forces people to have a "big picture" idea of some problem domain which is damn useful when trying to move to a company working within the same domain; it's very different from hopping companies and having to learn a slightly different tech stack and/or company structure each time. Sadly, this doesn't translate at all into a better salary, because as an industry we seem to have collectively decided that staying too long in a job is anathema.

>I'm expecting the penalty not to be so disproportionate as to persist 15+ years after the choice

The penalty persists because the years spent pursuing goals other than those that confer useful skills and experience cannot be regained. Are you suggesting that we reward all people equally, regardless of whether they are able to demonstrate the same degree of utility?

>In the case of taking care of other people, I just can't fathom how would you find selfisness in stepping out of a job in order to take care of other people.

Selfish from the perspective that taking care of a sick loved one does not necessarily provide a benefit to society at large. More importantly, that time spent not working or learning is effectively a pause in ones growth as a professional - what is the alternative, making hiring and salary decisions by age rather than experience?

>I know plenty of people who have jobs with a much higher social utility than mine, yet make much less and suffer long periods of unemployment

This is a bit of a conflation. I am arguing over choices which do not benefit society, in which case it is reasonable that one's career value is lower. This particular problem is one of misplaced valuation in our society, as there are tangible benefits to the degrees your acquaintances pursued.

Selfish? All of those things make society better. Business is the party with selfish demands.

Yes, society should absolutely tell business that it isn't as important as it thinks.

>All of those things make society better

There is no intrinsic benefit to society at large in pursuing a degree - only those degrees which enable one to contribute in some form, and even then the benefit only occurs if one uses the knowledge obtained to conduct useful work.

>Yes, society should absolutely tell business that it isn't as important as it thinks.

Businesses have the goal of generating some sort of value. Yes, that means that employees must make certain sacrifices with their time and future plans - that's why they get paid. But this conflict between the goals of a business and the goals of an employee exist regardless of whether we organize into business-employee relationships or not, because fundamentally any significant, communal goal requires these same sacrifices to be achieved. We won't have any engineers or doctors or programmers if everyone majors in English Literature out of a fundamentally selfish desire to learn something with significantly less benefit to society.

The same goes for the other listed pursuits. I'm not saying that one should dedicate themselves to their work - but the detriment to one's career that comes with pursuing these, again, selfish goals (from the perspective of society) is generally just, because it isn't fair to force others to allocate their resources to activities which do not benefit them.

Businesses have the goal of generating money for their owners. That's what capitalism is. Capital puts up money to start a business expecting a return on that money. Businesses are formed when the expected (in the probability sense) return on the business is considered a good deal.

There are some theories that this magically coincides with creating value in an ideal model, but no period in history has actually worked that way. There are many proposed explanations for why it doesn't, but I'm not much interested in why. All I care about is that those models don't describe reality.

So businesses are all about generating income for their owners. But society is about all people in it, not just those who control the capital. It is necessarily true that there will be cases where the best thing for society is not the best thing for businesses.

Business has pushed the public narrative too far towards blind support of "business is a good thing." Your post even seems to just assume that as a given. You claim that a goal is "selfish (from the perspective of society)" when the only thing you can criticize about it is that it isn't maximizing business value.

Business isn't everything. Sure, a society needs a functioning economy in order to survive. But that's a far cry from assuming "good for business" is the same as "good for society".

The latter is certainly more nebulous, though, and I can understand why you might wish they were the same thing. It would allow you to optimize society with simple quantitative measures instead of complex qualitative discussions about which sets of opposing goals have the better overall outcome. But the real world doesn't cooperate with such things. There are always going to be conflicts over goals, priorities, and even values. Resist the temptation to believe in an easy answer. Reality isn't easy.

Taking care of old or sick relative is not selfish. Staying in the same job is not selfish. No more selfish then changing job because some perk.

Quitting a job to take care of a sick loved one does not benefit the people you worked with toward a common goal, nor society at large.

>No more selfish then changing job because some perk.

The point here is that GP was complaining that there were no career benefits to making such a decision - why should there be, exactly? Such a career move benefits oneself and ones family. No one else.

> why should there be, exactly? Such a career move benefits oneself and ones family. No one else.

Because it proves they are decent people I guess?

> The point here is that GP was complaining that there were no career benefits to making such a decision - why should there be, exactly? Such a career move benefits oneself and ones family. No one else.

Same as leaving the job and changing. Benefits no one but you.

When all possible actions are framed as selfish, that whole argument is nonsense.