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Comment by DVassallo | Hacker News Reader

I left Amazon 9 months ago, after working there for 8.5 years. My total comp was over $500K when I left, which made it both easy (allowed me to save money) and hard to leave (I left about $1M of granted RSUs+Salary for 2019-2020 on the table).

At one point, I realized that a career as a full-time employee in at a "high-stress" employer is not the ideal one for me. I'm working for myself right now, but if one day I needed to go get a full-time job again, I would almost certainly not go to big tech again. I'd rather get paid a fifth of what I was doing, but do something that leaves me with some energy after I put in a day's work. My compensation and status growth were not conducive to increased satisfaction. I wrote more about my reasoning here: https://medium.com/@dvassallo/only-intrinsic-motivation-last...

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I am at that "OK, what do I do now" point after having a couple of years off. I started applying for the same places I left, and then realised how stupid it was to do that. At some point I had to come to terms with what I really wanted, and it wasn't a high wage. So now I am looking for jobs (and working for myself) at places or in ways that I actually like, and don't care about the wage at all other than that it is enough to pay the basic bills I have.

I can't work at a place where I am employee #8973235879 in a row of programmers who never really see any benefit to what they are doing and have to mindlessly fill tickets. I mean I literally can't, as in the same thing will happen as before (I will go crazy and no longer function in general).

What is your retirement plan?

I am guessing the 500k compensation number is due to stock growth, not something that is given as part of a promotion. I know a few SD2s that make more than SD3s because they vested back in the day at $700 a share and due to how Amazon does total comp, the final number is over 300k a year currently.

I had a competing offer from Oracle in 2016 at $370K, and Amazon matched it to $390K for 2016 to 2018. An extra $70K and $120K in 2017 and 2018 came from stock growth. But for 2019 and 2020 they had topped me up to ~$460K, so I would have kept that level if I stayed, even with no stock growth.

I am assuming sd3 role?

Yes, started sde-1 in 2010 and had been sde-3 since 2014

370k in cash?

It was 180K cash and the rest in Oracle stock vesting every 3 months.

Interesting. I know people 3 year out of college at Oracle with base ~190k. Partly because Oracle doesn't do cash bonus.

Not all big tech companies are the same. My understanding is that Google is much less stressful with similar pay.

I’m sure they are differences, but I doubt any high-paying big tech job is going to be low-stress. I don’t mean necessarily working long hours, but you get the kind of work where you need to be figuring out ambiguous problems, always convincing other stakeholders, dealing with some level of drama, etc. Things that require expending a lot of energy.

It’s unlikely you’d be just converting Jira tasks to code at these levels. (That would be my definition of a low-stress job).

I wouldn't call that stressful, just interesting.

It depends on the person I guess. Sometimes you're stuck with a poorly defined project that you don't believe in and there's no one to really validate your work. Leads to a feeling of meaninglessness and purposelessness and that your time and energy could be offered in a much more meaningful way.

Can happen at companies of any size.

You need to make decisions in a high-uncertainty environment. If you care about your work... it's much more stressful to have actual decision power than to have none and just vent with your colleagues about how bad the top-level decisions are.

Sorry, that just sounds like the opposite of boring to me.

I wasn't debating the "interesting" part, I was debating the "I wouldn't call that stressful" one.

That’s great, and I just don’t see a stress dimension here.

-e- especially the necessarily stressful part of this role.

What would you call stressful?

Impact (on others, on myself permanently) correlates very well to stress for me.

High impact decisions cause more stress: getting a project defunded, letting go of people, critical mistakes in execution that cause the company reputation or finance damages, etc..

At the very far end are life and death decisions that impact others and the very low end day-to-day decisions that only impact you (what tasks to complete, what shoes to wear).

With the above framework, it's unlikely highly paid Googlers made low impact and thus low stress decisions.

Impact matters but I think stress comes into play when you feel like things are going more wrong than right. And I wouldn’t say that most high paying tech responsibilities are anywhere near life or death decisions. But are much closer to comfortably fun and compelling challenges.

Low impact can also be stressful for me (I might be unusual). First, there is guilt that you are being paid all this money to twiddle your thumbs. After you stop feeling guilty for the wealthy corporation, you realize that you aren't fulfilled if you aren't achieving anything meaningful, which causes you to go on a stressful hunt to scratch any real impact out of the available work.

Then after still achieving nothing, you get nice ratings on your performance reviews, and then you realize that barely anyone is actually having any real impact. There is an enormous organ you are attached to that absorbs money to write fluffy annual performance reviews.

Then you eat ice cream in the nap pod hoping that you can feel content with your extreme comfort, but the most meaningful change in your mental state is a mild brain freeze.

I know many ex-Googlers who consider working there to be low enough stress that they joke that they'll retire one day to go work at Google.

That's probably an exaggeration, and they may have just had particularly easy jobs, but everything I know about these two companies tells me that Google would be much less stressful to work at than Amazon.

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