That instantly becomes political because not everyone agrees on what "nicer" is.

Hedonic adaptation is real. You compare yourself to your peer group, in which there’s always people living larger than you, stocks appreciated more than yours, bought their house earlier than you, higher earning spouse than yours (or any spouse at all if you’re single), generational wealth from China, etc. And homeownership in the Bay Area is such an insatiable black hole that this kind of money merely puts you in the running. You’ll never be, like, unable to repair a household appliance - which is better than many people! - but neither are you just waltzing through life milestones in the way people think when they see these figures. You’re mostly a pass-through vehicle from your company to local property owners.

Some companies are more top down and some companies are more entrepreneurial. Amazon is famous for assigning just the right amount of work to break you before your stock vests. Apple has rigid and precise opinions about what it wants built, with engineers discouraged from scratching their own itches. Facebook on the other hand is all about initiative, with engineers being almost like Wall Street traders: come up with ideas and implement them on your own, and in your performance review we’ll check the numbers to see whether you made us money or not. Like trading, you might have a good hypothesis that just didn’t pan out, or something else outside your control might have shifted, but that’s not going to save you. You have to be right. It’s stressful! But one thing that happens in places run this way is a pretty strong social norm against trying to stop anything before it happens. If someone wants to run an AB test, however stupid it seems, they get to run it, and you have to trust in the data (and data analysis) to reveal whether it was really a good idea or not.

It used to be an incredibly fulfilling place to work.

The worst part is when people pretend that things are difficult. You can't just suggest that someone not waste time on an obviously bad idea; you must acknowledge that the team's development strategy is a complex, multifaceted governance problem, and many quarters of sync meetings will be necessary to drive the appropriate alignment with all stakeholders and establish prioritization and scheduling on an action item to form a spot committee that will deliberate on the necessity of a course correction.

It's suffocating, it produces terrible products, but it pays really well.

At least, the kool-aid tasted great.

I guess they don’t value x1000 talent