Yeah sure i should chase making a boss happy instead “for stuff that matters”. No thanks. I’ll work my butt off instead for the right people and pay. It’s a win win situation.
Working your butt off is one option, working significantly less than full time is another.
However, if you only focus on pay you drastically diminish your search space. No SV company is actually pushing the bounds of AGI research for example.
thats why i keep telling people that software “engineering” or computer “science” are not worth pursuing. unless you use either as a launchpad. these types of jobs are just fancy bricklaying.
however there is nuance to everything. some people find 200k a year and living with flatmates in an expensive city rewarding. to each their own. i know i did. until it hit me.
Bricklaying? Google had a great WLB and l5s were clearing 500-700k TC and l6 was bumping up against a mil a year when I left more than 5 years ago. That’s early retirement and you don’t have to make a single sales call or ever manage people.
All work is fancy bricklaying if you're jaded enough.
Surgeon? Just spackling the same old organs day in day out, with the additional downside of potentially killing someone if you have an off day and place a brick upside down.
Professional football player? It's repetitive manual labor! Often performed outdoors in inclement weather. High likelihood of involuntary retirement due to workplace injury.
Executive? Staring at endless spreadsheets all day... With rows and rows of those brick-like rectangular cells...
All fun aside, I don't think many bricklayers could find it within themselves to complain about making 200k a year to work in jeans and a hoodie in an air-conditioned building with foosball tables and free snacks.
Salaries for MBAs likely follow a similar distribution as for programmers. A small fraction of elite workers enjoy outstanding compensation, while the vast majority sit somewhere on a long flat tail of mediocre incomes.
> Even if they're at the "elite grand master SRE" level. Still a fraction of some MBA.
Most MBAs didn’t graduate from Harvard or Wharton or equivalent schools. They’re people who believed that there were high returns to the valuable skills they were going to learn instead of realising it’s a finishing school where you network. Graduates of the University of Northeastern Illinois’s business school are not going to do much better than FAANG software engineers. This holds more, not less for the members of the professions. The super rich people with JDs aren’t practicing lawyers.
Not saying you have to join a non profit, just consider what you want to work on, who you want to work with, and the kind of hours you want to put in.
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