Poll: What matters most when considering a job?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562111

by LukeG • 17 years ago

26 45 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

rjprins• 17 years ago

It is really a flaw of me, but if it's not challenging I don't care about it and I am incapabable of doing a good job.

Luckily I am in a position wherein I can choose my jobs.

selcouth4• 17 years ago

I dont think thats a flaw at all. Dude, look at the people who take boring jobs that pay the bills and see their excitement level towards life itself 10 years later. :\

I dont want things that are ALWAYS challenging, or so hard as to leave me frustrated an unaccomplished at the end of the day. But I dont want an endless monotony of crap.

swombat3• 17 years ago

All those are important, and any honest person will say that most of those things matter to a large extent. Who wants to work with great technology, compensation and responsibility, but with a lousy team and environment?

What you really want to do is to get people to order them, rather than just vote on them.

LukeG5• 17 years ago

Right - hopefully the total vote volumes here end up as a decent proxy. We'll get more sophisticated with this later.

swombat3• 17 years ago

Why are you asking, btw, out of curiosity?

mattking• 17 years ago

Environment/Atmosphere and Team go hand in hand.

selcouth4• 17 years ago

Oops - sorry, totally missed this comment when I posted mine. But agreed. :)

Timothee2• 17 years ago

I would say that Atmosphere goes with Team but not necessarily Environment. I would see "environment" as the office, your equipment (computer, desk...), etc.

For example, Fog Creek's offices look awesome. But if you don't care much about Joel, the atmosphere might not work for you.

Looking at the rest of the options, that's what I think at least. If that's not the intent for "Environment/Atmosphere", something like that should be added then, because that can play a big role. A spacious office with views and Aeron chairs is always better than a small windowless room sitting on a pizza box, everything else being equal.

coglethorpe• 17 years ago

I'd add commute. It's a big reason I took my current job.

inerte2• 17 years ago

Money, but until a certain treshold. After X per month other factors kick in, specially whom am I working with and what. Boring work can be made awesome with the right people, the opposite ain't true. People will crush you even if you're doing what you love.

swombat3• 17 years ago

Boring work can be made awesome with the right people, the opposite ain't true

You mean the opposite is true.

DavidSJ• 17 years ago

He means even fascinating work can't make working with the wrong people awesome.

yan2• 17 years ago

"Money, but until a certain threshold."

You're referring to backward-bending supply curve of labor[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_o...

Celcius2• 17 years ago

There was a guest lecturer at my university who gave a talk on distributed development who claimed there's been studies that have shown developers don't tend to get happier the more they are payed as long as they aren't payed too little. Instead they seem to value things like training or just staying challenged as opposed to money.

I'm sorry I don't know exactly what studies he was referring too, but I'm highly inclined to believe what he was saying and it would agree with what you are saying.

selcouth4• 17 years ago

I'd put team as part of environment/atmosphere (or vice versa) - I know they arent perfectly matched, but dont the people you work with directly impact the atmosphere?

LukeG5• 17 years ago

I'm with you and Matt King (for the most part), but there can be distinctions - physical environment, team skill, etc. The two are communicated differently, too.

selcouth4• 17 years ago

(nods) Oh definitely true. I spent a summer with one of the BEST team's I have ever worked with (this I measured by their experience, the roughly equal ratio of seriousness to laidbackness and quiet time to social time, and the welcoming nature of the people there). And we worked in a small, windowless office with cement walls. Yuk.

But in that situation, team definitely won out. Sure, the environment itself sucked, but you hardly noticed because of the group atmosphere.

auston• 17 years ago

Results from my not so successful attempt: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128258

LukeG5• 17 years ago

nice. hopefully we can get some significant volume with this one.

yan2• 17 years ago

From original thread: Team, Geographical location, Environment, Freedom to experiment, Impact, Size, Equity, Technology. Most important I think is personal belief in the product or result. Especially if working on a startup. For example, If I love all of the above, but we're building a silly twitter app, a new todo management app, or a POSN (plain old social network), no amount of cool people will make me like my job.

LukeG5• 17 years ago

cool. thanks for porting it over, too.

Femur2• 17 years ago

One option not listed is 401k match. Next to base compensation, that is the metric I am most interested in.

CUViper• 17 years ago

It's better to consider total compensation. A $100k salary with up to 5% 401k matching is roughly the same as a $105k salary with no 401k matching.

The latter might be preferred since it gives you the choice of what to do with that extra $5k, but it gets tricky if you're nearing the contribution limits.

Femur2• 17 years ago

I completely agree that total compensation is paramount. That is why i said "Next to base compensation..."

I take both into consideration.

anamax• 17 years ago

> A $100k salary with up to 5% 401k matching is roughly the same as a $105k salary with no 401k matching.

Not at all. The 5% match goes into the 401(k). The 5% extra salary doesn't.

Note that 401(k) match also isn't subject to SS or medicare.

jcapote• 17 years ago

Surprised that technology & tools didn't poll higher, I guess I'm just a brat

staunch• 17 years ago

Stability probably should be on the list. Not very important to me personally, but I know it's a huge consideration for a lot of the people I've worked with and interviewed over the years. The largest employers in the world (governments) have that as their main benefit.

petercooper• 17 years ago

I think the environment/atmosphere is key. If you're getting hassled all day, horrible coworkers, management issues, etc, it takes a really resilient personality to deal with that just for the money.

As such, it surprises me that compensation and challenging work go above it. Even if I were being paid $200,000 a year to do cool work, if I had to deal with mega social and management issues, if I had to stay there I'd be deeply unhappy.

(Of course, the flip side is if the perfect environment offered a salary of, say, $10000 a year, that might be just as useless.. which makes polls like these a bit pointless really).

Timothee2• 17 years ago

which makes polls like these a bit pointless really

I think you need to look at it relatively. Given an average job, would you rather get an extra $10,000 a year or have a corner office? Would you rather have two of your friends in the team or work on Ruby-on-Rails rather than Java? (in your case, I believe it would be odd for you to accept a Java job in the first place...) Then again, you can argue that it depends on how much more money we're talking about.

But I don't think it makes the poll pointless. It still gives you an idea (vague, granted) of the community. (even though I'm surprised that compensation comes first so far)

runningskull• 17 years ago

Location is a huge one for me. I'm an outdoor fanatic, so living near good places for outdoor adventuring is a must.

mrtron• 17 years ago

Being in Canada, everything but health care/benefits.

Celcius2• 17 years ago

Yeah it raised an eyebrow for me, it's an interesting cultural phenomenon. As a Sweed I've never had to think about healthcare, it's just there and I take it for granted. Maybe I should start appreciating it more. :)

codeodor• 17 years ago

Not being a nine-year-old girl forging lead hand tools in a communist sweatshop tops my list.

After that, challenging work is the idyllic and romantic answer. But damn, that compensation sure is alluring.

whacked_new• 17 years ago

First to suggest that this is a horrible poll? Why: how would you answer this?

Accept = A x compensation + B x environment + C... + H x responsibility... + ... Z unknown factors + $alpha$ Hidden factor 1 + $beta$ Hidden factor 2

Step 1: Ignore all factors beyond H. Fair enough, given how you're framing the question with respect to only these variables.

Step 2: Compare several jobs and then what, minimize the errors, and find the largest coefficient, ignoring any and all covariates!?

banned_man• 17 years ago

What I'm going to learn from it. How I feel about the people. Ability to use functional languages.

Pay matters only as a signal.

mpk• 17 years ago

Waking up every morning and looking forward to the challenges instead of wishing you didn't have to go to work.

Oh, and lots of money. That'll take the edge off of horrible work any day of the week.

miracle• 17 years ago

The most important thing is the team you are working with. Always try to get into a team where you are the most stupid team member.

frossie• 17 years ago

You take a job for the compensation, the benefit and the technology.

You stay in that job for the team, the environment (not sure how those two are different) and the product (it's your baby by now).

You should leave when the work is no longer challenging.

zackola• 17 years ago

who is going to be your boss/how many will you have.

sebastian• 17 years ago

Personal Time (BIG time) & environment/atmosphere

jaspertheghost• 17 years ago

Read this:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-gu-1.html

"Once you have picked an industry, get right to the center of it as fast as you possibly can."

"Every job, every role, every company you go to is an opportunity to learn how a business works and how an industry works."

When you're young, you should always trade income risk and get to the center of the action ASAP and decide which "businesses" you want to learn. For example, if you want to start a enterprise software company, you would work at SAP.

This is only for you're very ambitious. If you're not, focus on the compensation, challenging work, environment, etc that everyone talks about. The fact is if you're doing a startup, you learn about the business from being in a company in the space. (SAP spun out of IBM, Salesforce/PeopleSoft/Siebel from Oracle, YouTube/Slide/Geni/Yelp/Linkedin from Paypal (all consumer internet), etc).

Poll: What matters most when considering a job?

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