Status is a zero-sum game, and there is no limit how expensive the zero-sum games can get.
But also, the relation between salary and “time actually worked” is counter-intuitive. Naively, the more you work, the more the employer should pay you. Because, why would anyone choose to pay more for less work, or why would anyone accept lower salary for more work?
If you introduce other variables besides salary and work time, it gets complicated. For example, people with more experience can be paid more, and maybe can also do their work sooner… if they can prevent the employers from giving them as much work as possible, which maybe they can, because their negotiation position is stronger. This could make the correlation between salary and work time smaller, maybe even negative. But at least it sounds fair—higher salary and less work is your reward for the time having spent learning and practicing your craft.
There are also completely unfair variables. Most obviously, the country you live in. People in poor countries work more and get paid less, duh. But a smaller version of this effect also exists between companies in the same country. The more stingy companies pay less and make sure that their employees work all the time.
There is a related skill, not sure what would be the best name, let’s call it “job market savvy”. It is the ability to recognize and exploit the fact that the relation between work and salary is not what people might naively expect, even after controlling for skill level (and country). Its minimum version is recognizing when you are in a bad place, and quitting. That alone already lets you can get Pareto-better combination of work and salary than some people without this skill have. A higher version of this skill (I can only guess, because I am not there yet) probably involves actively scanning the job market for imbalances, probably using a network of people who play the same game, and applying for the Pareto-optimal jobs (and quitting when they stop being such).
In other words, I have a strong suspicion that if you are a tech worker who works 40+ hours a week, there is very likely a job that would pay you the same, for less work (though you might still need to spend 40 hours a week in the office), that you could get with the technical skills you currently have.
This seems to go against the “Econ 101” logic, but in my experience, the most exhausting jobs I had were actually not the ones that paid best. Sometimes they actually paid below the market rate (but the people who worked there were often too exhausted to notice, or too exhausted to prepare for a job interview).
Status is a zero-sum game, and there is no limit how expensive the zero-sum games can get.
But also, the relation between salary and “time actually worked” is counter-intuitive. Naively, the more you work, the more the employer should pay you. Because, why would anyone choose to pay more for less work, or why would anyone accept lower salary for more work?
If you introduce other variables besides salary and work time, it gets complicated. For example, people with more experience can be paid more, and maybe can also do their work sooner… if they can prevent the employers from giving them as much work as possible, which maybe they can, because their negotiation position is stronger. This could make the correlation between salary and work time smaller, maybe even negative. But at least it sounds fair—higher salary and less work is your reward for the time having spent learning and practicing your craft.
There are also completely unfair variables. Most obviously, the country you live in. People in poor countries work more and get paid less, duh. But a smaller version of this effect also exists between companies in the same country. The more stingy companies pay less and make sure that their employees work all the time.
There is a related skill, not sure what would be the best name, let’s call it “job market savvy”. It is the ability to recognize and exploit the fact that the relation between work and salary is not what people might naively expect, even after controlling for skill level (and country). Its minimum version is recognizing when you are in a bad place, and quitting. That alone already lets you can get Pareto-better combination of work and salary than some people without this skill have. A higher version of this skill (I can only guess, because I am not there yet) probably involves actively scanning the job market for imbalances, probably using a network of people who play the same game, and applying for the Pareto-optimal jobs (and quitting when they stop being such).
In other words, I have a strong suspicion that if you are a tech worker who works 40+ hours a week, there is very likely a job that would pay you the same, for less work (though you might still need to spend 40 hours a week in the office), that you could get with the technical skills you currently have.
This seems to go against the “Econ 101” logic, but in my experience, the most exhausting jobs I had were actually not the ones that paid best. Sometimes they actually paid below the market rate (but the people who worked there were often too exhausted to notice, or too exhausted to prepare for a job interview).