Research suggests that once you have sufficient income to meet your basic needs, that travel time is one of the biggest factors in job satisfaction. I think we tend to focus on income because it’s much easier to evaluate the actual pay rate of a job—if you’re promised $100K, you can expect 100K. If you’re promised 40 hours and no overtime then you’ll often find that tested. If you’re promised low stress and high job satisfaction, well, good luck suing for breach of contract on that.
Being promised low stress/high satisfaction and having a rough idea of what kind of work or work environment is (more or less) enjoyable to you are quite different things. A given idea of which work is enjoyable won’t be 100% accurate; there are always going to be surprises from both inside the mind and out. But most people have a rough idea what kind of work they prefer to do. That’s where the low stress/high satisfaction predictions come from in this scenario.
Obviously one can only expect so much “enjoyment” in a work environment (and no “work” is fun and enjoyable 100% of the time), but if one type of work feels worthwhile to a given person, and the other doesn’t, even if this is on the basis of inference, then for some people this is going to be a significant factor in how good/bad they feel about passing up those $90k jobs for the PhD program that might now be in question.
Fair point. I’m fairly young, so most of my social group is still trying to figure out what sort of work environment they want, and how to actually identify it—a lot of entry level jobs outright lie about the work environment (“we value employee feedback, overtime only when necessary” → “we are going to be doing another 80 hour death march this week because of an arbitrary release deadline”).
Research suggests that once you have sufficient income to meet your basic needs, that travel time is one of the biggest factors in job satisfaction. I think we tend to focus on income because it’s much easier to evaluate the actual pay rate of a job—if you’re promised $100K, you can expect 100K. If you’re promised 40 hours and no overtime then you’ll often find that tested. If you’re promised low stress and high job satisfaction, well, good luck suing for breach of contract on that.
I read the first sentence of this comment three times, with increasing incredulity, before my brain finally parsed “travel time” in the correct order.
I think perhaps my expectations of LW discourse are being unduly skewed by all the HPMOR discussion.
Being promised low stress/high satisfaction and having a rough idea of what kind of work or work environment is (more or less) enjoyable to you are quite different things. A given idea of which work is enjoyable won’t be 100% accurate; there are always going to be surprises from both inside the mind and out. But most people have a rough idea what kind of work they prefer to do. That’s where the low stress/high satisfaction predictions come from in this scenario.
Obviously one can only expect so much “enjoyment” in a work environment (and no “work” is fun and enjoyable 100% of the time), but if one type of work feels worthwhile to a given person, and the other doesn’t, even if this is on the basis of inference, then for some people this is going to be a significant factor in how good/bad they feel about passing up those $90k jobs for the PhD program that might now be in question.
Fair point. I’m fairly young, so most of my social group is still trying to figure out what sort of work environment they want, and how to actually identify it—a lot of entry level jobs outright lie about the work environment (“we value employee feedback, overtime only when necessary” → “we are going to be doing another 80 hour death march this week because of an arbitrary release deadline”).