> After that I went freelance. And 15 years later I can say it was the best decision ever.
Every time I've left a job, I've been uncertain and conflicted. Every. Time. Then, a week or two into the new job... Every. Time. ...I thought, "Wow! I should have done this sooner!"
I’ve worked for a startup who was giving 866 stock options per month. Had I known they are valued $125 today, I would have:
- Shut up a few more times because I’d trust more the managers, and just followed the stream,
- Accepted to be patient about being a developer on a boring project, because what stressed me was “I don’t know enough to reach the career level that can allow me to ever buy a house.”
- Made 4 millions instead of 1.
I regret leaving and aggressively seeking for a better career, but at the time, things snowballed negatively because I wasn’t getting enough emotional attention. Of course it was a rational choice on both sides, but it was a mistake overall.
On my leaving card, all my colleagues wrote variations of “To the most motivated guy every” – proof that I was putting in decent work, albeit not working cleverly enough.
You really shouldn’t feel bad, because what happened has a low probability.
It’s like saying I should’ve invested in X which got quadrupled in price last year.
Most stocks (even very promising ones) didn’t achieve anywhere near that growth.
So you choosing the right one among the many to “shut up and stick to it just a little bit longer” has a low chance of exceptional returns on your investment.
You cannot see the future, even the most sophisticated analysis can be wrong, and even the best companies can stagnate for a loong time before getting lucky.
Exactly. This is like being dealt a horrible set of cards in poker and kicking yourself for folding. Let's say you got 2,7 and then found out the cards on the table turned out to be the rest of the 2s. Folding was still the right move
I wonder how widely the concept of expected value is discussed outside of poker or statistics. Simple concept, but it can really help with all kinds of decisions in life.
The problem is that people make lots of claims towards the direction of "stock options are always worthless" when they should say more like "stock options are often worthless but sometimes can be ridiculously valuable". Startup game just provides high returns to small minority, and some people after couple of negative experience seem to decide that everything must suck then and spread it around in here and other forums.
The mindset you should have (I know it's easy for me to say) is that you made the best decision with the data available at the time.
For every success story, there are many more failures, where after years of hard work, the company still doesn't succeed, where the managers that look like idiots are really idiots, and the stock options end up being totally worthless.
Regrets are pointless. Had I known what I know now I'd have put my (unused) beer budget into crypto this time last year and be looking at retirement now.
Ignore the money, divorce your happiness from money, and do what makes you feel happy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself. Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's.
Counterpoint: they sell ~8 hours of their day. Selling that to the highest bidder ignores that there's different environments that might be better or worse for everyone's general sense of fulfilment. IMO, chasing highest pay only is a recipe for an unhappy life that only pays off on the short term.
No one should sell themselves short, but choosing, say, a 100% worse environment or a dead-end technology stack for a 5% higher pay (or whatever) is not wise.
Why? My job is extremely easy with a great team and manager. I could get more, but I'd have to work in a high stress environment, and life is too short for that shit.
I think the grandparent was implying all other things being equal. If the highest bidder requires that you work in significally different and more difficult conditions, then it's not really comparable.
The problem is evaluating the size of the bid. Salary is only one part of the equation and people rarely get wealthy on salary alone. There are multitude factors when evaluating the "bid" of the company and to actually understand what is valuable and what is not is the difficult part.
Every time I've left a job, I've been uncertain and conflicted. Every. Time. Then, a week or two into the new job... Every. Time. ...I thought, "Wow! I should have done this sooner!"