alt Hacker NewsAgreed in general, ties in with something I've been mulling over.
I'd honestly like to be able to put more effort into my job, but as a salaried engineer extra effort doesn't pay off on its own. I have to spend more effort making sure it's seen come bonus/raise time, since my outcome is largely dependent on what my boss thinks of me, not what I've actually produced.
Founders get a much more direct line to work and outcome -- but I guess they trade stability, and maybe even the perception game just shifts to investors.
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Yeah - the only time it's worth it is if you're also learning. I volunteer extra time when a project really teaches me something new (or there's some fire and we need all hands, but that's rare).
This year I had the chance to learn IaC and generally using AWS through a project, but I had to donate a bunch of my time learning. Now that's 2 things I can claim I have worked with in production. But fixing bugs and general dev work, no thanks.
I've done a few types of jobs myself and unfortunately not really found offer frameworks that look like "capped downside and uncapped(ish) upside" based on performance.
Ideally what many senior engineers are probably looking for is - I can live on 50-75% of my TC a few years without setting myself too far back, and I'd work really hard on an interesting project that has a >25% chance of rewarding me 2-4xTC. It is not too expensive to roll that dice, and I have a reasonable chance of hitting in one career.
Instead we get a lot of lottery ticket profile things that are like "1% chance of 1000xTC". The EV looks good, but you don't get enough rolls of the dice for that 1% to pay off in a single lifetime let along career.