I can't help but feel I know a lot of people this article refers to.
I've worked at some great companies with some great people and I certainly will again in the future. But my experience also contains burnout amounts of internal politics, radioactive code, Kylo Rens, "I'm just the ideas guy", et cetera. People love to glamorize it with foozeball tables and free pop machines, but in the end it's pretty stressful work for a lot of people and comes with few guarantees of employment stability or sanity. I'm not even going to get into what's happening at Blizzard right now, why would I want to work there? Do I want to listen to my friends yell at me because I work for the social network turning their grandparents into anti-science zealots? Do I want to be forced to live in a city I don't want to live in? These aren't salary problems for me.
A perfectly reasonable person may take their chances on a different profession, or downsizing their life, moving to a less expensive place and requiring less income, working on a small startup with their friend. Or living in a van and hiking a lot, which is a lot cheaper and probably also a lot more gratifying than an expensive apartment in a suburb of Expensive Tech Town. Perhaps the chaos, uncertainty, and mortality of the last year has simply made people re-consider their lives and professions. It's what a large percentage of my tech heroes ended up doing (I miss you all, but I understand).
From my experience, I would recommend these companies focus on creating environments that work for and reward sane people on a long term basis, rather than just try to coat over their problems with money. It's a far more better strategy for the people one would actually want to hire than trying to dump raw salary on people for six months until they're too broken to show up to work, then hiring new people that don't understand the code to clean up the mess. When I do startups, being a place people want to work is the only choice we can provide because we just can't out-compete most groups on salary anyways.
It isn't helpful to engage in one-upmanship when it comes to people's individual trauma. It's alright for people to share their suffering and receive compassion without having experienced the absolute worst possible torture.
"People often tried to kill me." vs. "I worked at a job that paid a wage of 98% above the global mean but had a lot of stress." There's a difference I think, and if it's a matter of one-upsmanship, then we all have PTSD (btw, I don't).
Also he edited his post later so I'm guessing you didn't see the original context.
I'm guessing the GP meant something closer to burnout and was being a little hyperbolic.
Although I think there's something to be said for very long term (years to decades) of high stress possibly qualifying for something similar to PTSD, but of course I'm not an expert on this.
I was not literally diagnosed with PTSD and I apologize. It is not my intention to belittle actual PTSD like you have experienced. A better description is probably "burned out" and I'll change it now.
I've worked at some great companies with some great people and I certainly will again in the future. But my experience also contains burnout amounts of internal politics, radioactive code, Kylo Rens, "I'm just the ideas guy", et cetera. People love to glamorize it with foozeball tables and free pop machines, but in the end it's pretty stressful work for a lot of people and comes with few guarantees of employment stability or sanity. I'm not even going to get into what's happening at Blizzard right now, why would I want to work there? Do I want to listen to my friends yell at me because I work for the social network turning their grandparents into anti-science zealots? Do I want to be forced to live in a city I don't want to live in? These aren't salary problems for me.
A perfectly reasonable person may take their chances on a different profession, or downsizing their life, moving to a less expensive place and requiring less income, working on a small startup with their friend. Or living in a van and hiking a lot, which is a lot cheaper and probably also a lot more gratifying than an expensive apartment in a suburb of Expensive Tech Town. Perhaps the chaos, uncertainty, and mortality of the last year has simply made people re-consider their lives and professions. It's what a large percentage of my tech heroes ended up doing (I miss you all, but I understand).
From my experience, I would recommend these companies focus on creating environments that work for and reward sane people on a long term basis, rather than just try to coat over their problems with money. It's a far more better strategy for the people one would actually want to hire than trying to dump raw salary on people for six months until they're too broken to show up to work, then hiring new people that don't understand the code to clean up the mess. When I do startups, being a place people want to work is the only choice we can provide because we just can't out-compete most groups on salary anyways.