Ask HN: What is your low stress, high paid job?

I own a farm in India. Indian people are moved by plight of poor farmers, which helps government subsidizes most of the inputs we require in farming. As most farms in India have pretty weak technology and automation, we are able to leverage subsidized inputs along with modern technology and produce yeilds as high as 20x the average yield.<p>Labor is cheap in India and it&#x27;s easily found specially when we pay more for slightly more safer and comfortable work.<p>Supporting farmers is a sentimental thing for people in India so we are able to produce very large profits to the tune of several millions yearly in profit.<p>Previously I was a software engineer for a western company based in India it was very stressful job as you need to be available for Oncall troubleshooting anytime.

Software engineer for a large bank. Pays well enough, though not at Silicon Valley levels, but I have a house in a nice neighborhood and a Tesla and lots of retirement savings. We get 4 weeks of vacation, health insurance, 4 months parental leave, and other benefits. I don&#x27;t work much overtime and don&#x27;t feel stressed about deadlines. It seems like the team leads and directors above me might feel some pressure, but I&#x27;m not really looking to take on management duties myself since I already am happy where I&#x27;m at.

&gt; I haven&#x27;t had a &#x27;relaxing&#x27; holiday without worries in over 12 months and so I&#x27;m considering a change.<p>(I work in operations&#x2F;devops engineering and not into sofware engineering so my point of view is a bit different, the underlying reasoning is applicable anyway, imho)<p>I made a point to grill the interviewers during the interview on such topics. HR bullshit like &quot;we care for work-life balance&quot; means nothing, I grill the technical interviewer when it comes to the usual &quot;do you have any question for us?&quot;<p>How do you manage on-call availability? How many people are on-call and how many at any given moment? Can on-call people escalate things further? To whom? Are developers on-call too? Do do you architect for HA? How? In your current architecture, what could be a single point of failure?<p>This kind of questions.<p>Any negative reply is a red flag. If I start seeing more than two-three red flags (or even one on an important question) then I&#x27;ll pass.<p>My reasoning when I last changed job was that my job at the time was awful but I had a permanent contract, it would not have made sense to jump into another awful job and win the additional stress and risk derived from the probation time.

I’m a technical product manager for Indeed in Seattle. Previously I’ve worked as an engineer at Microsoft (both a- and fte, L59-61), an engineer (L5) at Amazon, a TPM (L5-L6) at Amazon, and an EPM (ICT4) at Apple.<p>Indeed is the best workplace I’ve ever had. The culture is seriously about helping - both each other and jobseekers. PTO is unlimited and strongly encouraged. When the office is open, we have the same free food as Google and Facebook (these used to be worse but improved dramatically a few months before Covid). People take the time to eat with each other, build relationships, make friends.<p>We discuss ways to ensure those with the least power are heard, and I think we listen to them - I’ve seen changes in the language we use to create inclusivity, and I’ve got two engineers on my team from the Ada bootcamp who I think are happy, and both getting promoted and recognized. I have leeway to trade revenue for, say, changes to our product that reduce unconscious bias in hiring. I also have leeway to target positive outcomes for people looking for work over revenue.<p>I am sure that like any company the mileage may vary. I make less than I did at Amazon or Apple, but I’m happy; I’d make the trade again in a second. If I think about work on a weekend it’s because I’ve got an exciting idea or solution I should write down, not because I’m anxious about next week.<p>I’d recommend Indeed to anyone.

Software Engineer&#x2F;Solutions Architect at a fairly large company from SF. They opened up a European office, and now I am getting well above average income for a German based engineer, plus 30 day vacation etc. So sort-of SF pay (not quite) plus German social security and all the best of vacation days.<p>I worked in StartUps for 10 years and used to high output everyday. Now everyone seems stressed at this company but we have mostly corporations s clients and I am fairly good at my job.<p>During December, I probably played more games on Stadia than putting hours into work, but I still got 2-3 shoutouts from clients how pleased they were with my job.<p>I get nice stock options and it‘s the first time in my life I just want to sit out the next few years, do a decent job and wait for my stocks to be granted. This and Bitcoin will set me mostly free in a couple of years so I can say goodbye to fulltime work.<p>It‘s almost sad to see the mentality from my US colleagues who consntantly cheer and push themselves over nonsense in Slack, but their quality of life depends so much on their employer.<p>So yeah, being in Europe and finding a US company to work for, 90% remote is probably the dream, because you merge the upsides from the social system without the downside of boring company culture, and you get the pay from the US without all the downside of overworking yourself.<p>I am 32 and just realized how stressful Sodtware Engineering is in StartUps. I didn‘t realize how much I learned and did before I took a break. Now I want to do a decent job, be a bit loud or annoying in internal meetings so people think I really care, finish my jon in 3 hours and read or learn something on the side the rest of the 5 hours I have to clock in.<p>I mostly used it last year to get into Crypto and now DeFi, and made 3-times the money I did with my full time job.<p>This also broke me mentally, because it‘s hard to engage in „real life“ work after that experience.

I&#x27;m a build&#x2F;release engineer for a large manufacturing company.<p>It doesn&#x27;t pay as well as working for FAANG, and I&#x27;m not going to get stock options that will make me rich. I live in a medium cost of living area. I make enough so that I can own a house, 2 cars (both paid off), and have a nice retirement account.<p>For the most part it is pretty low key. If the build breaks close to a deadline, there is some pressure to get it fixed, but that doesn&#x27;t happen often. Most of the time it is just working on my projects that have realistic deadlines.<p>Every once in a while I get a little bored, but then I remember those past jobs where everyone&#x27;s hair is on fire. The thing I like is that I get to work at my own pace, and spend most of the day writing scripts. I enjoy writing scripts more than I do application programming. I consider my scripts to be my minions that I send off to do my bidding.

A former colleague made ~$200k a year basically doing storage zoning for SANs at a big NYC bank.<p>He basically had about 2-3 hours of work a day, mostly early morning, and studied, ended up with a masters degree and a nice resume filler — he had a nice title with a big name during the process.<p>He really had strong storage chops, they just didn’t use his talents. There are a lot of operations jobs like that in finance and government.

SWE for a top tier investment bank. Pays good. Attend meeting all days, no harsh deadline, work from home, boss doesn&#x27;t do micro management, got plenty of free time so I end up running 10km everyday during lunch hour.

For me, it was Google. You can make an obscene salary by any reasonable standard and not put in that much effort or stress, especially if you&#x27;re smart.<p>I&#x27;m not in a phase of my life where that&#x27;s what I want, so I&#x27;m currently at an intense research-focused co, but I half-joke about going back to Google to retire in a few years (esp once I have a family).

Senior Software Engineer and Team Lead for a Analytics Contractor. Pretty highly paid.<p>I put together teams around projects, mentor juniors, and build cross project teams to fix architectural problems. My favorite part is actually teaching juniors and watching them grow. I live for that!<p>My advice is to find a niche that you love and stay away from industries that stress you out. There are a ton of different sub industries in SWE.<p>I would definitely stay clear of startups if you don’t handle stress well: startups and failing companies are the worst and for the same reason – they are both in a financial free fall trying to gain a new lease on life.

I think stress is much more about how you perceive it than anything else ? I’ve seen people sweating over deadlines on product deliveries ... nobody cares if you miss it, no lives are lost .. but some people go absolutely insane. 99.9% of the jobs aren’t critical for society to function and if you miss a deadline, no one will die.

Imo if you are a stressed out swe, you should be working on software to automate&#x2F;simplify stressful thing. And if people get in the way of that, then change employers.<p>Software is not supposed to be super stressful — the machines should do the heavy lifting<p>I’m sure there are a zillion exceptions to this that ppl will point out

Work for Google. Work on the same feature for a year. Deadlines are fungible and no one cares if you aren&#x27;t killing it

CTO at a non-tech company (~75 people) that&#x27;s trying to become more technical. On my own for a year, just made my first hire. I choose what I do and set my own deadlines, no-one else in the company has any idea about the stuff I work on (besides for seeing the results.)

I&#x27;ve managed to have low stress roles as a SWE and be highly compensated, so I don&#x27;t think you need to switch industries, however it is very company specific, and at least in my experience and perspective, requires settling for a little bit lower on the ladder

If you live in a small town your cost of living is much lower. If you don’t spend money, you don’t need to make as much. I’m a consultant that integrates hardware and software that started with mobile and BLE IIOT and now perform maintenance on about a dozen mobile apps. A new push has been on node IIOT apps that run in docker containers. This has been challenging and a ton of fun. I also develop an independent app that designs and prints labels - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;label.live" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;label.live</a> which is a React app via Electron.

Can relate. I am in cyber security and typically everything is on fire almost all the time. Haven’t had a proper vacation in aeons. A job in internal compliance is considered low stress in our field since it is mostly focused on creating risk plans and ensuring things are enforced by Ops, you are typically the driving force behind it. The pay is nicer as well.<p>edit : added more details

I used to be a happy developer, working on my tickets and that was it. until I was asked to act as a tech lead and a sort of PO (I still dont know what i am) Now, I need to plan what needs to be done, manage the tickets for the team, be the scrum master and all that. My life is much more stressful and I still make the same $ amount. But funnily, I like it

Im a software dev at a big non profit, pretty chill, learning a lot, low stress, mix of old and new tech, freedom to ask for more or less work&#x2F;what type of projects i want to work on, deployments are biweekly at normal times (not like at a bank i was at previously where they were like 10pm-3am because of India time zone lol)<p>i realistically have about 2-3 years relevant experience, making around 100k. im aware if i study&#x2F;prepare i could prob get an offer from a FAANG for &gt;150k which i prob will do in a few months tho for the prestige&#x2F;brand.<p>my manager has a lot more on his plate, but said in the last three years theres only been one day when hes had to work after 5pm due to a software emergency, so staying at current company is pretty appealing, but id like a pay raise when i hit my year mark so that will effect things.<p>Oue team of 5 devs is usually working 930-6 on a daily basis though, i usually work 9-5 tho.

Visual Effects Artist.<p>I make pixels for movies and TV. It&#x27;s awesome. Basically tweaking geometry and physics and colour to makes stuff look like the client wants it to look like.<p>I love the familiarity with the tools in my speciality. Been doing it for 20 years. Graduated from University with a bachelors in it.<p>There is stress available for the hungry. I&#x27;ve happily weaseled my way into a tiny boutique (30 people) studio with experienced and lovely owners that prioritize the crew (80% senior artists). Basically no OT, 100K$+ year, excellent health coverage (not in the USA), healthy relaxed and skilful coworkers. Dunno what could be better. And no, I have no entrepreneurial drive, happy to work for someone else.

On the opposite end of the spectrum here.<p>Make $30k a year living in NYC teaching software engineering and data science (mostly python) for a non profit.<p>It&#x27;s less than minimum wage if hours are counted, lot of stress dealing with students and their issues (especially during a pandemic) and I&#x27;m also on the hook for the curriculum which means my weekends are filled trying to figure out how to write lessons about math that people with no educational background can understand.<p>I barely sleep and after bills I have zero money. But it beats being unemployed during a pandemic especially since I work remotely. Before this, I spent months sending resumes and got zero interviews.

I get to write code, coach customers, help drive products and influence how big companies use Kubernetes as a solutions architect. Love my job, and I’m paid really well for it. It’s not low stress all of the time but it’s chill compared to the ops jobs I had back in the day.

It may be more dependent on your company than your actual job role. I&#x27;ve been software engineer for a decade and a half and have had stressful jobs&#x2F;teams and have been a cofounder which was also stressful in a different way than being an engineer on a team. Right now I&#x27;m an engineer in what you might call a typical SV (growing) startup, in an industry I like, and although the work days are busy, I never work overtime and don&#x27;t have any stress.

&gt; I want to understand if there exists a well paid, comfortable position in this stress-saturated industry.<p>Try freelance&#x2F;consulting. Set your own holiday time, set your own hours, target the projects and tech that interest you, and don&#x27;t agree to do on-call. Not always easy to get started and it&#x27;s not for everyone but it&#x27;s like a whole other world salaried people don&#x27;t know about because it&#x27;s outside their norm.

SDE in a very non mission-critical org at Microsoft. Best work&#x2F;life balance ever. As a bonus, my coworkers and managers weren&#x27;t stressed either, and so were pleasant to work with. My friends in Windows couldn&#x27;t understand how I could leave at 4 to go snowboarding. They were probably more than a little contemptuous about it, but I was getting roughly the same comp, so...

I am a software engineer at failing fortune 500 tech giant. Managers like to create artificial deadlines but other than that there is no real stress. If service goes down and I am not near computer, no big deal, we don&#x27;t have a lot of customers. But in my case I am also kind of checked out at work, so dgaf.

There are medium-low stress jobs at FAANG. Well, maybe not Amazon.

I was a sysadmin for many years and now teach at a local technical college (on a consultanty contract).<p>No good job is without some stress however I now work 9-5, no weekends, which is great.

The answer will certainly depend on &quot;get paid well&quot; level. What&#x27;s your current pre-tax salary, and how much are you willing to go down or want to go up for this transition to be worth it?<p>I have been at (or have VERY closely worked with folks at) all levels of skill, responsibilities, and salaries. Let&#x27;s assume you want to stay in scrum&#x2F;SE role. I am of the opinion that within SWE, you can find your fit as long as soon as you define which two out of three of these qualities you want, and which one you can give up: (1) High salary. (My metric is: get paid at least 50% more than a similar job in another acceptible part of your country.) (2) Super interesting. (It wakes you up in the middle of the night from a dream, because you found the solution you were looking for for a long time. You rather give up sleep than forget the solution.) (3) Stress-free. (Well, every job has its own acceptable levels of stress. Here I&#x27;m talking about level of stress that makes you want to consider finding less stressful job. If you are not especially lazy person, and find yourself wanting to switch jobs to reduce stress at least once a month, that&#x27;s high stress.)<p>I have have some experience (first hand or second hand) with roles that match the combos: (1)+(2)-(3): Start-up with goals to be bought out by FAANG within a few years, or go IPO in less than a decade of founding.<p>(1)+(3)-(2): Any team that has self-sustaining profit in a large tech company, or any large non-tech company that wants to seem attract tech talent without changing their non-Silicon Valley type culture.<p>(2)+(3)-(1): Any startup that is not VC funded, and definitely isn&#x27;t on IPO track.<p>There are LOTS of exceptions to above, and there are rare occassions to find all three.. but if you want predictable long-term behavior, I&#x27;d say pick two-out-of-three on those, and that&#x27;ll cast your widest nest. Finally, as soon as you frame your question with which of those two you want and which one you are willing to give up, you&#x27;d get a concrete company and role recommendations.<p>Cheers!<p>PS: I&#x27;m in a (1)+(3)-(2) in a non-FAANG tech company. My (1) is &quot;relative&quot; though, because I&#x27;m paid less than the company&#x27;s average, but I also get to be fully remote in a non-expensive part of the US, so relatively speaking it&#x27;s more than their average. I work on one of the most mundane parts of MarTech&#x2F;AdTech (hence the &quot;-(2)&quot; status). I get sufficient autonomy, but I also have to show that I&#x27;m bringing the value to the company. It&#x27;s not stress-free, but definitely manageable. I haven&#x27;t had to work weekends in a long time.

&gt; What is your low stress, high paid job?<p>Imaginary.<p>Well, actually, software developer, not so high paid, but also not high stress, so it works out anyhow.

I recommend just changing team or company. Stress is usually fault of the boss, not the industry.

I co-found companies and recruit&#x2F;coach&#x2F;develop CEOs to run them.<p>This first happened with a huge ($1bn turnover, 500+ people) online travel co i started when I realized that my COO loved solving everyday problems while I loved sitting and thinking and not being stressed out. So he ended up running all ops and then became CEO, and I am a large passive shareholder.<p>Over the last several years I co-created many other companies – all either venture backed or about to be – from biotech to SaaS to mobile apps to fintech. In all these places there is a team I trust to run them already in place, or being created.<p>The reason other people want to do this with me is that (a) people like being CEOs and having responsibility (b) i have certain superpowers, especially around identifying opportunities, crafting stories, pulling together talent and capital, coaching people, and – thanks to plenty of MDMA&#x2F;LSD use – quickly build deep relationships with a lot of trust (c) most people find it quite difficult to take the first step when nothing at all exists, and I find it very easy and exciting because I instantly imagine how things could work (d) I have been a VC-backed founder for a decade and have gone through a lot of stresses of firing people, dealing with complicated situations, motivating teams at times of hardship etc. (e) i am completely unwilling to do things i do not like doing and as soon as these arise i start looking for someone to delegate them to<p>I love this because I love creating things, building relationships, empowering other people. It feels extremely high-impact, and creates both very significant financial assets and ability to decide my own cash income. More importantly, it constantly builds more relationships and skills and knowledge of how to continue doing this. The flywheel spins up.<p>The work is quite intense and i rarely take holidays but i can do so whenever i want to, because i am constantly delegating and am rarely in the position when something cannot function without me. i don&#x27;t take holidays because i don&#x27;t enjoy them that much. i relax by spending time with interesting people, and that also happens to be a core part of my job since it builds relationships and ideas for the future.<p>Now. i get that this is not a standard &quot;job&quot; by any measure. however, it is a job i have created for myself because i understand myself well. and i think the answer to loving what you do (thus not being stressed) and getting paid a lot is to build your own job. to refuse to be constrained by existing ways of doing things, and to just not be afraid of doing things differently. there are many people out there doing this across many domains and in very different ways.<p>at core the reason i am able to do this is a lot of meditation, psychotherapy, psychedelics, coaching, and a lot of close friends i love. you have to deeply understand what you want, not compromise despite difficulties along the way, and build support systems for yourself. stress management is a skill.<p>good luck figuring this out, this is a very cool and interesting question to consider!

software engineer. i have great management. very low stress. um. i have millions in tesla stock so maybe it does help having that &#x27;fuck you&#x27; money???

not high paid at all, but delivery jobs are very low stress, at least for uber eats, doordash. I suspect fedex or ups are more stressful as those are always going 45 in a 25.