What you're actually getting paid in, with Leila Clark

**Leila Clark** (0:00)
Ken Griffin is worth approximately $50 billion, and Taylor Swift is worth approximately, well, maybe you know the answer.

**Patrick McKenzie** (0:05)
I would guess maybe $2 billion. Someone who has worked at Google for 10 years in a software engineering role is a millionaire, period. They do end up with Grammy award-winning artist, financial statuses.

**Leila Clark** (0:17)
You can then kind of always play this practical joke or trick on people where you're like, you thought you wanted to get paid in money. But here are two jobs. Here's one job that's miserable and will pay you like twice the amount of money. And here's one job where like, if you make enough money, you have a nice apartment, you are suffering no lifestyle constraints. One way in which Taylor Swift gets paid that Ken Griffin doesn't is that she can get a restaurant reservation anywhere in New York, but she wants to.
Think very carefully about the bundle of things you're getting paid in other than just salary. Do not reverse sort by salary, take the top thing.

**Patrick McKenzie** (0:49)
My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11 on the internet. I'm here with my buddy, Leila.

**Leila Clark** (0:54)
I'm Leila. I am, I guess I would say I'm a software engineer because that's the class you're assigned when you graduate from college and you're never allowed to change it again.
In practice, most of my time nowadays is spent as the founder of Stardrift. We're an AI travel planner, YC and BCD backed and I'm also big patio11 fan. But I think predominantly for this podcast, I think we're going to be talking about my first four years of my career where I was working as a software engineer in finance, not a trader, a software engineer, predominantly at Jane Street Capital.

**Patrick McKenzie** (1:23)
Awesome. You wrote a blog post recently, I should say essay.
One of my little tiny hobby horses, people will auto-combatitize their work when they call it something like blog posts because a blog software does not necessarily encapsulate the value that something creates to the world, but the word essay has a higher perceived value in many quarters than so-called the message. Yet, I occasionally slip up and call my own thing blog post too. But your essay on the topic of what people choose to get compensated in their career, that there are many currencies available. Can you walk people through some of the logic?

**Leila Clark** (1:57)
Yeah. I guess it's interesting that you say what people choose to get paid in, actually, because I think the title of the essay is What Are You Getting Paid In? I think part of the thesis or I think part of why it's resonated with so many people is that a lot of people don't realize what they're getting paid in or don't have it thought very hard about it or something. I think this is one of those sleeper essays. I'm sure you've had some yourself where I wrote it and it felt like no one read it for a year. Then suddenly lots of people came up to me and were like, I really liked your essay on What Are You Getting Paid In? I think part of what happened here is that Ricky Heichlin, who's also been on your podcast, sent it around to a bunch of our friends and they all really liked it. Yeah, having worked in finance, and I think especially working in quant straight out of college, I saw a lot of people go through a job hunting process and think about what jobs they wanted and it's a little bit of an extension of how you get into college, where everyone's like, let me get the highest grade. I'm like, let me optimize for the highest number and then especially in quant, it felt like a lot of things people were optimizing for was like the highest salary.
I think one of the interesting things about being sort of 10 years, eight years out of college now is seeing how those various paths have diverged and how much people who thought they wanted to get paid in money, including maybe me, actually didn't want to get paid in only money and how many other things there are that you can get paid in.

**Patrick McKenzie** (3:14)
Sorry, that's maybe the backdrop of the essay, I think that's a very reasonable starting point for it.
I think people often default into scripts that are socially acceptable and whatever milieu they find themselves in and those scripts make a lot of decisions for us, where if we thought critically on what we actually wanted, what our actual preference is, we might choose things that are different from the scripts. I think that one of the, I don't know if it's wonderful or not wonderful. It is observationally true thing that there are some class, for lack of a better word, of people who do very well in school and make a large portion of their identity doing very well in school. This includes some amount of intellectualism and also some amount of pleasing a teacher figure and buying in on meritocracy very, very hard.