When TC Becomes the Only Metric

In software industry, Total Compensation (TC) has become the north star. On forums like Blind, even personal life questions get responses like “TC or GTFO.” Somewhere along the way, TC stopped being a factor … it became the factor.

Like measuring system performance only through uptime while ignoring latency, resilience, and user experience, obsessing over TC alone creates an impedance mismatch with the reality of our lives. Culture fit, skill alignment, and personal growth, which were once critical inputs, are now edge cases, often discarded.

The result? Millionaires with mental burnouts. Developers pulling 80-hour weeks in toxic cultures. Families becoming background threads, starved for CPU cycles. Divorce is now a meme, not a tragedy. Work-life balance? Flagged as a lazy commit.

What are we optimizing for?

If financial independence is the goal, the FIRE target ($10M? $20M?) keeps shifting by continuous comparisons. And while we endlessly loop for that magic number, life’s real-time events such as relationships, health, joy get garbage-collected.

We know better. Optimizing for TC temporarily is understandable; building your life around it is a dangerously suboptimal strategy. It’s okay to trade some TC for a team that energizes you, a role that excites you, or evenings you actually spend with loved ones.

Let’s stop treating life like a backlog to clear after a successful exit. Happiness isn't an endpoint function; it's a continuous stream of experiences. Optimize for what matters now. The best system isn’t the highest-paid, it’s the most sustainable.

💡Steps worth taking:

• Trade a slice of TC for a role that recharges you; not drains you.

• Balance your system: optimize for happiness, not just earnings.

• Don’t let life become a background thread; revisit your priorities.

Did this post make you pause and rethink what you’re really optimizing for?