Um, no.
Our company is a private one, and we don’t pay what many of our huge, global competitors do. I get offers often to go back to the global companies with much more money, stock options, etc. But we have no problem getting and keeping great employees, because they value what we offer. Which is a company owned by people who value family and walk the talk. It really threw me when I first got here, and I saw that it was very rare that anyone came in to the office/lab on Saturdays. When we have suppliers, etc. who come in during the week and there are the usual dinners with them, no one has to come up with an excuse to say no thanks, I need to be home for family reasons. We tell our employees, when they have their 7 year old daughter in a school play at 2:00 PM, go, see your kid, we know you’ll make up the time. People in the industry know we are like that and we have a great reputation for that. We also offer a rare amount of job security; the owners have made it clear we are not for sale (and we get offers from “the big guys” all the time) and even during the economic meltdown of the recession, we had no forced layoffs (i.e. no targets of xx percentage cuts to save money) - our owners just took the losses out of their pockets (of course we did take measures, salary freezes, we shut down some of our stores that had been underperforming for years, etc.) The CEO said firing good employees when times got tough was like your car going too slow so you throw out the engine to save weight.
My previous company was not privately owned, but also not a huge global behemoth (though it was owned by a huge one, Total.) Again, we didn’t pay the maximum bigger guys did, but our work environment was very good. We worked hard (as we do in my current company) but people valued the integrity of management, the work itself was interesting and challenging, and people really cared for each other. E.g. we had a guy whose house burned to the ground, in December, and they lost everything including the kids Christmas presents. We had our normal annual Christmas party and we told them, hey, bring your 3 little kids for the cake and ice cream. They did, and the employees surprised them by having a Santa Clause show up and hand out presents to the kids, and then the parents were discretely given an envelope of cash that had been taken up. Later, when their new house got built, the employees helped them move in, fix it up, etc.
Is money important? Sure. It is in the UK too. Does it trump work environment? Not most places. Absolutely there are companies that will grind you down and try to get every last drop of blood from you. But that’s not a U.S. thing. That’s just the nature of a there being a LOT of companies out there and they are all run by people, and different people run things different ways.
As to the question of working outside your normal work day on what you do for a living, I think, as an old hiring manager, I get what the poster was saying. If he’s got two candidates, they are equal in every way, and one loves programming so much that he does it in his or her spare time, he gives them the nod. All other things being the same. But there’s a difference between two candidates where everything is pretty much equal and that is a differentiator and EXPECTING that in all employees and one who does not being considered a lesser employee. I have found that employees with a healthy family life tend to be happier when at work. But I also won’t expect all employees to have a family life, e.g. vs. a single person. Volunteer work is good, but again, for me, life balance is the most important. In fact, I have one chemist right now, she is SOOOO intense, she lives and breathes her work, she wants to come in after hours, she is married with a son, but she just never stops thinking work. And while she really gets things done and is incredibly productive, there’s another side to that - she is SOOOO driven that she has a very difficult time dealing with other people who aren’t as driven, she takes setbacks personally, and she takes a lot of coaching to keep her from blowing up.
There’s just no simple formula, people are complicated. I understand why a hiring manager who sees someone who really, really is into whatever they do at work would be a potentially better hire than someone who just does it because it earns them a check. But it’s complicated. I’ve said hiring someone after a couple of interviews is like getting married after two dates! (and the same for taking a new job.)
