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Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#421

Post by sakopov »

keiferski wrote: post #221

It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur, and will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business. These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, w…

Nothing interesting. No matter what people say, starting a business is incredibly difficult and takes a certain amount of luck. I've done 3. Failed at all 3. Made $0. Some people aren't cut out and are better off being employees.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#422

Post by yellowstuff »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #297
packetlost wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty hard to get into these IME. I'm considered a top-performer at the deep tech company I currently work at, and interviewed at a hedge fund awhile back. The process was way less intense than what I would expect a big tech co. interview to be. I made it to the top three candidates, but didn't get it. In hindsight, the role wouldn't have been a good fit, it was "higher up in the stack" than I prefer to be, whi…

Alot of getting hired into these roles depends on your upbringing/perceived social class by the people at the fund, the school you went to, how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, etc. The technical pieces are pretty far behind.

I've done a fair amount of technical hiring at hedge funds, my experience doesn't support this comment. There is some amount of credentialism/elitism in hedge fund hiring, but I see that more on the fundamental investment side, and much less for technical roles. There are a lot more hedge funds than FAANG companies, and different funds can have very different cultures.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#423

Post by fuzzfactor »

entropyneur wrote: post #301
keiferski wrote: post #221

It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur, and will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business. These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, w…

You make it sound so easy. I've ran small businesses for most of my career and I've never made more than a quarter of what I currently make working as a contractor (ironically, for a business I once started, now owned by someone else). And most of the time I earned 5-10% of that.

Good to get your message, I have some of the same experience.

I do better as a consultant/contractor for a client who is a previous customer from when I had my own facility. Fundamentally I used to provide the paperwork (the deliverable/invoiceable product) and supported everything needed to generate it, including any free advice which goes along to smooth the flow. Now I'm paid to help their paperwork achieve and maintain value with none of mine in the mix at all, but I'm basically doing a lot of the same stuff when I'm on site.

As a contractor aren't you now a small business operator of a different type, perhaps much smaller?

I would estimate in more of the exact same business in so many ways very few ever come close to that.

Maybe even doing some of the same things under different degrees of ownership and responsibility, and this could be a good example of way different compensation when the only difference is the underlying arrangement.

Looks like ironc can be good :)

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#424

Post by randomdata »

kevinsync wrote: post #238
keiferski wrote: post #221

It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur, and will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business. These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, w…

Yes. This is a bit reductive, but literally everything is out there for the taking -- you just have to go out and get it! Anecdotally, I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of formally-educated people I've encountered in life are more allergic to this idea than the opposite.. I don't have any solid theories as to why, exactly, but it's curious nonetheless.

> I don't have any solid theories as to why

What sees you discount the obvious? That is, formally educated people end up in formal education because they have a proclivity towards not wanting to have to go out and get it. They want someone else to hand it to them. Which is, after all, what the "formal" part of formal education describes.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#425

Post by sakopov »

kevinsync wrote: post #238
keiferski wrote: post #221

It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur, and will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business. These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, w…

Yes. This is a bit reductive, but literally everything is out there for the taking -- you just have to go out and get it! Anecdotally, I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of formally-educated people I've encountered in life are more allergic to this idea than the opposite.. I don't have any solid theories as to why, exactly, but it's curious nonetheless.

The problem is identifying what to go out and get. Because most people will go out and get the wrong thing and end up burning themselves out of future endeavors.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#426

Post by reaperman »

medvezhenok wrote: post #367
reaperman wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in that tax bracket for half my adult life (often did not have enough money to eat chicken and rice at home and just went hungry). I had to do my own taxes because I couldn’t afford an accountant and TurboTax starting taking the piss on their dark pattern pricing schemes. All of my friends at the time were also very poor, it was a giant recession and we worked in restaurants that weren’t getting customers. We g…

When you're in that tax bracket, there are plenty of tax break/benefit cliffs that are more impactful than tax rates. And they can certainly make your take-home pay go down if you accept a raise. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41048205

But that still doesn't explain the common denominator between a person living comfortably and a person in poverty both not understanding how tax brackets work or ever having to consider the most basic parts of how their own taxes are calculated, for so, so many years of their lives.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#427

Post by reaperman »

medvezhenok wrote: post #352
TimPC wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand how tax brackets work. You never make less money by moving up a bracket. The bracket rate only applies to income within the bracket.

The more correct statement is "you never pay more in taxes by moving up a bracket" - though even that is not correct in all cases. There are a lot of things (IETC for example, or benefits, or health insurance) which have $ cutoffs. Or tax breaks (i.e. electric vehicle credit) that only apply below a certain income. Exceeding those fixed points can certainly make you make less money. One thing I ran into recently was…

*EITC (nit)

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#428

Post by smsm42 »

TimPC wrote: post #190
orochimaaru wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You don't understand how tax brackets work. You never make less money by moving up a bracket. The bracket rate only applies to income within the bracket.

Taking into account only the federal income tax brackets, this is true. But tax cliffs exist, e.g. see: https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/tax-cliff so accounting for all taxes and other factors, there could be a situation where you earn more pre-tax, but end up with less after all is accounted for. For most high-earners it's less relevant as they are past of the most cliffs anyway, but sometimes things like losing access to IRA deductions may be a factor too.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#429

Post by vagab0nd »

ska wrote: post #147

Two tried and tested methods, neither guaranteed of course. 1) Be better than the overwhelming majority of your peers, and be noticed for this. You are quite likely to find interesting opportunities come your way. I do mean overwhelming though - small fraction of a percent. 2) Specialize in something most people can’t or won’t do. This includes difficult, obscure, and unpleasant work. In both cases some of the bigges…

3) Be first at something new. See the AI girlfriend project a while ago, which was pulling in 1m/mo.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#430

Post by borroka »

keiferski wrote: post #221

It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur, and will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business. These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, w…

A comment, the one I am responding to, that would fit much better in the "hopeful" bucket than in the "realistic" one.

I, like many others, hold a white-collar job in a technology company, not FAANG, with a salary between 300 and 400K per year, with lunch breaks, paid vacation days, good health insurance, and the opportunity to work from home at least 75% of the time.

At the end of my workday, which I have not found to be stressful in at least 3 years, I am fresh, hydrated, and ready to spend late afternoons, evenings, and nights pursuing my interests, taking care of the kids, and maybe learning French at last. I see guys running fairly successful local businesses, both physical and digital. Assuming you have a choice between the two paths, a brief look at the physical condition and a conversation with me and the business owner would quickly lead you to prefer one of the two paths.

I might be privileged, lucky, in an unusual situation. But the same is true for the successful local entrepreneur running a plumbing business with profits equivalent to those of experienced people working in tech.

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