81–90 of 97 posts
FWIW, USDS has let a number of senior/staff ICs from companies whose name rhymes with "frugal" do very short stints (3-4 months).
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I live in NYC. Chicago is the #1 food city in America in my opinion: - availability - quality - diversity Others agree: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/chicago-restaurant-city-of-... (a little bias here’s another one: https://travel.usnews.com/rankings/best-foodie-destinations-... ) You can do a quick search for more recent opinions. NYC has more top end, famous restaurants. Chicago has more close to top end restaur…
"close to top end restaurant" is purely subjective, and meaningless. Sorry, but Chicago doesn't have the diversity, quality or quantity of restuarants that NYC has. Not even remotely close. Chicago has certainly come a long way from the days of meat & potatoes, but its no where in the same league as NYC. And the fact that its easy to get reservations only further underscores how non-competitive Chicago is in that reg…
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Not OP but have had some analogous thoughts. Compared to the state institutions and startups I worked at before, FAANG-scale comp and perks literally changed my life, having grown up rather poor. I can afford to save for retirement while also attending to my health, I can afford a personal trainer to help me stay on track in my goals, I can afford a cleaner to keep my personal space tidy when I struggled for years to…
I had the same exact experience. The money really does make life easier. I am healthier for it.
1) How much money do you need, on an on-going basis, to maintain your level of comfort/improved health/whatever you’ve been spending the money on? Think of this in terms of annual expenditure. Include all of your livings expenses in this.
1a) What can you do to decrease your annual income needs? This might be something big like relocating away from an HCOL area, removing superfluous spending (i.e., things that aren’t making you happy/healthier/etc.,) or optimizing current spending (do you have a big cable package that you don’t use, do you need a new smartphone every year or could you upgrade every 2 - 3 years, etc.) Take this away from the number is step 1) and you get variable A. Example: 150,000/yr.
2) What do you want to do post-FAANG, if anything, and how much will it pay? This number is B. Example: $75,000/year.
3) What are you current investment assets? This number is C. Example: $1,000,000.
4) How much investment income could they produce? For round number purposes, in the current investment environment, maybe start with a 3% withdrawal rate. This number is D. Example: 3%
A. B. C. D. DIn this example, you need to save/invest an additional $1.5M for your plan to be realistic, or change your expenses or post-FAANG income to alter the timeline. However long it will take to grow your assets by $1.5M — through additional savings from your FAANG income and returns on existing investments — is how long you need to stick it out at your FAANG job, or an equivalent high-stress/high-pay job — before jumping ship without suffering any loss from the benefit the high income provides.
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"close to top end restaurant" is purely subjective, and meaningless. Sorry, but Chicago doesn't have the diversity, quality or quantity of restuarants that NYC has. Not even remotely close. Chicago has certainly come a long way from the days of meat & potatoes, but its no where in the same league as NYC. And the fact that its easy to get reservations only further underscores how non-competitive Chicago is in that reg…
NYC's food scene is great, but when I lived there (circa 2015) the only Mexican food available was confined to a few blocks of 116th ST in East Harlem, whereas Chicago had Rick Bayless.
Having Japanese and a handful of decent Chinese places != diverse.
I’ve lived in NYC for 10 years. I’ve looked.
Here’s the breakdown of where to go to get authentic, good non-tourist food:
An hour+ to get to different parts of Queens for decent Korean, Chinese, Mexican options.
Three hours to get to Northern VA for Vietnamese food (or 2 for Philly).
1-2 hours to get to New Jersey to get decent Indian food.
Yes, NYC has great sushi that costs 500 per person. Again, that doesn’t make it the #1 food city in America.
There is a weird hack about compensation. Move to a place with a much lower cost of living. I'm not talking about suddenly moving to Thailand, you can stay within the US, there are lot of smaller cities that needs tech but their cost of living is much lower. Basically the math works like this, if your cost of living is 200% US average (San Fran, LA, NYC are there or higher) and you move to a 96% US average your salar…
Not really, because saving the same percentage of a much higher salary gets you to retirement or financial independence much faster.
I have 4 kids, in Silicon Valley I would need $1.2M to buy a 4-bedroom house (2018 average). Where I live, I own two 5-bedroom houses for a total of $240K. So now I have secondary income and my taxes are much lower than the $1.2M house taxes. This thing kind of cascades let's say you put $200K down for your $1.2M house, so $1M loan also means your 4% interest will be a lot more money than my 4% interest rate. Your school taxes, and property taxes would be much more $ as well.
All that money has to come from somewhere. Does it mean your 401K % contribution is lower? Does it mean that if you do retire with twice as much money in retirement you will be spending all the profits paying your taxes? Maybe, maybe not.
I think that's kind of impossible to predict clearly what's more beneficial. For me I rather have my houses fully paid by the time I retire, I'm trending to have paid both of them off in about 8-10 years. I'm putting 13% to 401K, 6% in IRA and living a comfortable life. Would I have 4 kids if I living in NYC or the Valley? Definitely not.
I'm not trying to argue that my way is the best way. Just that it's just "a way", an alternative for someone that is tired of working in FAANG and wants something else.
> I like being an IC and building what I'm told to build; I have no idea how to decide what it is we should be building and don't want to deal with customer demands. To be honest I'm kind of surprised programmers like this work at frugal
Why is that? This seems like the heart of the labor-hoarding criticism of Google: hire a bunch of smart people, then tell them to churn out low-value code for the ads machine while their RSUs vest and refresh.
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NYC's food scene is great, but when I lived there (circa 2015) the only Mexican food available was confined to a few blocks of 116th ST in East Harlem, whereas Chicago had Rick Bayless.
It’s not just staples like Mexican food: there isn’t great Vietnamese, Thai, and options for other cultures too. There’s barely passable Korean food in Korea town. It’s commercialized tourist goop. I’m talking Manhattan, gentrified Brooklyn, and LIC here. Having Japanese and a handful of decent Chinese places != diverse. I’ve lived in NYC for 10 years. I’ve looked. Here’s the breakdown of where to go to get authentic…
That's where I live now, and while I love the ready access to great banh mi, I do have to go to NYC to get a good babka. No place is perfect, I guess
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Agreed with all this. The absolute best thing you can do as an engineer at a smaller company is not write code at all. Figure out how to solve problems using existing tools and processes. If you do have to write code, write the absolute simplest thing possible that solves the problem. That doesn't mean "low quality," because things like testing/CI/monitoring are still important. It just means you aren't building a sy…
Problem is you were hired to code, they will review your performance a large part on code, and if you want another engineering job they will want examples of when you coded X and test you on concepts in latest frameworks. The role you are describing might be different to an engineer. Sure a good engineer avoids unnecessary coding but having done that they have to be seen to do some necessary coding (or necessary work…