421–430 of 632 posts
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I've lived here for ~20. I was raised here. I've never paid less than 40% of my income on rent, and I've only worked in tech.
Even if that's 40% after tax and 401k withholding, you are either wildly underpaid or you live in very extravagant housing
My experience has been that jumping from employee to any level of executive is the absolute hardest step, at least for me. I think once you are a team lead and have some number of direct reports, you can then start jumping your way up that ladder. But going from 0 to 5 direct reports has often seemed impossible. I'd be open to tips on how to do it.
This is rather true in practice, but I find it tremendously depressing. I have found that the executive path is actually the one that most of the scumbags take, it is the one that attracts the most people, and those people are usually not likable, they're salespeople that sell themselves all day. The third group, the one that actually creates value, is accurately represented as not as successful both in terms of mone…
You could also say that humankind is still stuck in an evolutionary stage where in most places, being dominant is the best signal of "value". In a Tim Ferriss podcast, Ray Dalio actually mentions that disagreements at Bridgewater can take on different forms, because some people are less suitable for verbal, thinking-on-their-feet sort of debates, and might be better suited for long form (like Hacker News threads) debates.
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That is admittedly a tougher situation - my comment was geared towards someone making 100k as this post's theme has been "technical workers". Your situation is definitely tough and would probably mean having to live way out of the bay area and commute to work. I mainly reacted to OP saying it wasn't possible. How can you say that when people commute from Vallejo into the city everyday wasting 3 hours a day so that th…
Let me give you a different perspective on this -- yes, it is possible. Heck, even living on 10k is possible -- you could put up a tent and live in that. You could live in a camp ground. One could even forage for wild berries for sustenance. Almost anything is possible if one is to split hairs... Except it isn't what most tech workers expected . The vast majority of tech workers I know have sacrificed a lot and work…
It's harder than we expected, but not impossible. To say you can barely get by with your 120k salary when there are people getting by on 40k is offensive.
Believe me, I know what it's like to be banging your head against the desk at 1AM on a Friday night while your friends are out partying. But I also know what it's like to see a family work hard to provide for their kids in some of the poorest neighborhoods in California.
They too work hard and it's a disservice to them who try their best to make it work to say that it's impossible on a 100k salary.
We should raise the bar for everyone - but that bar starts with them, not with tech workers. This is why you get protests for Google buses, sometimes the points people are making here come across as tone deaf.
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Let me describe a typical mid-career Silicon Valley salaried tech worker scenario. YMMV of course. Base comp 200K Bonus, stock, 401k match 50K Total gross comp 250K Expenses: Taxes 40% (30% fed, 10% state) 100K Rental housing 40K ($3300/month) Food 15K Transportation 15K Discretionary spending 20K Total expenses 190K As a result, you can comfortably save $60K per year. Of course, kids and housing options will add gre…
Is it really typical in SV tech to get that much matching on 401k and/or get a bonus? Seems extraordinarily high. Maybe that bonus, stock, 401k match is sort of an unknown that one may or may not receive (in which case, you'd be comfortably saving $10k/year). At any rate, if those bonuses are real, maybe I need to move out of Texas.
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> The same just isn't true of product development, sales and marketing. Any one of those three teams, staffed well, will account for well more than the value of the entire engineering organization. Why is it not true for them? Sales are not magic, it is a profession that can be learned. I have seen a lot of companies stating how important is sales, and how unique they are. It can't be true for all companies. It is li…
>If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product. Without engineering organization, you don't have anything to sell. Without sales and marketing, you will also have a hard time. It is collaboration what brings success. The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that enginee…
(I cannot distinguish product development from engineering as cleanly as you do, but on sales and marketing...)
Can't disagree more. At least with the definitions I have in my head, this sentence is logically inconsistent with such definitions. Engineering is the way you get non-linear leverages. Sales and marketing, almost always give linear multiples at best.
I feel once you have the "golden goose" leverage delivered by engineering in hand, you start calling it sales because that's the final step in conversion to $$$. Also, that's when the linear multiple provided by sales and marketing is the biggest in absolute numbers.
[But yes, if you call everything you see as "marginal contribution" engineering, and everything valuable "product development", then you tautologically "prove" your conclusion.]
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>If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product. Without engineering organization, you don't have anything to sell. Without sales and marketing, you will also have a hard time. It is collaboration what brings success. The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that enginee…
More efficient engineering ships features faster, not just cheaper, which lets you respond quicker, which gets you more users/clients/your favorite metric.
But who communicates this to the customer? How decides what features are built (in a larger company)? Who pitches these new features to potential customers?
At a big enough company where the engineers aren't the ones doing this work, the benefits of any engineering achievement is moot if those other 3 groups don't do their jobs well.
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I keep on hearing about that.. so what's savings rate people should expect in SF?
If you're single without kids -- 50% easily. Perhaps someone with kids can comment.
I liked this essay better when Venkatesh Rao wrote it in 2009. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
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Isn't this the default route for failed founders? I know a bunch of them now leading some divisions or branch offices.
Was thinking the default route would be to try again but if they didn’t would it be a faster way to climb to exec
It seemed to me that most people aren't 'serial entrepreneurs' they just heard of the success of SF tech founders, tried it at home, failed, marked it as something they weren't made for, went for a simpler job.
Also, some get a family and start to avoid risk.