Ask HN: Why do software engineers always focus on salary and early retirement?

My reasons why I am maniacal obsessed (yes, I think about it many times a day, every day) about early retirement (more like financial independence than retirement), in order of importance:

1) Grew up dirt poor and I have a constant fear of ending up there again (suffered a lot as a child/teenager when I didn't even have $3 for discretionary expenses, I was incredibly envious of my peers who were better off).

2) (Forced) ageism in the industry: it's incredibly true, regardless of the few outliers who will post here on HN saying "not true, I'm 89 and still professionally coding my life away".

3) Constant stress due to learning: I absolutely love this field and programming is the thing I'm the most capable of doing, but the amount of study I have to do to keep up with what goes on actively eats into my personal life and free time, I have to dedicate many hours a week just to be aware of what is happening in my areas (e.g. frontend development, devops, ...). It's very stressful, to the point where if I could go back I would choose to pursue a more "stable" highly-paid field (e.g. medicine) and keep programming as a hobby.

4) Corporate politics in big companies: it's insane how much of your time will be spent on useless stuff just to drive your manager's personal agenda, think about it. I've being victim of spending months on useless refactory of some even more useless application in big co.

5) Employees treatment in startups: startups tend to have interesting work, but absolutely truly horrible financial incentives, horrible risk/reward and horrible mechanics around equity compensation (and I speak as someone who has been relatively lucky in this field, since the first startup I was in made me ~$100k in equity, and the other one about ~$1M in equity, still less than what I would have made in FAANG, for which I had very lucrative offers, but didn't accept for the bullshit of the previous point).

I'm 32 btw.

Because we're one of the few industries where you can make six figures before age 30 without working yourself to death or going to school for a decade. We have the opportunity to save a ton of money years before others. In general most people care more about their salary than the work. You chose two careers (researchers, professors) that may be the exception. Go ask finance people or lawyers what they think.

I'm into the FIRE stuff. I don't find being interested in your work and having access to early retirement as mutually exclusive.

Having the ability to retire early is not really about retiring — it's about having optionality in your life to choose what you do with your time, whether that's what you work on, where you work, who you work for, or if you even work at all post the point of financial independence that divides "working life" from early retirement.

Primarily, it's the freedom. In other words, many people in this space are more interested in having the option available to them to take time off work and travel for extended periods, take sabbaticals, work on problems of personal interest that might generate no income, start a company for fun, etc. It's more realistic to achieve these goals after hitting a financial independence milestone, however one defines that goal relative to their spending requirements in "retirement".

Secondarily, it serves as "insurance" or a fall back to primary income should you choose to continue working in your current role or in a lower paying job but doing something you find personally fulfilling for other reasons, like a charity or non-profit. Maybe you want to work a blue collar job or two out of curiosity but that would be impractical or financial infeasible compared to an engineering salary. Maybe you want to work on open source full-time.

Tertiarily, there are unique tax optimization opportunities that emerge when you have established wealth but have no to little income in a given tax year.

One of the most popular blogs for learning more about this is Mad FIentist - https://www.madfientist.com/.

I should have clarified: by stable I didn't mean "reasonable work life balance" or other definitions, I meant the knowledge in the discipline you're practicing is itself stable.

Several of my high school friends are not physicians and, while they have to generally keep up with the latest best practices in their specialty, most of the knowledge they acquired in school never changes for the entirety of their career (so ageism doesn't basically exist), which isn't even remotely true in software engineering and it's a constant source of stress like I initially described.

It's about having control over your life. If you have to work it sucks.