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“It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

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Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#261

Post by coldtea »

michaelmcmillan wrote: post #106
coldtea wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In which direction is causality flowing here, and how do you justify it? We didn't choose our brains No, but our privileged parents did contribute to them, and their our upbringing, early months, lack of childhood stress over things as food and war, familial support, good schools, and so on. Brains is hardly the best contributor to entrepreneurial success. In fact a plot of IQ vs success I've seen plotted looked li…

Induction gets you nowhere though: where did our privileged parents get their brains from? You're proving my point here: we inherit roughly 50% of our traits through our parent's genes. I never claimed IQ was the best measure (surprised it looked like random noise though), but certainly our cognitive traits matter . So to my question: How do you distinguish that privilege from the privilege you got from your "class"?…

>Induction gets you nowhere though: where did our privileged parents get their brains from? You're proving my point here: we inherit roughly 50% of our traits through our parent's genes.

Well, of people with equal IQs, isn't a potential 0-50% penalty from nurture/privilege still huge enough to make points about "self-made men taking risks" (and implying that others are "lazy" or whatever) moot?

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#262

Post by war1025 »

radcon wrote: post #247
vostok wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of people with CS degrees who can't find a job, and plenty more who have jobs that barely pay enough to cover their expenses. If anything, this comment is out of touch with reality as it stands for most software developers in the US. The median salary for a software developer in the US is over $100k. In Silicon Valley MSAs it's even higher of course. The median income for similar careers like compu…

Average starting salary for CS undergrads today is $57,000. He did say "entry level dev gig". If you live alone in a major city, have student loans, and don't have great healthcare benefits from your employer, you'd be lucky to save much of anything on that salary. Banking $10k is a pipe dream.

I made $70k / year for the past 7 years (finally got a raise at the start of this year), so ages 23 - 30. My work health insurance covered me, but not my wife, for most of that. We had our first daughter a week after I turned 27 and twins a week after I turned 29.

MY wife worked at a coffee shop until we had our daughter. Making around $20k / year.

In that time, we grew our net worth to $250k.

That's not a lot by some standards, but it is a hell of a lot more than most people our age have. Even people in similar income brackets as us. All it takes is living below your means.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#263

Post by bsenftner »

vorpalhex wrote: post #185
njepa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't like 3 or 4 percent though. Starting a startup ranges from a largely risk free career move to impossible. Most people today start at negative. Want to live in a decent sized city? That's at least $2k a month. An education? Might very well be $50k in debt. Job security? Need to put in the hours young. Otherwise there is a very real chances of getting evicted, not being able to find a decent job, not being abl…

> An education? Might very well be $50k in debt. You can get a perfectly decent degree from your community college for very affordable prices. Likewise you may not be able to live in downtown manhattan, but you can probably live anywhere in a whole bunch of the square states on $1k a month.

A practical problem with community colleges are the plain fact that high ambition people tend not to be there. People with ambition tend not to be there, or are operating from a disadvantage and community college is the best they can get, at that time in their lives. This defines the initial network of a community college attendee, as well as their operating environment. There is quite a bit of invisible help that arises simply from one's environment being a can-do ambitious place. Not saying community colleges do not have positive environments, but at a university setting becoming a degree professional is the given.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#264

Post by war1025 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #255
jasonkester wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to adjust your numbers if you like. Personally, I have a hard time spending that much in a year. The idea, though, is to save up enough that you don't need to think about losing your job as an existential threat. That's an easily attainable goal for a software guy, and it puts you in a nice position in a lot of ways.

You are defining a "safety net" that tacitly assumes a privileged middle class life, which makes the problem artificially simple. For someone that genuinely comes from an impoverished background, creating a safety net can be substantially more complicated because it involves considerably more than just having a bit of money saved. Many poor people have no family whatsoever in any meaningful sense, which makes buildin…

He is referring to people with CS degrees, not lower class people with no life skills. If you made it through college and got a degree, you're basically on track to be middle class.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#265

Post by acdha »

jasonkester wrote: post #225
idlewords wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the United States, people who don't have significant financial support from their parents graduate from university with a great deal of debt.

Indeed. But those are the same people getting those $150k entry-level salaries from companies in the Bay Area. Even after paying down $50k/year in debt one would be hard pressed to spend the rest of that without saving anything. You spend your college years sharing a house with 5 roommates, driving an $800 car and living on Costco pallets of canned chili. Keep that up for another few years after school while pulling…

This is exactly faulty set of assumptions being challenged here.

Not everyone gets that $150K offer, and that's increasingly true the further you are from a healthy white middle-class male.

Not everyone wants to move to the Bay Area and unless you're a friendless orphan the further that move is, the more travel expenses you're taking on.

Not everyone has family who are completely self-sufficient and will never need help. (Speaking personally from the “parents have never helped with rent; have helped parents with rent” club)

Not everyone can find 5 roommates they're comfortable with, an $800 car at all much less one that runs perfectly with no maintenance costs as you're assuming. In reality, most people buy newer cars because it's better to have a fixed bill than deal with the missed work and random thousand-dollar service bills which you tend to get with $800 cars.

Not everyone's health is compatible with living on canned chili and even if you don't have any long-term issues, you'll probably want to get some basic nutrition before you develop some.

If this actually worked for you, great. All we're saying is that you should be less quick to forget that other people had it harder. I think that's especially true because when I think about the people who over-spent, they were never starting poor — they grew up comfortable and never had to worry about true disaster.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#266

Post by _Microft »

altaccount1 wrote: post #239
_Microft wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you maybe have a source for it?

Footnote 2 of this Paul Graham essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

Thanks. I'm sure I had read that before, it's surprising that I didn't notice that yet.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#267

Post by ergothus »

vorpalhex wrote: post #185
njepa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't like 3 or 4 percent though. Starting a startup ranges from a largely risk free career move to impossible. Most people today start at negative. Want to live in a decent sized city? That's at least $2k a month. An education? Might very well be $50k in debt. Job security? Need to put in the hours young. Otherwise there is a very real chances of getting evicted, not being able to find a decent job, not being abl…

> An education? Might very well be $50k in debt. You can get a perfectly decent degree from your community college for very affordable prices. Likewise you may not be able to live in downtown manhattan, but you can probably live anywhere in a whole bunch of the square states on $1k a month.

Community college is a great deal. But $12-15k for a bachelor's degree, not to mention any hit to income because your work availability is limited when attending school and doing assignments, is not something every person can wave off as no big deal. That assumes the community college offers a four year degree and is within reasonable travel distance (oh, you do have a car, right? Because that college might not be on the bus route you take to work). If you have to move to attend college, you sacrifice whatever job you currently have, plus all the expenses of moving (but apparently we're expecting them to move across states anyway)

Along with that job, we then talk about health insurance. It's great if you are young enough and have parents with insurance that you can be on, but not one of those criteria can be assumed, so if you aren't working a full-time job, you will have limited access to health-care (plus the issues of paying for it if you have access).

Just because some of the high end cost estimates can be undercut doesn't mean there isn't considerable expense and threat.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#269

Post by majani »

Actually the headline of this is the takeaway you should get from this story. People with safety nets are the ones who get to do startups. This is logical and how it should be. If you weren't born into a rich family, then make saving up your number 1 financial priority to build that nest egg for yourself. Even the kids from privileged families are mostly in that position because their parents made a series of good financial decisions in regards to savings.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#270

Post by Silhouette »

vostok wrote: post #235
radcon wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we work in software, where socking away your first ten thousand dollars happens automatically after landing an entry level dev gig, provided you don't go out of your way to blow your entire outlandish salary on silly possessions. This is shockingly out of touch with reality, just like PG's original tweet. There are plenty of people with CS degrees who can't find a job, and plenty more who have jobs that barely pay…

> There are plenty of people with CS degrees who can't find a job, and plenty more who have jobs that barely pay enough to cover their expenses. If anything, this comment is out of touch with reality as it stands for most software developers in the US. The median salary for a software developer in the US is over $100k. In Silicon Valley MSAs it's even higher of course. The median income for similar careers like compu…

The median salary for a software developer is over $100k.

In the US, or certain parts of the US, perhaps. In most of the world, software developers often don't make that much as employees even at the peak of their career. Maybe you'd reach it in a big city like London, as a very senior developer, working for a big company, but even then it would be exceptional. For most developers not in a US tech hub, getting to that income level or beyond is going to require going independent at some point.

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