Build Personal Moats

- Go work in the HFT industry. :P

- A good freelance dev can pull in about 80-100 euro/hour which leads to a monthly pretax income of >10k euro. This is almost four times the median monthly household income. Even if you maintain a level of spending double that of the median, you can still save 50% of your income.

- Even a "normal" senior dev in the Amsterdam area can pull in 5-6k euro per month, which is still double the median household income.

- Since you are saving so much, buying a house in the suburbs like Almere or Delft or Hoofddorp (assuming you work in/near Amsterdam) becomes much more feasible. If you can work remotely, get a house in the northeast and save yourself another 100k. Make sure to use your continuing savings for paying down your mortgage as early as possible. Most Dutch banks allow for 10% per year early repayment without but some allow for more.

- Simultaneously, invest a little time in skills like cooking that will enable you to have a good life in hedonism terms without having to spend a lot.

- Now that you have a paid off home and low expenses, you won't need to pay a mortgage anymore and can increase your savings rate even more. Start investing in income generating instruments like bonds, dividend generating stocks or even real estate.

- Repeat this last procedure for ~10 years until income from investments exceeds expenses.

- Do the cperciva thing (see the post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24537865) and work on whatever you find interesting.

There's a whole community of people in various stages of this process at the DutchFIRE subreddit if you want to know more. This strategy won't allow you to spend like a rapper trying to impress his friends, but it's a solid, low-risk approach that has worked hundreds of times already, even in relatively high Cost-of-Living areas like the randstad. Of course, if you just want to bitch about high taxes that's also fine ;)

1.

Writing documentation is helpful for everyone, but it is more helpful in building a moat for the writer than it is for the reader.

When I document hard-to-learn processes, I drill the process into my memory in a way that the followers of the process are glad have avoided -- a win-win! And by seeing the results of people attempting to follow my documentation, I get valuable feedback on how adaptable my processes are to others, which helps me easily adapt the processes to new situations even for myself.

2.

Avoiding processes that rely on a hero avoids building useless moats.

It's good to avoid processes that rely on a hero. Teams should try to replace hero roles with repeatable processes as much as possible, but after doing this, often there are some hero roles left. These are roles are usually done by people with an ability to do critical but unforeseeable one-off tasks in a way that's very hard to train or hire others for. I'd need to hire a team to replace each of these people!

As someone who wants to build a personal moat, I actually want to work on teams that do this kind of "hero role pruning", because in those teams, any hero role I happen to fall into is one with actual value that's hard to replace.

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If I were to mesh together the article, your response, and my responses here to create a more nuanced criticism about the article, it would be that the moat one builds should come from things that are naturally hard for other people to do, not by one artificially making things harder for other people.

This is a little bit context dependent. I’ve spent a large portion of my career as a contractor. I’ve never tried to make myself irreplaceable, but it usually happens. Being seen as irreplaceable when your contract has to be renewed every 3 months can be pretty profitable.

That’s not to say that I haven’t grown in my career. My skills, knowledge, interpersonal relationships, have all grown. My salary has grown with, as a result. But I’m happy in my spot, happy with the independence that being a contractor gives me, and happy not to have to play the corporate game.