361–370 of 583 posts
Thanks for making this article and sharing all of that, it's precious information.
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What an absolute joke. The United States has terrible class mobility compared to the Netherlands or Germany for example. You don’t have anything to support what you said other than a skewed perspective created by American centric media. Edit: I guess the down voters here hate facts. The US scores lower on social mobility than the majority of European countries https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_In…
Using a different metric the Netherlands are slightly better than the US, but Germany is slightly worse. https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/1-5%20generations.png
Let's take a typical profile that HN users would be interested in, a top10% engineer working for a big company. This person would never become rich in NL, but almost always become rich in the US.
Unavoidably: US based, 6 figures right from the start. You're pretty much half way there already.
Just happen to live in the US, work and don't be stupid financially. I guess it also helps not having a big "student debt" (that's also not US exclusive but US typical, since in many other countries education is cheaper - subsidized and you don't gradutate with a debt. ATL not a personal debt). But since there's so much tech demand in the US irrespective of education, you can often skip college and follow a different path. But not if you have to immigrate with a student visa to go the H1B way, haha!
The casualness with which you can earn those amounts of money and then lecture (not this particular post, more like the trend) on "retire at 40" or "financial independence in 10 yrs" is a bit tiring (from an outside perspective, and in a harmless-envious way) but all the best to those that are in a position to make it. Yes, casualness in a relative sense, not implying you don't have to work or anything like that.
Congrats to OP.
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Is it harder to get into the US or the EU?
I am not the right person to ask. I assume it is easier getting into EU but I can't say for sure
Several of them ended up going to Canada because it was significantly easier and had a reasonable tech scene in the Toronto area
> Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I’ve been very privileged, especially in the educational opportunities I’ve had. This might sound reasonable from a US-centric perspective, but to me it reads like utter nonsense. The main privilege here is access to the US labor market and tax policy. There are no stories like this one where I live (in Sweden). Absolutely none.
Oh boy that is true. Honestly, everyone who is born in the US is kind of privileged compared to 99% of the world. Especially if you are willing to work hard.
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> Did I miss anything in that summarization? Have no children? Not only because they eat money, but your priorities will do a complete 180.
And also, the article says "don't buy a house". I put both of these into the principle of save more than you spend. Some of us consider those necessities in life, however, and we're willing to make the necessary tradeoffs.
Buying and selling homes is extremely expensive - it doesnt make sense for someone who wants to have the ability to move with little friction. Its also putting a lot of one's financial resources into a single asset. A housing market downturn could be financially ruinous, a series of expensive repairs could easily cost far more than an entire year's of rent. Property tax, maintenance, and potential HOA fees mean that even after paying off your mortgage, you're never actually free of ongoing housing expenses.
However, if you have kids or other ties to an area, owning housing can help make your expenses both lower and more predictable than renting. Over long enough periods of time, the housing market also tends to go up, which means it can be a good investment.
This is very similar to my story. I moved to America from Ireland in 2007 after graduating with a degree in cs. I did a year in grad school before working in tech in the Bay Area for more than a decade, including at two companies from FAANG. I also ran a consulting business and for the last 3 years worked at Coinbase. I don’t consider myself in anyway special. I know many people from Europe who went down this path. T…
>I don’t consider myself in anyway special As someone who has within the last few months failed three FAANG on-sites and a Coinbase phone screen, I’d say you’re special.
I bet most engineers at these companies did not get an offer on their first 3 tries. This is not a big deal at all because they'll let you interview over and over after cool-off periods.
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"I do not understand why articles like these consistently score poorly on HN?" Because the article pisses me off. This is not something helpful to us average peasants. No shit you can become a multimillionaire if you're pulling in over half a million per year. Maybe some of the advice I'd good, but it would be worth more coming from someone who actually is average so we can see it as evidence. Otherwise it's some ric…
The implication of the article, that such compensation is reasonably possible to a moderately competent software developer working for big companies in the United States, seems pretty reasonable to me. Another thing one could note is the bump in compensation in recent years, which could be a combination of stock going up, more experience making the author a more valuable employee, or market rates for software enginee…
The author made $625k in compensation this year. Even for large US tech companies, that's far above the "moderately competent" level. According to levels.fyi, this is approximately what a Principal SWE makes at Amazon, the third highest compensation level listed.
This is on the disclaimer and several other comments already, but I can't help commenting. Unavoidably: US based, 6 figures right from the start. You're pretty much half way there already. Just happen to live in the US, work and don't be stupid financially. I guess it also helps not having a big "student debt" (that's also not US exclusive but US typical, since in many other countries education is cheaper - subsidize…