The main takeaway from this is that you want to work FAANG lol. He was on track to hit 2m in 20-25 years until he shifted to Google/Amazon. A vast part of his compensation was probably in stock and those stocks are way up, so he hit his savings goal within a few years. He would have spent 15 years at Intel/Sun to hit the same #s
My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
451–460 of 583 posts
Re: My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of working smart rather than working hard is seeing the salary signals the market is sending and responding to them strategically. This is worth more than mastering a skill that is saturated with competition relative to demand. It took me a long time to accept this as I was wedded to the idea that hard work and skill alone should be well compensated. But that hard work and skill needs to be pointed in a good dir…
My grief (and grieving) is not with this. If you had an advanced degree in math or physics, hedge funds in NYC was always an option to maximize your talent in exchange for money. But one also had an option to choose something different and still make an upper middle class living. It seems these days, only the finance/tech offer such living. NOT choosing tech is choosing barely middle class living, and everyone else i…
Where I live (DC) most people are not in tech and they still have an upper middle class lifestyle working for the Federal government or a contractor (in a non-tech role). Nationally, purchasing power has been declining for many years.
Besides Fed Gov, Tech/finance are the probably the only sectors left with large work forces, great margins, a culture of rewarding talent (vs health care for example), AND rooted in the USA (vs manufacturing and heavy industry). These factors combine to create a super class of tech/finance labor.
Re: My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not going to change your mood but I hope someone else reading this interaction early in their career will come out of it with an optimistic mindset instead of a cynical one. It pays off better.
Keep in mind you can be disappointed in more than one way. Either you tried the impossible with an optimistic mindset and failed anyway, or you failed at something doable because you took pessimistic choices. It's not actually obvious which category this is in.
Yes, but the optimistic mindset would probably have a better outcome than the latter regardless if they failed to meet their original expectations or not.
Re: My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
#454> 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.
The opportunity described is only common in a handful of companies in handful of cities. Outside of this it is going to be rare even in the US. Since Sweden doesn't have a large presence of these companies you are going to have to move to for example Zurich or London for it to be common. It isn't a Sweden versus US thing, it's a "achieving a high level in a major company that gives you stock" versus not. The opportun…
GP poster is also incorrect. Prior to his passing, famous DJ Avicii is estimated to have an estate of 50 million USD; well-off enough to never work again if he didn't want to. There's also, y'know, the Royal Family. GPs post would lead you to believe that Swedish society is flat, but there are absolutely bank managers (or something, I never got a chance to ask) running around driving Porsches while the rich plebs own thirty year-old cars, or don't own cars and take public transit. There are people who can skip the line to getting housing in Stockholm by buying a flat instead of waiting in line for years for a rental property. 20-year olds in the technology field are still much better off, economically, than someone who's chosen to be circus performer or artist.
However, a world-class DJ and the fact that some people are richer than others doesn't really contradict the claim that Sweden is much more egalitarian, and my previous points need to be examined within the broader culture of Sweden and Scandinavia in general. (Many Swedes commute daily into Denmark.) Having a car is convenient, but thanks to a world-class public transportation network in Stockholm, rather unnecessary. Car ownership is thus less of a deal compared to much of the US. While the privileged in Silicon Valley are trying to get "fuck you" money (more eloquently expressed as Financial Indpendence / Retiring Early - FIRE), the older Swedes I met still work, and are most proud of the days or week off their job affords and middle-class people are able to travel more than I see Americans (though a lot of that is cultural, but time off work and plane tickets+hotel is expensive).
Re: My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolute majority through RSUs, which is why I’m objecting the GP’s claims. The vested stock I’ve reinvested through an ISK in a somewhat broader portfolio over time.
If you’ve made over a million dollars in RSUs after taxes then I must admit… I’ve never heard of anything like that. Are you sure you’re not talking about stock options in a quickly growing company/ startup?
No, I’ve had stock options too but they’ve turned out worthless.
I don’t know what your seniority is and what you’ve seen but I can assure you it exists, and it’s not unique exceptions. Maybe a good opportunity to interview if you’re feels it’s unattainable where you are now. Plenty of US companies hiring remotely too…
Re: My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that measurement of social mobility makes much sense in this context. Sure, moving from lower working class to upper middle class is probably easier in Sweden than in many other countries. But the thing is: it doesn’t make much of a difference. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Nordic welfare state kind of games the social mobility score in this way, by having such a compressed income distribution. I…
The report itself [0] notes many of the contradictions in the US: > "Despite scoring high on the Work Opportunities (83.0) pillar—because of its low unemployment rate—as well as on the Technology Access pillar (90.2), it has the lowest score in the region on the Fair Wages pillar (43.8 against an average of 64.6 for the region). With an incidence of low pay (less than two-thirds of median wages) at 24.9, it has one o…
> 'You have the opportunity to succeed greatly, and be rewarded extremely well, but this requires financial resources at birth
This is the opposite of financial mobility.
Re: My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your flip comment seems to belie the fact that he's only earned at least a half a million dollars for one year. I would say $475k is close enough, in all honesty. > The majority of his NW comes from investment and savings, not income. Sum of (earnings - spent) over the career is $2,611,000. Net worth by the end is $2,400,000. In order for investment returns to be above savings on income, taxes would have to be 42.3…
Income tax in CA at that level is 33% per year approximately. Even at $150k. So knock 1/3 off earnings and subtract expenses, what do you get?
With these numbers, most of the savings come from earnings, not investments.
Re: My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> such compensation is reasonably possible to a moderately competent software developer working for big companies in the United States 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.
You're looking at take-home, while levels.fyi shows granted amounts. AMZN and GOOG have both ~tripled since early 2018, so if you joined with a large stock grant (and as the other user mentioned, amazon's are backloaded), you'd be getting 3x the modelled amount. So someone who joined with a 160K salary and 400K stock grant at Amazon, which is modelled compensation of just a bit over 250K would take home 160K + .4 * 400K * 3 = 640K this year. That translates to the high side of L5 or low side of L6 at amazon, which is to say well within the "Senior" band.
Re: My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You are equating guilt with acknowledging privilege, and those aren’t the same. When someone says "check your privilege", they're saying that you've done something wrong and should feel guilty.
No, they aren’t. They are saying you should consider if and how your privilege helped you out, because sometimes that isn’t transferable to other people; someone black in a job interview may not have the same experience someone white does, and that’s okay, but it’s important to recognize if and how being white helped so that someone who isn’t white can account for that and adjust. It has nothing at all to do with gui…
It does have something to do with guilt, because the ultimate concession of acknowledging privilege is that you didn't truly earn your advantages, which is a root cause of perpetuated injustice. That's where the guilt lives: being the beneficiary of systematic injustice. This doesn't make you a bad person, of course; pretty much anyone in a position of privilege will capatalize on it, as that is human nature.
Re: My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It's not hard to move up the quantiles if you put the effort." The statistics paint a different picture - there are only so many jobs above the median. "In any case, 105k median income just goes to tell how big the opportunity is." You mean limited? Clearly this is multiples lower than the author. "The mean salary is useless in quantifying wether you, as an individual, have any agency in influencing your outcome." N…
I'm not going to change your mood but I hope someone else reading this interaction early in their career will come out of it with an optimistic mindset instead of a cynical one. It pays off better.
I'm early in my career and I'm bullish on myself, but I would never go around preaching that there's a "high probability of success" of a SWE making >$500k because clearly there is not.
I'm bullish because I have evidence to support that possibility. Most people have zero evidence that they would ever make >$500k, let alone having a "high probability of success".