"that can get them retired easily by their mid 30s" Maybe a small subset. The median dev salary is $110k. So no, only a very small number are able to retire in their 30s.
The absolute value of your salary doesn't tell you anything about how long it takes to get to retirement (or more accurately, financial independence). That's exclusively a function of your spending and saving rates. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
Yes, trivially. But the achievable savings rate depends very much on the absolute value of your salary, for any level of target creature comforts.
Okay, now do one for juniors. As a junior developer I would literally work for the worst company, but none of them are interested in me.
Contact me with your resume and I'll try to give you my best good-faith advice as a hiring manager. (And if I think you could have potential on my team, I'd even talk about hiring you
myself.)
I don't think that is accurate. I would say it is a combination of both. The article you link to obviously makes it sound like it's an exclusive function. But it simply dismisses the fact that not everyone can reasonably sustain the savings rates mentioned. Sure, there's reports of very motivated people that live on next to nothing and have a huge savings rate for the first 10 years of their working life, abstaining…
We all have to make the choice between prioritizing creature comforts and freedom. I chose freedom. While my colleagues were living in fancy high rise apartments, buying new gaming rigs and cars, taking extravagant international vacations, and getting married and having kids, I was living in a basement studio with my college mattress on the floor and no car for several years while biking to work. I'm retired and they…
> getting married and having kids
i have not met anyone yet who is married with kids but would have preferred an earlier retirement instead. kids are more expensive than all the other things combined that you listed - no amount of living in the basement or saving 30k on having no car is going to make up for that.
> I Think I Know Why You Can't Hire Engineers Right Now
But nothing on the article touches on an exploration of why these factors (which seem reasonable, in general) are any more relevant now than they were a year ago. Or five years ago.
The absolute value of your salary does highly correlate with cost of living, unfortunately. Which may have an effect on your savings rate.
Yes it does. If you have a high salary, you are probably living in a HCOL area. If you have a low salary for the same kind of work, then you are probably living in a LCOL area. The savings rates of these different individuals could be the same if the salary difference is proportional to the cost of living difference.
But 20% of $200k/yr is $40k/yr, while 20% of $100k/yr is $20k/yr. If you make twice as much while saving the same rate (i.e. cost of living goes up proportionally), you'll still end up saving twice as fast. Then move to a LCOL area, and you've got twice as much saved as the people who've lived there all their lives.
It's an under-discussed topic that this apparent utopia isn't available to everyone. Race, gender presentation, academic background, country of residence or origin, Twitter blue-check, etc. all seem to be correlated (no numbers; purely anecdotal) to those who enjoy (or don't) this utopia. Being masterfully technical, social, or political have a lot to do with it too, it seems.
I apparently check the right boxes. I just suck at life.
Hey random Internet stranger. Don't feel terrible. I have a CS PhD, work in AI, have a fancy job title and decent resume ..yet, I am not making anywhere close to these crazy numbers. I painted myself into a bad corner and am somehow stuck. I work crazy hours to keep myself up to date so I can get myself unstuck. I think most engineers are not making 300K-500K .. it is a bit like social media .. you just hear about the winners and not the losers. Also, the stock market was up like crazy in the last 2 years .. I think this accounts for some of the insane numbers we are seeing, people retiring, etc. The biggest mistake I made is my job doesn't give me shares/RSUs, etc. It was somewhat obvious that this was a problem but it wasn't terrible until most major tech companies did a x3 in 1 year. This was a 1 time lottery I missed (and I suspect many others did too). Things could have gone the other way too (I graduated from my PhD in 2008 and recall how terrible those days were).
The article is concise but missing a lot of real-life examples: * The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to a lot of people even though the money would be super sweet to have. * Some wannabe startups also employ LeetCode style interview even though they don't pay anywhere near FAANG/Unicorns. * You know what's worst than LeetCode style interview? LeetCode style inte…
The companies that pay 80% of FAANG salaries without the LeetCode whiteboard bullshit are out there.