81–90 of 93 posts
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and you won't get FU skill or FU money. I answered the question.
You can definitely get FU money by making $160K+ straight out of college up to a quarter million a year plus three years later. How much do you think most people make “starting their own business?”
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You can definitely get FU money by making $160K+ straight out of college up to a quarter million a year plus three years later. How much do you think most people make “starting their own business?”
first of all no one's making $160k right out of college. Second of all, no, that's not even FU money. Maybe after a 20 year career, yeah you can retire well.
I don’t work for some hip non profitable startup surviving off of VC money either.
These are standard offers - go to levels.fyi and see what the starting wage is for the BigTech companies are in America.
Some of the younger cohort who are just coming out of college getting FAANG jobs (including the one I work for) are talking about FIRE (financially independent retire early). They are saving/investing $50K+ a year.
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first of all no one's making $160k right out of college. Second of all, no, that's not even FU money. Maybe after a 20 year career, yeah you can retire well.
That’s the return offer one of the interns I mentored got when they came back after they graduated. They had no reason to lie to me. They work remotely and decided to move back in with their parents. But even if they didn’t, they could live some place cheaply. I don’t work for some hip non profitable startup surviving off of VC money either. These are standard offers - go to levels.fyi and see what the starting wage…
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That’s the return offer one of the interns I mentored got when they came back after they graduated. They had no reason to lie to me. They work remotely and decided to move back in with their parents. But even if they didn’t, they could live some place cheaply. I don’t work for some hip non profitable startup surviving off of VC money either. These are standard offers - go to levels.fyi and see what the starting wage…
It's annoying to argue, but (1) that's an anecdote, not data, (2) levels.fyi is a biased sample of people obsessed with / want to brag about their compensation (like you, because even though this post was about FU 'skills' you started arguing about comp), (3) FU money is in the single digit millions at least, if not $10 million, like I said you may get to that level after 10-20 years with good investments, but it's r…
Are you that unaware of compensation at any of the top tech companies?
How much do you think they are making?
You don’t need “10-20 million” to live a decent middle class lifestyle in the US.
> For a startup it's even less guaranteed, but you will certainly get much more than that ($10s of millions at least), faster (5-10 years) if you have a reasonably successful exit
Yes all you have to do is choose the one startup out of 10 that don’t outright fail and then choose the subset of those that have an outsized exit.
> At big corps you barely do anything for the first two years you get hired, but at startups you are working on something mission critical from the start
Have you ever worked at any large tech company?
I literally just went to a customer’s site with the former intern I spoke about and they are the only hands on keyboard consultant (I work in the cloud consulting department at $BigTech) of a six figure contract. I was there in an advisory role. All of the new grads go through a six month training program and immediately get put on projects.
In my department they get to learn about working with “cloud technologies” from people who are inarguably the best in the business.
I’m sure people at other big tech companies also learn a lot more about working at scale than you can learn at a tiny company.
Besides you are suffering from severe survivorship bias if you think more than an insignificant percentage of people working at a startup ever leave with any significant amount of money let alone “millions”.
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I agree. I strongly suspect the people telling OP they aren't worried about finding another job are bullshitting him. Or in some cases, maybe their egos have them believing it too.
I’ve worked for 26 years across 8 jobs - 6 since 2008. It’s never taken me longer than a month to get a job.
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I agree. I strongly suspect the people telling OP they aren't worried about finding another job are bullshitting him. Or in some cases, maybe their egos have them believing it too.
> Or in some cases, maybe their egos have them believing it too. If that's the case, then mission accomplished. It seems that OP's root goal is to avoid the crippling anxiety and stress. Convincing yourself that it's not a problem -- even if it is -- also accomplishes that. Maybe it's not the best, but you're going to get laid off (or not) regardless of whatever anxiety or stress you feel leading up to that point. Be…
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I’ve worked for 26 years across 8 jobs - 6 since 2008. It’s never taken me longer than a month to get a job.
Sounds like you're lucky. I'm unlucky and average. I would be afraid that I wouldn't get another job if I got fired.
I’ve kept my skills in sync with the market and kept a strong network. Most of those years from 1996-2020 I was just your run of the mill enterprise CRUD developer.
Good reputation and a healthy network. Having the skills to do the technical work is only part of the answer. I've met a lot of brilliant programmers in my career who were not good at following through on commitments, delivering work, working with others, or leaving old workplaces without burning bridges. On the other hand, I've known a lot of good-but-not-great programmers who were great to work with, made sure they…
>the trap of thinking that social skills are "bullshit" At some point I thought this way because I wasn’t good at them and was too anxious to even attempt to work on them. Then I realized - ‘programming’ humans is really fun, especially when you can improve them :) - everything else you and I do in our lives is related (directly or indirectly) to social status, so why not eliminate inefficiencies by using social skil…
Maybe its better to work on developing empathy? Leadership and Self Deception is a decent book on people skills that really emphasizes this approach.
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> only about $67k/year. Which is >100k/year before tax which is well above median household earnings.
Right, but we're also an above median family size (again: 4 kids.) I could easily drop 20-25k from that spending if we didn't have kids - in fact, at the time I had my first kid, my mortgage was $24k/year, my bills were nearly 40% lower than they are now, and I didn't track food and clothes budgets back then but even if they were 80% of present day levels (I suspect it was much lower) that'd put us right around $40k/…