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Are people really getting independently wealthy at young age that common? I know a few successful folks, but they certainly aren't young when they MADE it. I know a lot of folks who worked in startups but never got anywhere near what I earn consistently in the past 20 years.
I retired, so that's a different discussion. It's tough on "older people" who are "only" in their 50's and 60's. I tried to stick with companies, and even the university, but funds came and went (mostly went) in university and aerospace. Tried to hang in there with Sun, but things were starting to implode there. So, a succession of "Let's pretend you're a contractor" and "You are a contractor" jobs with increasing di…
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Just don’t follow the fads I’ve been doing kernel code in C for nearly 30 years. Same tech stack.. emacs, c compiler, kgdb. Lots of things have come along to make things better (dtrace, eBPF). The kernels have changed (out with Solaris, DEC OSF/1, AIX, etc, in with FreeBSD and Linux), but it’s all pretty similar in the end. And experience REALLY helps and is rewarded. Especially when you were there 25 years ago and y…
You remember why you did something 25years ago? I have a hard time remembering what I did two weeks ago in a sprint retro
I certainly didn't write it 20 years ago, but I was there and around and can understand the motivations which is helpful.
Right around then, most open source kernels started doing a lot of performance work on sockets. Some of which has stood up until recently, but some things look silly with today's eyes. You could set the port number hash length to more than 16-bits, which doesn't make sense... But they added it to get 2 or 4 bits of hashing in 2000, and it worked enough that nobody changed it. Things like that.
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Just don’t follow the fads I’ve been doing kernel code in C for nearly 30 years. Same tech stack.. emacs, c compiler, kgdb. Lots of things have come along to make things better (dtrace, eBPF). The kernels have changed (out with Solaris, DEC OSF/1, AIX, etc, in with FreeBSD and Linux), but it’s all pretty similar in the end. And experience REALLY helps and is rewarded. Especially when you were there 25 years ago and y…
You remember why you did something 25years ago? I have a hard time remembering what I did two weeks ago in a sprint retro
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You mean FIRE? I can't say I know anyone who FIRED sustainably.
You don’t need to FIRE to still get rich enough to retire before the traditional retirement age when your a tech guy making multiples of the median household income. Then add in a few people winning the equity lottery
I think all of the above. I turn 64 this year, with 40+ years programming and system admin experience. Companies outside the world of software development and tech startups tend to have more older programmers. I worked a lot in enterprise logistics with mostly older programmers, for example. I have freelanced for about 15 years and noticed that most of the successful freelancers I meet skew over 40. I will guess that…
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You don’t need to FIRE to still get rich enough to retire before the traditional retirement age when your a tech guy making multiples of the median household income. Then add in a few people winning the equity lottery
I don’t understand that. I read that many times, including money mustache. I just can’t imagine 1/4 income is sufficient. Again, I’m not trying to be difficult but I don’t know anyone who was able to FIRE that way.
While it is the kind of project that can 'change the world'; my well-being does not depend on its financial success.
You don't have to hit the lottery to FIRE. Just make good money for a reasonable length of time and live beneath your means. Save and invest and before you know it, you don't need to do the daily grind in order to meet your needs and many of your wants.
Are people really getting independently wealthy at young age that common? I know a few successful folks, but they certainly aren't young when they MADE it. I know a lot of folks who worked in startups but never got anywhere near what I earn consistently in the past 20 years.
Also, while I think there's less of it on HN than the rest of the internet, most people overstate their income, savings, skills, experience, etc.
There's also a confirmation bias taking place, because most people aren't posting "I can't retire until I'm 72 because I have 4 kids to put through college and the stock market has screwed my 401k!" Your sample size on this is extremely small. ;)
Ignore what you _think_ everyone else around you is accomplishing. Focus on yourself. Most of what you believe is taking place around you is smoke and mirrors.
These are fields such as: research, biotech, pharma, cyber security, medical, utilities, oil/gas, space (NASA), air (Boeing), defense, ...
If you don't have skills immediately pertinent to domains such as these, you may have skills that are tangentially related and allow you to get in the door and then become indispensable and branch/learn.
Also, you may have skills that are huge benefits and don't even know it. Examples: applied probability, databases, big data, ETL pipelining, business continuity, encryption, 3D visualizations + animation.
I'm in biotech/pharma (48 y.o.), and know several programmers who started as web developers and ended up making front-end UIs (e.g. Streamlit apps) that were of immense benefit to the researchers. Over time they pick up some genetics, move over to help other teams, etc.