There is No Such Thing as a “Safe” Career (2011) • Hacker News Board

Re: There is No Such Thing as a “Safe” Career (2011)

#21

Post by sliverstorm » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 3:15 AM UTC

lolwutf wrote: post #12

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #5

Ok, so what the fuck am I supposed to do? I'm 24, and I'm a CS grad student. I want to do research, or at least research&development. I can code plenty well; hell, I'm typing from the end of the workday at my sweet internship right now. But if you're going to tell me that even tech will leave me broke and unable to support a family at 35, what... what anything? Why anything? Why pretend I have career aspirations if a…

There's always management. That's my plan when I'm in my 40s/50s/tired of coding age, at least. Otherwise, don't worry about it, because there's lots of people out there right now jumping around companies from year-to-year, doing that thing. It's the norm for an industry, right now. There will be some conventional wisdom you can glean from colleagues, The Market, and your own heart/personal development, when the come…

There's always management

This is my plan. Good management of technical assets is (in my eyes) absolutely essential to actually achieving anything noteworthy, so as an experienced, storied old guy you can still provide value. Maybe even more value than before.

Re: There is No Such Thing as a “Safe” Career (2011)

#22

Post by stephenaturner » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 3:15 AM UTC

On the one hand, the headline is quite true, but the story is filled with bigoted, idiotic stereotypes and ridiculous generalisations, written by someone who clearly has an axe to grind and little sense to offer anyone. Lame.

Re: There is No Such Thing as a “Safe” Career (2011)

#23

Post by derekp7 » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 6:34 AM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #20

derekp7 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to get some numbers out there, for people in our income range. Assuming you are able to save 25,000 a year, get 8% return on investments, and pay a marginal tax rate of 28% on the investment returns, you will have a shade over 1 Mil in 20 years. To make it a bit more realistic, if you save 15,000 per year and get 6% returns annually, it will take about 33 years. So you can either retire at 41 or 53 (assuming 1 M…

Again: I'm a graduate student . $15k/year USD is most of my annual income . Mind, about 5,000 NIS/month netto is a pretty reasonable lower-middle class salary for a grad-student in Haifa, but it's not "save up for retirement and kids" money. So let's just assume your post applied to everyone who actually does have a full-time development job earning nice huge sums of money and somehow finding low rents somewhere.

yeah, my post was general (I just replied to your last post, didn't infer context from your previous one). But anyway, the numbers still work out at any income level -- if you invest 20% if your income at 8% for 23 years, you can then live off the savings for the next 40 years (assuming you withdraw from your savings 80% of your income level, which is the amount you were living off previously, and that the savings still nets you 8% annually). So if you are making 20,000, and invest 4,000 a year (20%), your are living off of 16,000. Then after 23 years, you can withdraw 16,000 from savings for the next 40 years.

This is simplified ignoring taxes, and also not counting for inflation (you'd want to work for 30 years to be able to draw enough extra to cover inflation -- however your contributions will be increasing during that 30 years since hopefully your pay goes up faster than inflation).