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Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

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Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#51

Post by koolba »

Regardless of which path you'd like to go down, learn some basic financial planning, frugality, and learn to live like a miser. It'll pay dividends, both figuratively and literally.

Regarding the executive path, or more generally any management role, learn early on if it's for you. If you're the type that gets caught up in human interest stories, considers it inhumane to fire low performers, or generally believes in a sense of fairness to the world then forget about it and stick with being an employee. It's better for your own sanity.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#52

Post by dark_silicon »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #14
ryandrake wrote: post #7

> Often times there are hard barriers preventing people from starting a company. In these cases my best advice is to move to a tech hub (preferably the Bay Area) and work for a tech company until you can save the money I had to laugh there. Moving to the Bay Area will reduce your ability to save money, not increase it. I was probably saving 40-50% of my salary when I worked in Nowhereville, Florida. With the housing…

It really depends on the kind of lifestyle you choose. If you want to live alone in a fancy apartment, drive a new car, and eat out every day, then you certainly won't be able to save as much. If you practice frugality, find cheap housing (which does exist if you look hard enough), and don't spend money on things you don't need, then it's quite easy to save a lot of money.

"fancy apartment". Cute idea.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#53

Post by JohnDotAwesome »

mmm94720 wrote: post #34
hellbreaker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep on hearing about that.. so what's savings rate people should expect in SF?

Let me describe a typical mid-career Silicon Valley salaried tech worker scenario. YMMV of course. Base comp 200K Bonus, stock, 401k match 50K Total gross comp 250K Expenses: Taxes 40% (30% fed, 10% state) 100K Rental housing 40K ($3300/month) Food 15K Transportation 15K Discretionary spending 20K Total expenses 190K As a result, you can comfortably save $60K per year. Of course, kids and housing options will add gre…

Is it really typical in SV tech to get that much matching on 401k and/or get a bonus? Seems extraordinarily high. Maybe that bonus, stock, 401k match is sort of an unknown that one may or may not receive (in which case, you'd be comfortably saving $10k/year).

At any rate, if those bonuses are real, maybe I need to move out of Texas.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#54

Post by gxs »

ryandrake wrote: post #7

> Often times there are hard barriers preventing people from starting a company. In these cases my best advice is to move to a tech hub (preferably the Bay Area) and work for a tech company until you can save the money I had to laugh there. Moving to the Bay Area will reduce your ability to save money, not increase it. I was probably saving 40-50% of my salary when I worked in Nowhereville, Florida. With the housing…

This is an insult to the thousands of people who make it in the bay area on barista wages.

Just fucking wow.

You can save in the bay area, live with roommates and pay comfortably.

You don't even have to do that forever, just long enough to move up a bit in your job and save for a downpayment if buying a home is your goal. Not to mention if your spouse works and makes similar money then you can live a really high quality of life.

If you think you're entitled to owning a big house, 2 cars, with money left over for dining out everyday and to pad your savings for a 5M retirement fund, you're going to have a bad time.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#55

Post by akhilcacharya »

ryandrake wrote: post #47
mmm94720 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me describe a typical mid-career Silicon Valley salaried tech worker scenario. YMMV of course. Base comp 200K Bonus, stock, 401k match 50K Total gross comp 250K Expenses: Taxes 40% (30% fed, 10% state) 100K Rental housing 40K ($3300/month) Food 15K Transportation 15K Discretionary spending 20K Total expenses 190K As a result, you can comfortably save $60K per year. Of course, kids and housing options will add gre…

Here we go again with the "typical" tech worker making 250K. According to Glassdoor [1] and Payscale [2] the median/average base pay for SW engineers in the SF is about 1/2 of that. 1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en... 2: https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...

That sounds more like a new grad salary...

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#57

Post by didibus »

leeoniya wrote: post #19
metalliqaz wrote: post #5

Missing from the strategies for the first two (really all three): come from wealthy background.

not really. my family moved to the states from moscow when i was 7. we spent all our money that we got from selling a crappy apt on the move itself. we lived on food stamps, had to learn english, my parents (both with technical university degrees) went to community college and worked low wage jobs to pay the rent, bills and tuition. we had a super old used ford that was rusting everywhere a vehicle can rust and the d…

> but to say that it was because of some innate wealth misses the mark

I'm not sure it misses the mark. All data show that wealth carries over multiple generations. That doesn't mean that non wealthy can't make it, just that wealthiest will, on average or even probably some p95 and up metric.

And wealth should be put into perspective, its often more to do with the surrounding education of the wealthy. If your surrounding growing up ran businesses of their own, knew how to manage people, understood finance, investments, calculating risks, knew about markets and business, had connections, that's a great environment to learn the same from. You mentioned both your parents had technical university degrees, so you had some advantage there.

Everyone can give it a shot, we have equal opportunity, but not equal challenges to face. You making it out of less is double awesome to you, even if maybe you felt it was easy, dunno, its still a hard thing you did, harder then if you had come from a more supportive environment.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#58

Post by sputknick »

wolco wrote: post #45

Missed the all important contractor. More money, more control over types of projects taken but little control over actual project.

Can you talk more about this. Roughly where in the world do you live? How do you find work? How deep is your backlog? How many customers do you have?

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#59

Post by ThrustVectoring »

hellbreaker wrote: post #12
ryandrake wrote: post #7

> Often times there are hard barriers preventing people from starting a company. In these cases my best advice is to move to a tech hub (preferably the Bay Area) and work for a tech company until you can save the money I had to laugh there. Moving to the Bay Area will reduce your ability to save money, not increase it. I was probably saving 40-50% of my salary when I worked in Nowhereville, Florida. With the housing…

I keep on hearing about that.. so what's savings rate people should expect in SF?

Depends on your salary and general lifestyle. Single with no kids helps. Commuting from the East Bay helps. Not eating out or having expensive hobbies helps. Not owning a car helps. Making more than the typical low-to-mid 6 figures helps. Not having an onerous student loan burden or consumer debt helps.

I've personally been saving over $2k/mo on an after-tax income of just over $6k/mo, haven't been trying particularly hard to max that out though.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#60

Post by xor1 »

mattdawson wrote: post #28

The lack of even a nod to diversity issues (race, gender, class, etc.) that the tech industry is dealing (or not dealing with) is tone deaf and insulting to the extreme.

I would place class above everything else, and I think it's important to take physical attractiveness (for both genders, mind you) into account. It really feels like most people aren't comfortable with accepting just how much looks matter to them when it comes to judging things like trustworthiness, intelligence, and competency, and how much it affects their ability to like (or dislike) somebody. All very important when it comes to hiring and work/business relationships.
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