The reality is, the later years of your life are going to be significantly more secure and happier if you make a lot of money.
Setting a high target for success and working hard to get there are worthy goals for men and women alike but going through life with a perpetually-agitated constitution because you don't attain a result that puts you in the top-1% wealth bracket (for example) is an almost certain way to find yourself unhappy and discontented as you strive to meet your main life goals.
In the midst of the tech bubble, a prominent Valley newspaper ran a feature story in which it interviewed five couples who were each at varying degrees of financial success, from modest to rich. Ironically, it was the rich couple (net worth of approximately $200 million) that was quoted as saying, in response to a question about what they most wanted, "we want to know what it would be like to be worth a billion dollars."
To me, this sort of mindset can be problematic, and the problem becomes one of loss of perspective. When the accumulation of money becomes in itself an obsessive goal, it comes back to bite because, no matter how much one has, it will never be enough. I don't think this is really an issue about the money itself, either - it involves instead the idea that your very perception of your value as a human being somehow becomes defined by how the ciphers add up, and that ultimately represents a sad loss of perspective because you wind up forever measuring your wealth (and what it brings) with what everybody else has.
Money is great when rightly gained and used. So too is ambition and a desire to achieve the ultimate success. It is good to set your goals high. But it is never good to become obsessed about the accumulation of money as an end in itself. Such a goal, even if attained, will sap the life out of anyone who allows money to become his master.
This piece was thought-provoking along these lines, though I think flawed in tying to tie all this to feminist themes. The issue of avarice as a problem is a transcending one that is hardly shaped by gender.
If you save wisely, you can retire just fine after a career at a tech company making 2-3x the US median salary. And most companies have good health coverage for the cancer.
She is talking about the pressure to make $10M or more through a startup, not getting the money to retire comfortably.
Well... kinda. One of the dirty little secrets of employer-provided group health care is that when you have one person whose health care costs vastly exceed the average, there's enormous pressure to get that person out of the "group". I've know companies where someone got cancer and the premiums for the whole company doubled the next year.
The standard deviation of health care costs for a company scales like 1/sqrt(# employees). Once (sigma cost) / sqrt(# of employees) << (mean cost), there is little advantage to having a bigger pool.
This is a theory at this point...and it's not a well-tested theory. I don't know many people who have actually retired from a lifetime (i.e. 30+ year) career in tech. Considering that the software industry (as we know it) is only about 30 years old, it's hard to draw long-term conclusions.
Uh, what? The software industry is a lot older than that. The largest companies today by revenue are listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_global_soft... and it is instructive to go down the list. Of the 10 listed, 2 have been selling software since the 50s (in the case of Accenture admittedly as part of another company), 1 in the 60s, and 3 in the 70s. So over half are over 30 years old.
Wikipedia claims that the first company founded to provide software products and services was Computer Usage Company in 1955. The software industry expanded in the 1960s. Since then it seems to me to have been growing exponentially since. By the early 70s there was already enough accumulated experience for veterans to write classics like The Mythical Man-Month and The Psychology of Computer Programming.
Incidentally I know multiple people who have retired from a lifetime career in tech. They seem to be in a similar position to other retired professionals.
No, it isn't. A lot of companies that sell software now sold other things before they sold software. And of the companies listed on that wikipedia, page, only IBM, EDS, Lockheed Martin, CSC, Capgemini and SAP existed before the 1980s. Nearly all of those did other things before entering software.
In any case, the exception makes the rule: virtually nobody was a professional coder before the early 1980s. Of the few who were, many retired rich and young after two of the largest technology booms in world history. They don't make good examples of career longevity, for what should be obvious reasons.
Many companies move into software, but of the companies listed on that Wikipedia page, only IBM, HP, Lockheed Martin and arguably Accenture did something else before going into the software business. (Accenture was spun out from an accounting firm, so in some sense they did accounting first, and in some sense they existed long before they actually were a company.)
And of the companies listed on that wikipedia, page, only IBM, EDS, Lockheed Martin, CSC, Capgemini and SAP existed before the 1980s.
Check again. Microsoft was founded in 1975. Oracle in 1977. And while Accenture did not exist as a separate company before 1989, it started as a department at Arthur Andersen that had been selling software consulting since 1953.
Nearly all of those did other things before entering software.
What exactly did EDS, Computer Sciences Corporation, Capgemini and SAP do before entering software? As far as I can tell, nothing.
In any case, the exception makes the rule: virtually nobody was a professional coder before the early 1980s. Of the few who were, many retired rich and young after two of the largest technology booms in world history. They don't make good examples of career longevity, for what should be obvious reasons.
Again false. There were a lot of professional coders before the early 1980s. Most worked in the mainframe world. Much of their code is still running today. And very, very few of them retired rich and young. (Certainly the ones that I know didn't.)
Fine. The software industry is 35 years old. You're picking nits.
"What exactly did EDS, Computer Sciences Corporation, Capgemini and SAP do before entering software? As far as I can tell, nothing."
The same thing as that Arthur Andersen group that you're classifying as part of the "software" industry. Mainframe hardware sales and consulting:
"GE asked Arthur Andersen to automate payroll processing and manufacturing at GE's Appliance Park facility near Louisville, Kentucky. Arthur Andersen recommended installation of a UNIVAC I computer and printer, which resulted in the first commercially owned computer installation in the United States in 1954."
I never said that there weren't any software developers before 1980 -- I said that there wasn't a software industry, as we know it. That mainframes were first sold in the 1950s is not evidence to the contrary.
However despite there not being a recognized market, software that was produced for one client could and did get sold to others. And as the 60s progressed there came to be enough of these pieces of software out there that the first regular catalog of software products for sale got going early in 1967. By the end of the 60s there were hundreds of software packages for sale, and IBM declared that it would get into that business starting January 1, 1970 by unbundling some of its software from its hardware.
By that point there is no question that there was such a thing as a software industry. Small? Yes. But definitely present at a surprisingly early point.
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/08/google_age_discr...
So much so that a bunch of people agree with you and it's a defining norm.
Note that the article is talking about the obscenely rich, like the Facebooks and the Googles. There's no need to be obscenely rich to retire, afford healthcare, treat your lovely soon-to-be-cancerous wife. Above a certain point, having more money gives diminishing returns on quality of life. After that, it's just a scorecard as someone will almost always be more rich than you.
But we think we do need to be obscenely rich, and that it's our role, nay our purpose to do so. It's a story that's exulted, whispered, and told in our ear so often, we don't realize it anymore.
In the end, you should know yourself. The old masters weren't kidding when they said that the hardest thing to do is not mastery over others, but over yourself. You should know what you value in life and what you want out of it, and that the source of that inspiration comes from within.
Because when you buy into other people's values that aren't your own, you may find that when you finally get to the top of the hill at the expense of everything else, what you really wanted wasn't there at all. And that's what she's warning her friend about.
She seems to think people have these thoughts only because the media whispers it to them. Unfortunately, there is also a degree of truth to them, and the media merely exploits this truth. It does matter how pretty you are (especially as a woman), and it does matter how rich you are.
She's talking about low six-figures vs empire rich billions.
She makes no claims if one makes below that.
Of course having a sizeable amount of savings is important for all the things you described. Yet the "low six-figures" income of her first example is probably largely sufficient to handle these.
You don't need to start a company to have enough money to retire. And of course if you choose to start a company you're trading increased likelihood of being severely short of funds at some stage in the short term for the possibility of being rich later in life.
How many founders on here can honestly say their main motivation is maximising their chances of survival in old age?
All of the possibilities you mention are much more likely to be handled by a) Good budgeting b) A solid career as an employee or an independent contractor
The reason to start your own business is because you want the challenge, and the satisfaction of building something important.
If you have a desperate need to have a few million in the bank, your best shot is to to get a good job, learn about investment, and start living cheaply.
Once you hit late 40s to 50s, people won't pay you a high salary for a typical line position.
So at that point, you either continue to work for low wages, possibly being shifted within the company to doing sales on commission, being a trainer, or moved to a low-wage country.
Or you are independently wealthy by then.