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Comment by claydavisss | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: these jobs are increasingly meh and will not be impactful on the local economy.

Lifetime comp (salary + retirement benefits) for Amazonians in Crystal City will probably be less than for comparable Federal workers.

Google is like any other white collar business now - a small cadre of well paid execs surrounded by an army of people just doing ok.

80% of Googlers in NYC will probably have lower lifetime earnings than firefighters or cops once you factor in pensions

These companies are just factories with desks

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You obviously have never gotten an offer from Google nor do you have any idea how much google pays software engineers.

I am not even going to waste my time making a rebuttal to your biased opinion.

You're way off on your compensation figures and comparisons.

New Federal workers don't even get a pension, and the max pay band in the highest CoL areas is $164,200/year. Note that it would typically take decades of experience to reach that, as tenure factors in a lot on which pay band you're in.

You're also vastly overestimating how much police and firefighters make. You're looking at the outlier figures and acting as if it's the norm.

> 80% of Googlers in NYC will probably have lower lifetime earnings than firefighters or cops once you factor in pensions

No way. How much do you think Google entry level fresh graduate engineers earn in total compensation?

You will probably be retired for thirty years. Public employees are getting paid for those years, techies aren't.

I have a relative who is retired CHP. $200k a year total retirement benefits. Show me a rank and file Googler who has that lined up.

Typical techie trajectory will be maximum salary around age forty and then increasing irrelevance

As I tell everyone in tech now - imagine 64. It's coming.

Very, very few retired CHP are getting $200k/year. The average CHP pension is <$100k/year and is worth $2.6 million. Only about 1000 retired CHP are getting more than $100k/year.

The average Googler should be making 300-400k+/yr after 5 years. If that Googler is willing to live on a CHP salary for 30 years, it should be trivial to have saved well over $2.6million. They should, in fact, be able to save well over double that over 30yrs giving you the equivalent of that $200k a year in benefits.

bullshit that the "average" googler is making $400k after just five years, come on, thats just fantasy football.

remember Google employs people like HR and Accounts Receivable and lots of rank-and-file tech

there's really nothing more to do than come back here in twenty years and comment on what will be a flood of stories with titles like:

"Ask HN: was once a staff engineer at Google but since I turned fifty no one will hire me and all new jobs require fluent Mandarin. I'm running out of money, advice?"

The typical HN reader at this point hasn't even experienced a downturn.

Do the likes of CHP still promise that kind of pension?

I have a relative who's retired civil service in Southern California and there was a big dropoff in plan quality after his era.

How much do you think Google NYC or even Amazon engineers make?

How much do you think a firefighter pulls in AFTER retiring?

Most public employees with pensions will probably pull in well over a million after they retire and before they die.

Tech workers are still young as a group so pension envy is still not a thing....but will be

Run the numbers...tech jobs in a tier 1 real estate market isn't that great of a deal. Most likely a nice rental and a slightly underfunded 401k

And don't forget tech is like Logan's Run...have fun looking for work at 50 (when most public employees have started their retirement countdown)

A young googler in his 20s easily pulls in over a million every 4 years...

they also pay taxes and rent

my point was....how much will they "pull in" for the thirty+ years of their retirement?

public employees also don't have to worry about obsessively sharpening their skills every four years or foreign labor or being made irrelevant by cloud services, and they don't care about recessions for the most part

techie Ragnarok is coming within ten years, HN will turn into a giant therapy board

Quality of life in a tech job and risk of injury is also far better than firefighter or cop.

firefighters work four days on, four days off, their quality of life is much higher than yours

chance of injury in firefighting is very low as structure fires become rare...

How sustainable are those retirement benefits/pensions given the finances of many states and municipalities? There is already news about pension cuts, etc in several places and it will likely get worse in the future.

Basically you depend on the local government to make good financial decisions (the fact that your pension is so high might be a counter-signal to that).

If you work in top tech companies and save enough, possibly with the option to relocate to cheaper areas when retired, you can have more ensured returns from investing judiciously in bonds/stocks.

Should you trust your own responsibility to manage finances or the local government you work for?

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