Ask HN: Why do software engineers always focus on salary and early retirement? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do software engineers always focus on salary and early retirement?

28 pointswinuser37 comments

I noticed over the years that many posts and comments here (especially on topics such as working at startups, jobs, careers, etc.), people are always focused on making a lot of money and retiring early.

I feel this is very demoralizing. I can see this be the case at blue collar types of jobs. But across many professions (medical doctors, researchers, professors, ...), people are actually interested in their work! Why does it not come across that way from software engineers.

It seems, from many posts and comments here, software engineers are just wary of being used and abused by their employers, and looking to make a lot of money early and retire young.

Is anyone here actually excited about writing code, building software systems, and doing this until old age?

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I love my work and want to continue writing code and managing software projects. I would simply like enough money to always be able to work on whatever project I want without worrying about money.

I think for many that is the origin of the obsession with money in the tech community.

I know plenty of rich people and none of them are "retired" in the traditional sense. They instead have more freedom to pursue projects and more resources to change the world.

So I think many of us simply want to escape the rat race.

I think another cause is that the length of the career of a software engineer is shorter than any other engineer. The reason being that a civil engineer from the 70s can still do the same job today. Software and the tech used in it changes so profoundly over a short period that the amount of continuing learning required is immense. To reduce that stress, it would be great to have a large financial nestegg.

Finally, because we work in an industry based on exponential change and disruption, there is more ability to actually get rich. It would be delusional/useless to focus on getting rich as a public high school teacher, but actually feasible for a software engineer.

My reasons why I am maniacal obsessed (yes, I think about it many times a day, every day) about early retirement (more like financial independence than retirement), in order of importance:

1) Grew up dirt poor and I have a constant fear of ending up there again (suffered a lot as a child/teenager when I didn't even have $3 for discretionary expenses, I was incredibly envious of my peers who were better off).

2) (Forced) ageism in the industry: it's incredibly true, regardless of the few outliers who will post here on HN saying "not true, I'm 89 and still professionally coding my life away".

3) Constant stress due to learning: I absolutely love this field and programming is the thing I'm the most capable of doing, but the amount of study I have to do to keep up with what goes on actively eats into my personal life and free time, I have to dedicate many hours a week just to be aware of what is happening in my areas (e.g. frontend development, devops, ...). It's very stressful, to the point where if I could go back I would choose to pursue a more "stable" highly-paid field (e.g. medicine) and keep programming as a hobby.

4) Corporate politics in big companies: it's insane how much of your time will be spent on useless stuff just to drive your manager's personal agenda, think about it. I've being victim of spending months on useless refactory of some even more useless application in big co.

5) Employees treatment in startups: startups tend to have interesting work, but absolutely truly horrible financial incentives, horrible risk/reward and horrible mechanics around equity compensation (and I speak as someone who has been relatively lucky in this field, since the first startup I was in made me ~$100k in equity, and the other one about ~$1M in equity, still less than what I would have made in FAANG, for which I had very lucrative offers, but didn't accept for the bullshit of the previous point).

I'm 32 btw.

>if I could go back I would choose to pursue a more "stable" highly-paid field (e.g. medicine)

I'm fine with the first part of that sentence. But medicine is an awful awful example.

I should have clarified: by stable I didn't mean "reasonable work life balance" or other definitions, I meant the knowledge in the discipline you're practicing is itself stable.

Several of my high school friends are not physicians and, while they have to generally keep up with the latest best practices in their specialty, most of the knowledge they acquired in school never changes for the entirety of their career (so ageism doesn't basically exist), which isn't even remotely true in software engineering and it's a constant source of stress like I initially described.

That's true, you're right, ageism Doesn't really exist. I will say though that seeing my dad, an aging surgeon, there are other stresses. Doing emergency surgery at 3am is a lot more stressful as a tired 60 year old compared to an energetic and confident 35 year old.

I'm always reminded when I'm at his house, and he's on call, how much higher and stressful the stakes are in his line of work.

1) Work is for suckers

2) At this point in time, if you play your cards right, you have the ability to significantly limit the amount of time you are a sucker

I am in my mid-fourties and I can tell you one thing: When you get older, your brain gets slower. And that it not helpful for writing code. There are very bright yong people, and they want a pice of the cake, too. Therefore, it is getting harder, and often frustrating, to keep up with all the changes, and if you do not keep up, your knowledge may be obsolete soon.

Therefore I STRONGLY recommend to focus on high salary and early retirement. This has nothing to do about not being excited about writing code and stuff until your old age. It's just that making money is not getting easier if you are an ageing programmer.

Speak for yourself, I am older and find applying lessons learned creates better architecture and better overall outcomes - when I was younger furiously coding was everything, now I arrange things better and the code is only one component of the outcome of the overall system.

I'm a way better programmer than I used to be 10 years ago. In fact, it's a career choice that seems to age well. A lot of the "programming" skill set is technique, avoiding mistakes, knowing what things to do. These all improve in time.

You don't even have to think faster; things like loops, algorithms, and testing mostly remain the same across languages, but are already burned into your brain as muscle memory.

Principally, for me, it's not the principal of not enjoying the work. The issue is better aptly stated as: Is this what I want to be doing when I'm 70?

I knew a guy in his 50's, worked at the same place for thirty years. Died at work (of a heart attack). There's so many other things in life than just work.

...but the beautiful thing about our profession is that we can keep coding, whether we're employed or not (FOSS). So, why would't you want to race to retirement, to be able to do the other things that you love (say, surfing every morning or painting or hiking or what-have-you) and still code? That's the best of both worlds, really.

At my young-age I'm already afflicted with various stress related illnesses as a result of working in this sector. I'd like to build a buffer for when I eventually do flame out. Money = freedom + options.

> I can see this be the case at blue collar types of jobs. But across many professions (medical doctors, researchers, professors, ...), people are actually interested in their work!

TBH this reads as pretty patronizing and shows a fundamental disrespect/misunderstanding of blue collar workers.

I was, and in many ways still am. And to the degree that I focused on being able to retire early, it was so that I could work on software projects of my choice.

In my case, various forms of adversity struck, and early retirement is no longer possible. And even if it were, my desire to blast away on open source projects has waned considerably.

Plan ahead for the possibility that your preferences might be rather different in twenty years.

I'm into the FIRE stuff. I don't find being interested in your work and having access to early retirement as mutually exclusive.

Having the ability to retire early is not really about retiring — it's about having optionality in your life to choose what you do with your time, whether that's what you work on, where you work, who you work for, or if you even work at all post the point of financial independence that divides "working life" from early retirement.

Primarily, it's the freedom. In other words, many people in this space are more interested in having the option available to them to take time off work and travel for extended periods, take sabbaticals, work on problems of personal interest that might generate no income, start a company for fun, etc. It's more realistic to achieve these goals after hitting a financial independence milestone, however one defines that goal relative to their spending requirements in "retirement".

Secondarily, it serves as "insurance" or a fall back to primary income should you choose to continue working in your current role or in a lower paying job but doing something you find personally fulfilling for other reasons, like a charity or non-profit. Maybe you want to work a blue collar job or two out of curiosity but that would be impractical or financial infeasible compared to an engineering salary. Maybe you want to work on open source full-time.

Tertiarily, there are unique tax optimization opportunities that emerge when you have established wealth but have no to little income in a given tax year.

One of the most popular blogs for learning more about this is Mad FIentist - https://www.madfientist.com/.

>Tertiarily, there are unique tax optimization opportunities that emerge when you have established wealth but have no to little income in a given tax year.

Interesting. Can you briefly mention such opportunities? I know they can be different by country, but still would be good to have an idea. I'll check out the Mad Fientist blog too.

Disclaimer: I'm not an accountant, so my answer here is paraphrasing what I've read from others and may not be the best, is not advice, etc. Since the tax code is always changing, the techniques available will change over time. I always recommend having an accountant or financial advisor.

That said, there are several ways to save money on taxes in the situations that exist around early retirement.

1 - One example is the 0% long-term capital gains tax rate accessible to a low income bracket, which one can put themselves in for a given year when they are living off investments and in control of their withdrawals (vs a normal salary that would exclude you from this bracket).

https://www.physicianonfire.com/the-taxman-leaveth-taxes-in-...

2 - A second strategy to consider is "Backdoor Roth" and Roth IRA conversions.

https://www.physicianonfire.com/backdoor/

https://www.gocurrycracker.com/never-pay-taxes-again/

https://www.madfientist.com/how-to-access-retirement-funds-e...

http://www.mymoneydesign.com/personal-finance-2/retirement/b...

3 - One more is maximizing contributions to an HSA as it combines the tax benefits of a Roth IRA (tax-free withdrawals) and a Traditional IRA (tax-deductible contributions) in one account.

https://www.madfientist.com/ultimate-retirement-account/

https://jlcollinsnh.com/2014/08/18/stocks-part-xxv-hsas-more...

4 - Avoid short-term capital gains tax rates. (Compare the percentages in the 2 tables here.)

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10151...

5 - One last one to keep in mind is tax-loss harvesting and less commonly tax-gain harvesting.

https://www.madfientist.com/tax-loss-harvesting/

https://www.madfientist.com/tax-gain-harvesting/

If you're curious for more FIRE related info, some good subreddits to check out are:

- r/leanfire

- r/financialindependence

- r/personalfinance

Thanks for the detailed answer, I appreciate it. I guess some of the points may not apply to me when I live in India, but some probably will be in common, and the reddits are likely to be of use.

A lot of it is definitely country specific and I have no clue outside the US honestly. It gets even more nuanced if you happen to live in a different country than where your citizenship is. But these posts still could be useful reading to see what strategies you can apply in India.

From those subreddits, in their about sections, there are additional relevant subreddits for outside the US as well.

Great info. Thanks again. Interesting to see from your profile that you work with Python, as I do. Checking out your HN post about your PyCon 2015 talk, and your sites ...

You’re getting a sampling bias in your data, because you’re taking it from this community, which is (duh) focused on getting rich with risky ventures.

There are definitely those of us here who are in it for the technology and are passionate about what we do (i.e. software engineering). I love computer programming. I hope to be doing it until I physically can’t anymore.

It’s a cultural thing too. People in the US generally tend to have a certain idea of a life timeline: before the retirement and after. Not so in many other places. This book has a great discussion on this topic and more https://www.crossculture.com/product/when-cultures-collide/

Because we're one of the few industries where you can make six figures before age 30 without working yourself to death or going to school for a decade. We have the opportunity to save a ton of money years before others. In general most people care more about their salary than the work. You chose two careers (researchers, professors) that may be the exception. Go ask finance people or lawyers what they think.

Finding work that you love and will continue to love for 40 years is really really really hard

They focus on high salary because they can. In other careers there are no high salary options so they can't,

They focus on early retirement because they can. Others would do if they could pull it off. Also as a result of high income and great job security have nothing else to worry about. Gotta worry about something, right?

Retirement doesn't necessarily mean you have to stop coding. It means you can stop coding, if you want, or if you need to.

I would say it is unfair to categorize software engineers as "always focus(ing) on salary and early retirement". It is true that in all fields, especially ones that pay well, there is always people who are in it for the money, and they want to get out as fast as they can. But there are plenty, and I would argue a significant majority, who do it because they love and enjoy it. You have to be careful when judging any field by the vocal minority because it is often just that, a very vocal minority.

I really enjoy writing code every day. I do it less now that I lead a team, but want to do coding of some sort until I die. My only motivation to make more money, is to eventually afford me the freedom to do coding for me.

I think many of the professions you mentioned (medical doctors, researchers, professors, ...) are going to have people with the same mentally as software engineers where the workforce members want to make a lot of money using acquired skills then retire early. There's nothing new with people wanting to make a lot of money while working in order to have a lifestyle of not working.

Likewise, there are software engineers, doctors, researchers, etc. that are more passionate about the work they do than getting to a retirement lifestyle. People find different things to obsess over.

Because it is almost always sucks to work for others :)

I used to be excited about writing code, until I left school (and maybe 5 years after.) Then reality set in.

I love writing code, and more specifically building things!

Being concerned about financials is rational, you don't have to stop doing anything when you have financial freedom... but you have the option to. Additional, work is more meaningful when you don't have to do it.

Even though I want to continue to code, I always worry whether company can still hire me when I become older. If I can't get hired around 50 as a software engineer, I should rather earn lots of money to support my remaining life.

>But across many professions (medical doctors, researchers, professors, ...), people are actually interested in their work!

I'd be very confident that if you psychologically assessed people in those fields they'd almost all be in the top 10% in conscientiousness. Those people feel uncomfortable every hour in which they aren't productive. They work all the time because that's how their brain works and that's what the job demands. That doesn't make them happier. People high in conscientiousness don't necessarily feel good from working a lot, they rather feel bad when not being productive. I invite you to look up statistics about drug usage among medical interns.

because more money = more nice things, and i want to eventually do whatever i want, and you need money to do that

doesn't mean i like my work less. it just means i want to be paid what i'm worth

Because you don't regularly see published hype from the ones NOT in the camp of get rich, retire. You're own perception based on 'software engineers' and 'always' is wrong, and is based on the last 10 years tech startup culture mirage. Everyone wants to be a rockstar, then producer, then record label owner, but not everyone wants to play in the band everyday just cause they love it.

Yeah, depends on how you define "retire". There are plenty of people who hit financial independence and "retire" but still choose to work. I'd go so far as to say you should keep working after you hit financial independence or else life gets kinda drained of its meaning.

For me, "retirement" doesn't mean quitting work but rather having the ability to choose to only work on things I find meaningful. I'm also pretty horrible at dealing with authority and too insistent on knowing why people order me to do stuff at work. Most of the time, I can keep my irritation hidden from others but it would be nice to not have to deal with that irritation at all.

So long as the bulk of your money comes from one or two main "clients," you more or less have to do what they say, and they don't have to explain why. "Retirement" means having a diverse enough source of income that you no longer have to follow orders and can push back or simply decide not to work with them because you don't need the money.

TL;DR - we're obsessed with early retirement because we are human beings who crave autonomy mastery and purpose.

If there were a way to gain all of those benefits without having to pass through the process of accumulating vast sums of material wealth, I would certainly do that instead. And I am trying to find ways to get there without simply saving a ton of money. Having said that, even in the best of situations, human beings are gonna human and that means authoritarian leaders naturally emerge when money is involved. I'd rather have a giant sack of cash to shield myself from that inevitability.

I want to "retire" early so I can program whatever I want, whenever I want. :)

It's about having control over your life. If you have to work it sucks.

You can only go so far with this imo. You're better off learning how to deal with what life throws at you than "being in control".

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