Comment by deanmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deanmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

If you are a semi-competent software engineer with some experience, move to the Bay Area, get a position at any large company that pays well (350k-500k including RSU is pretty feasible these days), live absolutely frugally (under 40-50k a year), invest the rest in VTSAX+VTIAX and don't keep them in your company stock (perhaps some 30% fixed income too to smooth the ride) and you'll be there in ~5 years with absolutely minimum risk (if the market crashes it might take maybe 7? But if you buy a slice of bonds you'll have dry powder to rebalance into equities as they fall).

I've been doing that for a few years now and I'm at ~1.6M all liquid and on track to retire before I'm 40 (32 now) and I'm a standard software engineer working in infra. I wish I would have known that earlier instead of completely wasting my time working as a startup employee for pennies, but I also had immigration issues (H1B visa) that prevented me from freely navigating the job market (or at least that's what I like to tell myself as a poor excuse for not taking more control of my future sooner...).

If you want to reduce those ~5 years, you can start putting your money in speculative bets (e.g. crypto, leveraged etf, option trading), but that's not my cup of tea, I am way too aware of how much easier it is to go from $1M to $0 than from $0 to $1M.

The biggest advice I have for you is: if you're interested in seeing financial returns on your time/work, don't work for a startup, ever :-)

Could you define semi-competent for us please? :-)

350K - 500K sounds insane for a run of the mill developer.

Maybe I should have said "competent". I myself am a generalist with relatively fair experience in systems, so I do SRE work at Google and got an offer in that range.

Many of my friends are developers who know Python (and just Python), have no deep understanding of underlying computing fundamentals (no network stack, no operating systems, ...) and no special skills (no big data, no machine learning, ...). They all still managed to get a really good offer from FAANG (in the same range I'm mentioning), they just had to pass the typical coding interview puzzles that are really not that difficult if you spend a few weeks seriously training for them.

One thing to keep in mind: Bay Area is massively expensive, so don't disregard my other point of being "very frugal": it is very easy to end up spending 150-200k after tax in cost of living, especially if you feel you "deserve" nice stuff, or you have kids. I grew up poor in a poor country, so living like a student at 32 still feels like luxury to me (I drive a brand new Honda Civic, live by myself, cook good food at home, ...) and allows me to save 200k+ a year, but many people wouldn't be able to do it In the Bay. Many of my peers routinely spend $600+ a month just on Uber Eats/Doordash, which is simply insane to me.

According to Glassdoor, an SRE position at Google in SF averages $136k/yr.

$103k is the low end. $153K is high end.

350k-500k/year is not a typical salary at all, and only a tiny fraction of people would be able to manage to land a position that pays so well.

A talented developer could manage to make 200k-300k with the right experience.

Literally nobody I know (SRE or developers) makes that little in SF, everybody makes at least 250k. I don't pretend to know why glassdoor numbers are so off, but I found the numbers at https://www.levels.fyi/ much more accurate in the current climate. Again, I speak by personal experience and the one of the people in my circles.

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