Tech salaries are risk premiums
phildini.dev
phildini.dev
If we're extrapolating, this is just saying growing market means growing jobs? I don't know why this is disturbing or perverse.
The opposite is true, if people stopped buying iPhones all those people who support iPhones would be out of a job.
If one whole industry stops hiring then of course the premiums go down. The supply is huge and the demand is low.
Sorry, I feel like this article is taking something simple and making it sound complicated and insightful without necessarily bringing a new insight?
The author has roughly described the concepts of wage inflation and supply-and-demand (for workers, in one industry, and for consumer goods), and reduced almost everything to "risk premium". Risk is everywhere in the economy, yes. The word "premium" implies additional cost over and above a base cost, which encompasses many more factors.
Edit: To be fair, I'm glad that the author and some readers are excited about learning new concepts. I have many similar blog posts written, though admittedly they stay in my drafts folder if I feel they aren't contributing significant insight :)
You should publish them! A blog post doesn't have to be wholly or even slightly novel to be immensely useful for someone.
Right delivery, right place, right time. Others will almost certainly have thought, discussed, written about the same ideas before you but the reader might not land on their blogs or equivalent, and even if they do, the delivery might not speak to them.
They might however land on yours and your delivery may be just right for them.
Anyway, nobody owns ideas - to the reader, whether it's you or someone who thought of it before you delivering the idea doesn't matter - all that matters is the delivery of the idea itself.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261567941_The_Dark_...
I'm also not sure why the author keeps talking about tech wages as being "risk premiums", as opposed to simple supply-and-demand. If being a tech worker is very financially/physically risky, there would be a premium in wages as compared to other similar professions. But that doesn't seem applicable at all to tech workers who enjoy far more security than other professions. If anything, the fact that startup compensation is far lower than FANG salaries, would mean that there is a risk-discount. Not a risk premium.
I usually don't make comments like these, but I'm honestly surprised that this article is sitting on the front page of HN.
Except it doesn't mean a growing market at all, it means increased concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few manipulative zero-sum game mega-corps. Where economists are wrong is that the S&P500 index has become a terrible way to measure economic growth. It mostly measures economic concentration.
Also, by manipulating the market for software engineering talent, megacorps are holding the entire industry hostage. These megacorps don't need so many employees, they only hire them because they can afford it and it allows them to maintain dominance; these are smart people and their skills are basically wasted and their minds atrophy in the midst of mind-numbing bureaucracy.
That's why big tech companies have so much power over politics; through market manipulation (through media influence and job market manipulation), they've created an economic fiction of fast growth and success and they're holding it for ransom over politicians' heads. The politicians have to choose between helping them to perpetuate the fiction or to be blamed for a market crash.
Therefore, it's unlikely that additional sales of iPhones would impact on salaries.
In fact supply and demand is a prerequisite (but apparently not sufficient) for understanding it.
But why do we even discuss it when there is a whole cohort of salaries that actually make no sense in comparison: All of the VP's, CEO's, etc... even stock holders just wasting efficiency collecting dividends from existing wealth and the productivity of others. Why are tech people trying to defend their salaries when we could just point at the next people up the chain?
According to one theory, if you overpay the guy at the top, it makes all the underlings work harder to try and climb up that greasy pole. The more grossly and obviously overpaid that top guy is, the more desirable it is to try and somehow work your way to his position.
Sure, it might be a little harder, but to me its absurd to claim the salary difference makes any moral sense.
Could you expand on this? I would be interested in what part you find 'rare' -- I find there are tons of different niches/archetypes that a SWE can have.
- Attention to detail
- High frustration barrier
Over the course of a career those become less and less important as one learns to use the appropriate tools (e.g. linters) and processes, but you still need them to get to that point. Especially for beginners, those two in practice most often break the "everyone can learn to program" trope, that I'd like to be true.
Indeed. Everyone can learn to write code. Not everyone can learn to program.
http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009...
The person who for some reason is up on a Saturday night reading the NGINX source code in C to better implement their company's Lets Encrypt integration.
The person who actually stepped through Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes the Hard way just because they thought Kubernetes was really cool.
The person who writes code for personal projects during "social hours" where others may be out with friends, out with their significant others, etc.
EDIT: I'll leave it for the integrity/honesty of the comment, but here are some descriptors I wish I'd used in the first place instead of 'autism':
* On the spectrum
* Extreme Introvert
* Socially disconnected
* Ties self-value to work-output in extreme ways
* Seeks joy from work versus social interaction & status
I wouldn't identify any of your examples as signs for someone being on the autistic spectrum.
(And the boundary between BAP and ASD is rather ill-defined and subjective anyway.)
(1) Classical autism
(2) Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
(3) Broader autism phenotype (BAP)
If people were to understand you as talking about (3), well I don't think you said anything inaccurate. You obviously weren't talking about most individuals included under (1). As far as (2) goes, well at one end (2) includes (1), and at the other end (2) has a very vague boundary with (3).
Everyone seems to be missing this. It doesn't have to be in the DSM criteria, the parent poster is talking about the popular view.
I don't necessarily agree – I don't seek joy from work but I do things that others (my wife included) would consider as "work". The moment you tackle that label on them – or whenever I lose control of what I'm supposed to be doing – I'll no longer have the same joy.
> The person who for some reason is up on a Saturday night reading the NGINX source code in C
Sigh
Now this I have issue with. I think the best programmers I know will do something like this out of their own self interest. Maybe they are setting up some elaborate and over-engineered system for their own amusement.
If this is for work, though? You bet your ass I'll be reading that NGINX source code, if I have to, during work hours, however loosely defined those are. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes your mind will be so focused on something that it _just won't let go_. In which case, fine, Monday can't wait and I'll try this thing. As long as there is no expectations from the part of the company.
Saturday night I'll be mucking around with 3d printing, game engines, programming my own blog software for the 30th time in a new Scheme dialect, anything. Just not work.
EDIT: I'm not suggesting a large company is going to hire me as CEO...
Since the OP mentioned Matt Levine's Money Stuff, here's a fun little bit from today's newsletter [1]:
> Every time you read about a workaholic billionaire and think “boy, not me, if I had a billion dollars I’d be on the beach,” the answer is always “well that’s why you don’t have a billion dollars.” If you have the characteristics that enable you to make a billion dollars, you don’t usually turn them off once you get there.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-03/amazon...
But yeah, give me a few millions and I'll slave away for one year, then retire.
And in the next sentence you're questioning why CEOs get paid so much. A good CEO or CFO or CMO can generate value for the company at a scale that's much much larger than what a single programmer does.
During Satya Nadella's reign as the CEO, Microsoft went from people speculating its impending demise to a trillion dollar company. Don't you think he deserves a billion from that $700bn rise in market cap?
TSLA stock will tank the moment Elon Musk decides to step down? In a cynical world, maybe he's just a figurehead and there are others running the show behind the scene, but creating such persona is still something that a CEO has to do.
This is the same old Tesla vs Edison discussion. It's a common misconception among people that it's enough to be a genius lone worker to be able to provide value to a company.
No, nobody deserves a billion dollars, I don't care what they do.
You mean the employees should have asked for higher salaries and refused to work for his company if the company refused to pay? I don't think a single person has claimed that Bloomberg has paid them a single cent less than the salary specified in their contract.
That's the rub, isn't it? This is a protest against market forces, not against people. If I write a book and everybody in the world pays a dollar to read it (JK Rowling), how on earth could anyone say that I shouldn't have a billion dollars? Shouldn't they be ranting at the all the people who gave me the money of their own accord?
In Bloomberg's case, every employee made a conscious decision to work for the company to increase its value, and every employee was paid what they signed up for. What's unfair about it?
The second assumption is that people join companies to "increase their value". That may be true for some people on this forum, but most people join companies for a paycheck, because they can't live without income. If no one had to work to live comfortably, I doubt anyone would care about billionaires.
So he summoned it out of thin air
Leadership is the other side of that coin.
Nobody can actually spend/consume more than ~10% of 1Bn. But if someone is smart enough to make 1Bn, it's probably a good bet for society to "promote that person to being in charge of how most of that 1Bn gets allocated". In most of the civilized world 1Bn doesn't automagically translate into "you're a god now, you can buy off the police and the judges and the government and do whatever". (Now sure, in a corrupt country one could fully spend 1Bn by "buying out" lots of people and institution and making himself a god, but in "the civilized world" it doesn't work, or would require significantly more than 1Bn.)
The alternatives are bureaucracies / central-planning committees. For some things they work well, for some they are catastrophic, but for most thing they are simply very very very suboptimal / wasteful and non-innovative!
Hence we "bet on capitalism" and let the guy "keep" his billion.
(There are issues ofc, one could spend a significant part of the money outside of the "legal market of civilized society" or use them to subtly "bend the system"... hence it's probably a good idea to cap personal wealth at 1Bn or smth like that and force other forms of power be shared or politically mediated. Or to just monitor that the use of the money is on goods and services that are actually legally buyable and are "bought to be used or sold at a profit" instead of "bought to profit the buyer and buy his servitude" or other schemes, or not on fake donations that buy influence.)
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/11/18/...
If somebody single-handedly invented a cure for all cancer and made it free to the world... you'd have a hard time convincing me that person didn't deserve a billion dollars.
Bad CEOs get a severance package on millions and go working elsewhere.
If you're a bad programmer, your failures aren't public and you can job hop to the next gullible company.
I don’t really think that is true at all.
Both programmers and CEOs (and others) can be "force multipliers". If they're really good, they can help their company do better than the sum of the parts.
If the programmer is mostly working on code it's usually easy to discover if they're detrimental. Though if they're doing more fleeting stuff like design, it can be more difficult because the effects are less direct.
In a similar way, a CEOs performance can easily be masked by other factors, such as the market in general and good employees. Say the company increases sales by 10x, but most other candidate CEOs could have done 20-30x or more.
That said, I do think there's some other factors at play when hiring CEOs, as some with known repeated terrible histories still get hired etc.
Based on the numbers, usually it's luck. It isn't to say that there are some outstanding CEOs. But the majority are in the mediocre camp and just get lucky.
https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/study-luck-looking-the-par...
This is an extremely optimistic view of the majority of developers who are essentially building glorified Wordpress themes.
A glorified Wordpress theme for a cornershop isn't valuable. The same thing for a redesign that materially affects the decisions of millions of consumers may be super valuable.
If tech salaries were risk premia, you would expect the expected value (weighted average over all foreseeable futures) of compensation packages at startups to be higher than those at established tech giants. This might be true, but it doesn't seem obvious: there are often comments on HN doubting the claims of high packages at tech giants, suggesting the commenters aren't getting paid more at their more risky (p(fired | laid off | shutdown)) jobs.
Software engineering salaries are high because there's competition for the 'best' software engineers. In a competitive hiring market, the absolute upper cap on compensation is the marginal contribution of an additional engineer, less some percentage to account for uncertainties. That marginal contribution is high at the largest tech companies, so salaries are high. Other companies can either pay high, too or, if they can't use a software engineer as efficiently (e.g. because they don't get as much leverage from software, or if their engineering is poorly managed), they won't be willing to pay the market rate.
- developing a training curriculum or materials
- designing operational processes
- developing a brand identity
The difference with software is that the software kind of runs itself, without much need for humans. The examples I gave above are also 'create once and execute many times' things, but they require humans to do the execution.
I don't buy the part about asymmetry of switching costs. It's possible to argue that asymmetry exists in the opposite direction: each employee has one job, so switching jobs is time-consuming and risky; Google has thousands of engineers who have had the same training/experience on internal tools/standards, so it's easy to replace a single engineer when they leave a project.
The other point I made is analogous to Baumol's cost disease except that, instead of applying to different types of job, it applies to different types of employer.
They fired me because they knew they couldn’t afford to keep me and if I was courting these companies, they knew I would get an offer. Which was true.
And if they knew that you were going to get an offer they couldn't match, then obviously you were worth more than what they were paying you. In other words, a great deal for them. Why would they cut that any shorter than they had to?
Was it just good old fashioned spite, cutting off their own nose?
This seems very unlikely. Tech is probably very far from being "solved"; and the minute salaries stop being relatively high, that's when people will stop joining bootcamps and getting CS degrees, instead going back to finance or whatever the hot ticket is at the moment. This will likely cause a dampening effect on tech salaries, cushioning any decline in the short term, and creating a serious talent supply problem in the long term, which will just push salaries even higher.
I think that the truth is, tech is in demand everywhere. Because what tech really is, in many cases, is about improving your processes, automating work, and increasing efficiencies in all sorts of businesses - and that isn't something that has an endpoint. There are still many fields that have barely begun to benefit from what tech has to offer.
For what it's worth, I agree with you as well.
I wish to nitpick this. I think tech has been used for this purpose extensively, but I'd argue "digital toy" or "ultimate writing tool" are just as valid (and slightly less depressing) statement of purpose for software.
You're right that supply responds to demand, but putting that aside there can and will be macro trends in the long term. Will the venture capital frenzy remain forever? Will top firms stock values grow exponentially forever? These questions will have a material effect on engineer salary in the long run
In essence all of'supply' and 'demand' would fall into this risk premium bucket by this interpretation.
> and the cut you’re taking from not working at AppAmaGooFaceSoft.
This pre-supposes that:
A) Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft are the highest paying companies (not only not true for liquid cash, even less true if you factor in start-up equity expectation)
B) Salaries aren't being set by all the other companies as well. [Generalists, at least in the Bay Area, are in a competitive employment market, not an oligopoly]
I can't tell if the argument here is that the market isn't competitive or something else. It's not like FAANG pays high salaries because they are generous.
How do you model those risk premiums against each other? It seems like they should both go infinity in order to keep anyone from ever leaving anywhere.
In the long run, the price of the risk premium = the cost of replacing the employee.
I'm relatively certain that if you established a clearing house for tech jobs the way the AEA does for economists, even if it removed all the uncertainty of who the highest bidder for an employee was, wages would remain high or possibly go higher. There's a lot of room for top tech firms to bid up wages yet, and even the small bootstrapped companies value programmer time pretty highly.
I think programmers’ salaries are weighed down by risk aversion. It’s tough to measure marginal impact, you don’t know want to be punished for being placed on a less productive team, etc. So salary is some function of your expected marginal productivity on an average team but scaled down by a risk premium. If you don’t want to pay this risk premium, trading is an option.
Not clear how this connects with this idea about tech salaries. Where's the uncertain outcome? Person potentially jumps to FAANG? What's the certain outcome in the analogy?
The reason why it doesn’t generalize to the entire tech industry is because not everybody has Big N experience while anyone can buy a government bond.
so the steady state (the Treasury Bond Risk Free Return) is not changing the company to have web-enabled doodads but just collecting the cash from your customers for the next five years.
(I suspect there are plenty of businesses where this might apply - run it to the ground with minimal investment.)
So the risk premium is the cost of the programme to build doodads (the extra ROI is what you will make as a shareholder if you hire a developer to make your doodads.)
This then gives me two risks - the risk that doing nothing tanks the business away faster than predicted, and the risk that the programme fails.
So developer salaries are paid as a risk premium against tech driven change in your industry, and the risk of buy vs build.
So developer salaries might be better compared not against AmaGooFace stopping hiring, but against the spread of SaaS based services that can reduce the risk of a failed build.
Perhaps we should all go out, Luddite fashion, and smash the Looms of our SaaS startups?
There's the feedback loop between the salary competition and the stupidly constrained housing market.
I'm not close to the area so I'm happy to be corrected by those who saw things unfold over the years
We need an acronym for all of them. (Facebook Apple Google Microsoft Amazon Netflix).
This also doesn't take into account the high salaries you can get in NYC in fintech.
Why does it matter if it's cash only? The stock is equivalent to cash unless you care that much about the fluctuation.
At Google we have Autosale so any time I get a stock grant it's automatically sold and deposited into my bank account as cash.
At Microsoft I think they go even further and give you an amount of stock based on the cash value at the time you receive it so you don't even have to worry about price fluctuations. (At least that is my understanding)
I believe the reason FAANG ignores MS is that MS salaries are lower, but that is only based on my personal experience.
It happened that because their employees are paid heavily in stock, the acronym became synonymous to high paying jobs
Hell, a stock offer is something like 30% more valuable than cash over 4 years, though obviously riskier.
This is also why a lot of start-up offers actually blow away faang comp (way higher expected rate of return).. again at expectation.
As companies adopt more remote work strategies, I believe there will be downward pressure on salaries.
The reason I get paid what I'm paid, is because the company hiring me expects the work I do for them to be worth at least that much. If not, they would not hire me.
So the money I'm paid is not "risk premium", it's simply getting paid what you're worth. It could actually still be less than what my work is worth to them, but I don't have a good way of telling, and it's probably still more than what I'd be able to earn making my own product.
Though if there's one profession where it's easy to make your own product with very little risk or investment, it's software engineering, and that's probably the reason why we get paid much closer to what we're worth than many other professions; because to us, leaving and starting out own business is always an option when employers don't want to be reasonable about what they pay us.
Also, there's enormous demand for what we do, so that increases our bargaining power, and therefore our salaries.
So to what extent is our salary risk premium? I suppose an employer could pay us much less than what we think we're worth, and if we have nothing better at the moment, we might take it and leave the moment we find something better. In that case, it would be better for the employer to pay us more to discourage us from leaving.
But is that risk premium? If it is, then practically any salary, and perhaps any cost, can be considered risk premium. I don't see this as a very useful way of looking at things.
And Google and Facebook have little to do with my salary; they barely have any jobs in my field in my country, and I don't want to emigrate. Sure, I could make more if I worked in Silicon Valley, but I don't see that being worth it for me.
At least where I live (Toronto), there are more jobs than (qualified) candidates. At my last job (a very large digital team inside one of the largest corporations in the country), we were hiring up to 20 people per month, and usually interviewing 100+ just to get those 20 people. And still had lots of job openings.
Most candidates would tell us that they're talking to 4-5 other companies, so we often didn't get people even if we made them an offer.
From speaking to colleagues elsewhere in the city and country, most (non-AppAmaGooFaceSoft + Shopify for Canada) companies are in the same boat.
It's an environment where both sides of the market are currently empowered to be highly selective.
Isn't part of this just the standard signal / noise resulting from the fact that most people who are capable of doing the job are currently employed, so a larger than normal number of applicants will be sub-standard, since they are the ones who can't get a job?
We (my previous employer) were quite selective in our screening, so there were plenty of people applying that we turned away.
But I would say the majority of people we interviewed were employed but looking for something better or different.
There are companies who needs software to increase their profits and/or gross margins. There are people who can engineer software.
There are different levels of software complexity (think between Excel spreadsheet's formulae and operating system). There are different skill levels of software engineering.
There are different gross margins obtainable via software of different complexity. There is everlasting competetion between companies for market shares.
Everything else is demand and supply curve from Economy 101.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...
Not at high scale? (say a one-off consulting project). Sucks for you -- labor market is surging from the high scale company's productivity improvements. Be prepared for your labor costs to go up much faster than inflation.
Think about hunting with a bow & arrow vs hunting with a spear. With a bow & arrow (the improved tool), you're able to bring back more meat with less effort, but the productivity of each hunt is higher to the stakeholders (the people eating, in this situation). If it's still very difficult to find hunters with the baseline skills required to not only operate a bow & arrow, but to complete the other necessary aspects of hunting (ability to track the animal, carrying it back, etc), then it makes sense that their pay would continue to increase.
And the internal competition between themselves (that wasn't always there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... )
Unions have long fought to keep demand up for specific industries under this exact logic.
You are worth more when there’s more demand for your (and people like you) labor.
Corporate programmers get access to monopolized technologies, improve them for the owners of the 'intellectual property' they create, so that the corporation they work for can (continue to) extract rents.
Professor G. Standing says this about 'rentiers':
“[Rentier capitalists] assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that economic policies are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have the most unfree market system ever created….
How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?"
"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions."
Source: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
If you max out 401k and IRA this is $275k, which is $168K take home or $14k a month.
1-bedroom in SF + Utilities: $4000
Car: $500
Parking: $200
Groceries: $500
Healthcare (copays/premium contribution): $200
Entertainment (incl drinks, streaming services, going out to eat): $500
Phone: $100
Misc. transit: $200
Debt payments (Student loans): $400
Left over: $7400
If you want a child or buy a home...
A 2-bedroom condo will take $1.5M or $300K for a down payment. Then you have to add insurance + HOA. A 1.2M mortgage + insurance + HOA will be close to $8K/month.
Full-time childcare costs $2K/month (+ need to save for college, then all the costs with raising a child).
Again, if you bought an average house then your left over goes to maybe $3K/month (without account for less regular costs above).
With the SALT restrictions you can't write off more than $10K in state taxes now either, which means basically $0 off your property taxes since that your income tax alone in CA will be more than that.
Personally most "wage workers" aren't in a great state in the US. Is it "normal" for workers to be able to barely save anything while getting into six figure student debt for a college degree? I would say no.
But saving $30k-$40k a year isn't going to cut it if you want a child or save for a downpayment.
I'm super confused here.
EDIT: How is 30-40k/year not enough for a child unless the child is special needs with bad healthcare?
I can't believe this shit.
"I am saving (eventually) millions for retirement, while having thousands of dollars left over each month even after accounting for all my 'entertainment' expenses etc. Is this even a living wage?"
layoffs happen frequently, the average tenure at any one company is only a few years, and ageism is rampant.
annual performance reviews regularly involve getting let go for a non-insignificant number of people.
this is hardly a "company for life" role or industry for most.
Which industry's jobs are "super stable"?
==layoffs happen frequently, the average tenure at any one company is only a few years, and ageism is rampant.==
Are average tenures low because tech companies fire people or because people are leaving for even better jobs? (my anecdotal experience says the latter is more true)
==annual performance reviews regularly involve getting let go for a non-insignificant number of people.==
Again, which industry does this not exist? Have you ever met someone who works in retail?
==this is hardly a "company for life" role or industry for most.==
Do these still exist?
1. Your housing numbers are "luxury" prices. (those are generally numbers you see in say SOMA).
2. Having a car in SF in such premium neighborhoods is a further luxury item.
3. Homes are also way overpriced here compared to rent, but that's another story.
Your childcare numbers are actually more on the average side, but again, $300k for a single earner (with stay at home spouse) is obviously way better than $300k combined -- meaning you either:
A) shouldn't count childcare.
B) it's another luxury item.
Now don't get me wrong - if you are earning $300k a year as a one-earner family, you'll probability still be feeling money woes, but that's more of a testament to the standard of living in your social group being so high (who sends their kids to public schools?? weird!!) than any absolute metric.
Also hard to imagine that the bull run will last forever. A recession will hit the tech industry hard.
Ok...
The top of market salaries come from these large, competitive companies. It is more unusual to be making that much and "resting and vesting" than not.
> If you max out 401k and IRA this is $275k, which is $168K take home or $14k a month.
> Left over: $7400
That sounds like a lot to me? I think the vast majority of the US would absolutely be ecstatic if they could save 7400 a month on top of maxing their 401k.
Just maxing my 401k (with employer match) I'll already have enough for my own retirement. Most people aren't able to do even that though =/
I haven't added less regular expenses like personal travel costs (maybe another $400/mo on average), misc shopping/clothing ($100), and gym membership ($80).
I agree that if you want to live on the high end, $300k might not be sufficiently high end. But it's still high by any reasonable metric.
layoffs happen frequently, the average tenure at any one company is only a few years, and ageism is rampant.
this is hardly a "company for life" role or industry for most.