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Comment by xxxtentachyon | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has generally tried to take your current approach and has generally been rewarded for it, yours is a refreshing perspective. There's a persistent voice in the back of my head that questions whether I'm acting out of fear, rationality, or just following a happy stasis. It's always reassuring to see the other side of this.

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Noone posts about how their startup exploded and took 5 years of savings in their prime money earning years.

Mine wasn't a startup per se, but my first business exploded, cost me my marriage, six figures of debt and a 70,000 IRS tax bill.

Myself and former cofounder did a blog post like that once (no longer online), but yeah, I agree, there are plenty of negatives of the startup life that isn't talked about so much, especially the toll it can take on your health (both mental and physical), nevermind your bank account, which in our industry isn't thaaat hard to recover.

Are you suggesting that your twenties are prime money earning years? I know that for me my earnings have only gone up over time.

Earnings go up, but so do expenses and responsibilities for most people.

And would your earnings be where they are now if you had a big gap in your twenties where you did a failed startup? (Depends on the experience it gave you, I guess.)

My career is almost entirely startups. ~25 years of it. Several failed. Several paid out inconsequential amounts. It's never been anything but a positive in interviews, as long as you can talk to lessons learned and as long as it doesn't seem like you were the primary reason it failed.

Despite a family, I have more disposable income net of tax now than my gross salary for most of my 20's.

> your twenties are prime money earning years

Yes, your first few jobs in the technology field increase pay greatly over your first few years. Your overall expenses only increase if you decide to get married and have children in this time, but with youth putting that off, it's more common to make a lot of money without massive life changes.

My personal experience is that the older I get, the more I make, even when taking inflation into account.

After 32 years it's only 2.5x what I made when I was 21.

I wrote a blog post with a graph describing my income [0].

[0] https://medium.com/@brian.cunnie/software-engineering-income... special "friends" link does not count against Medium's quota

I follow this approach, too, and I consider myself successful, but I also have no voice questioning me. Consider for yourself if you'll regret what you're doing (or not doing) today ten years from now...

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