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The Gods on Hacker News

riknieu.com

348 pointsivm169 comments

Personally, i've always had the opposite thought to all this. Where else can I as one of the non-gods of HN, go to argue with millionaires and billionaires, discuss things with them and be treated the same as them in conversation just based on the things I say?

HN's always seemed like a fairly equalizing place to me. As long as you can form a constructive, useful comment, your post will sit right next to people who make insane amounts of money, and be regarded equally based on its own merits.

There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me, or any conversation probably, in person.

HN is one of the very few places left where one can be openly anonymous without sounding like a 4Chan kook. We don't need to know people's professions/job or titles.

The truth is that players recognize players. The lawyers here can normally spot the other lawyers, and they can always spot the law students. I think it safe to assume the doctors, physicists and soldiers have similar abilities.

How do you know you're recognizing other players though if in the vast majority of interactions you can't verify such a thing due to the anonymity? It's true that it's often easy to tell when another individual here knows less than yourself or has a less matured knowledge on a topic, but recognizing another player just means that they can speak at the same level as yourself. You make the distinction based on the contents of their words and not their identity which gets back to benefits of being anonymous: The only thing that matters is the contents of the discussion.

An interesting way to see this in action is to take a look at any conversation here debating different viewpoints. You'll often have conversations that could coherently be read as between two individuals but every post could have a different author that contributes to the conversation in a way that it doesn't matter who they are. What is said matters much more than who says it.

>> but recognizing another player just means that they can speak at the same level as yourself.

Not levels. It is about experience rather than complexity. Law students, all students generally, get hung up on the minutia of a situation. Old hands see the bigger pictures. The law student will say "That doesn't come in because it is hearsay". The lawyers say "If the cops have it, it almost certainly will come in at trial somehow". The old hands don't bother with such discussions because they know a case is won or lost long long before evidentiary hearings.

By level I don't mean experience or complexity so much as the amount of baseline knowledge needed to take part in a conversation. To use your example, the old hands are fully capable of being part of a discussion on the technicalities of a case with the student, they just realize there's more to it than the technicalities. The conversation is at a lower level because the barrier for entry in experience is lower. Recognizing who someone is from the conversation they're taking part in though is much harder. A historian or police officer could just as well understand that legal cases don't depend as much on technicalities as people think and be capable of taking part in such a conversation without others in that conversation being able to tell the difference between them and a professional lawyer. The best bet then for most parties is to by default treat all others as equals of unknown origin until shown otherwise.

> The truth is that players recognize players. The lawyers here can normally spot the other lawyers, and they can always spot the law students. I think it safe to assume the doctors, physicists and soldiers have similar abilities.

This reminds me of the bar scene in Goodwill Hunting (sans the power/class dynamics):

> CLARK: There's no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities—especially in the southern colonies—could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital—

> WILL: [interrupting] Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

> CLARK: [taken aback] Well as a matter of fact I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of —

> WILL: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from Vickers, Work in Essex County, Page 98, right?

etc.

As someone who never 'made it' and whose CV is a complete joke, feeling like I've contributed to the occasional discussion here has been good for my mental health, and moderation seems to be quite sufficient.

Apologies for the grandiosity, but the oft-denigrated "words on the internet" may be the most significant trace left of the existence of myself and many others long after everyone here is dead. If technology and civilization survive, future data anthropologists have their work cut out for them. The thought of historians combing through ancient threads and trying to piece together a narrative - only, maybe, for a moment perhaps with something I wrote - gives me a glimmer of warmth, like a fireplace on a cold day.

That's funny, because I'd just-as-soon historians never spent so much as a CPU cycle analyzing my posts. I've said some intelligent things, some popular things, some uncomfortable-but-I-suspect-true things, some well-reasoned things, etc.. I've certainly had an impact on the people in my real-life sphere and maybe something I've said online has helped a stranger, too. (Comments here on HN have certainly helped me.) But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too.

Edit: Clarity.

> But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too.

I suspect you're probably doing yourself a disservice but I can certainly think of numerous instances of my own idiocy. I should particularly have learned by now not to browse and contribute to internet forums whilst drunk, for example, because this tends to magnify my idiocy[0].

[0] To be clear, I'm not drunk now.

> But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too.

Every now and then, I come across something phrased in such a way that it makes something in my brain click. This is one of them, and I'm really leaving this comment so I can find it easily again in the future and maybe get it put on my coffee mug or something.

> There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me, or any conversation probably, in person.

In San Francisco there are tech millionaires everywhere. Just like almost every other group, some are nice, gregarious, excited to talk to anyone; others are rude, snobbish and judgmental. You're likely underestimating yourself and others.

This. The side effect is OP is likely humble which is a great side effect. But I’d say it should stop there and not extend into thinking others are better than yourself. A lot of $$$ is people making different decisions and those decisions end up on a bell curve of chance. Some end up making peanuts, a lot make something ok, and some others make millions. I’d say there’s a big fallacy with equating “I got a good dice roll on joining the right startup” with “I am a higher class of individual”.

Haven't been to San Francisco myself, but Vancouverites tend to be cold in general, moreso when there's an obvious class divide between two people.

I've noticed the difference between the kinds of people who will respond to me or the tone of their responses in public just based on what clothes I happen to be wearing that day.

I'm not saying everyone out there is shallow and judging of people, just that people tend to prefer to interact with people they feel is on the same level as them in a public situation.

HN removes all that and leaves just a username and words.

> In San Francisco

I'd wager most people on here are not in San Francisco.

Fewer than 10% in the Bay Area, and far fewer than that in SF.

Sorry, I may have slightly misstated my point... I live in San Francisco, it's just been my experience that wealth and success doesn't always make people inaccessible.

Where else can I as one of the non-gods of HN, go to argue with millionaires and billionaires

To me, what's really great about HN is not the "talking with millionaires and billionaires" thing. It's talking with people who know how to get shit done and some of those people happen to be millionaires and billionaires because they know how to get shit done. Others are lowly PhDs (okay, sometimes someone is both a Phd and a zillionaire).

And they will, in a surprising number of cases, answer your questions in layman's terms even though you are a big fat nobody. Assuming you are not blatantly an over the top asshole about it.

(Whoops. Forgot the not. That's a bad thing.)

I've had the same experience. I always see side projects at the top of the front page and many of these projects are not making $1k MRR, or even $100 MRR, but they're on the front page because everyone knows how difficult it is to make and launch a side project here. I love this community. Yes we have big expectations, yes we all want to do great-things and you see the extremes of that when you see the comments that $1k MRR is not that good. You also see comments that 1000 Inserts Per Second is not that good. It gives you perspective on the amazing people here; who have big dreams and big expectations and I would not want it any other way.

> As long as you can form a constructive, useful comment, your post will sit right next to people who make insane amounts of money, and be regarded equally based on its own merits.

I agree that HN is pretty much the best place on the web for this kind of thing, but I think we can still do better to reduce the number and degree of 'hostile disagreements'. I would like to see us debate charged topics a bit more objectively and constructively and with the genuine desire to understand other points of view. On the other hand, posting here has taught me a lot about how to structure comments to head-off the obnoxious / predictable / low-value responses while still being able to find a fair number of good-faith participants (which isn't to say 'people who agree with me', but rather 'people who can constructively disagree or even challenge my logic when they agree with my conclusion').

Agreed

I'm a mech eng with little to no software knowledge. I only understand concepts from a high level

Even though HN can have a distinct "pro-privacy, pro-free market, SV centered" bent and people getting pedantic about technical detail, I find it has one of the most egalitarian, informative, collaborative and non toxic comment sections on the internet I have found. Expecially considering its size

With the upvote system and user base, I find it filters out the comments to bring the relevant, informative and humble responses to the top

I frequent the site to read the articles relevant to my interests and almost always lurk the discussion in the comments

> HN's always seemed like a fairly equalizing place to me. As long as you can form a constructive, useful comment, your post will sit right next to people who make insane amounts of money, and be regarded equally based on its own merits.

I wonder what causes this - perhaps it's the lack of emphasis on the poster's name (small text, light grey vs profile picture, bold name, etc)?

I'm willing to bet it's a combination of that, the anonymity of most users, the userbase in general, and somewhat opinionated moderation. Whatever it is, I'm glad it exists.

Excellent point. We get to hear from and learn from people we never have been able to here.

I'm not sure I like this. In practice it means people who don't know what they're talking about (but can bullshit) get promoted more than people who earn $500k/year understanding the subject, who can't be bothered to dress their point up or engage in arguments because their time is valuable.

Case in point: I'll give you good odds the person saying $3.7 million "isn't a lot" is not on the ludicrous salary they're citing. It's a dumb sentiment.

More broadly when someone earning half a million says you're wrong about their area of expertise, you should probably just listen. Deep understanding isn't easy to explain, and most people with deep understanding won't explain things laboriously.

To be honest, someone earning half a million a year, or even someone where $3.7 million isn't much money, doesn't tell me a whole lot about how much they know about anything. I'll agree, there's a chance someone earning a high salary has some in depth knowledge in their field.

Or maybe they're a manager with some good connections?

Or hell maybe they have in depth knowledge and they're a manager with good connections.

Maybe that commenter earning a low wage has spent their life immersing themself in that knowledge because they enjoy it but never made it a career.

The amount of money someone has doesn't necessarily correlate to how much they know about something.

Money comes and goes, having lots of it let's you have and do some pretty cool things, let's you not worry about necessities so much, let's you throw some weight around.

But I disagree it's a good indicator of how much knowledge a person has on a subject or that it automatically makes them a trusted authority on something.

What I'm getting at is someone's reputation on a subject is not obvious in Reddit-style forums, so while this does allow the promotion of comments by outsider savants, the vast majority of non-expert comments end up being from people who are good at being pedantic and exaggerating their understanding.

So you do get some outsider savants, and that's cool, but you also get endless waves of BS, superficial observations and contradiction for the sake of contradiction, while opinions from experts that are difficult to understand or digest get ignored (usually downvoted, unless they explicitly credential-drop).

I think both you and the author have entirely valid perspectives. Yes, you can hear from and read comments by all kinds of wildly successful people here, and that can be really cool. You can also hear from people who think $3.7M (I assume this relates to the Basemetrics post) isn't a lot of money even though, for most people and - let's be honest - for most of us, it's a huge and utterly life-changing sum that we'd be happy to walk away with for 7 years work.

From my own perspective, my side-project makes just about enough money that it looks like from August/September most months I can now expect a payment from Google Adsense. Net hosting expenses I'm still not making any money (at all!)[0] but it feels pretty good that the project substantially pays for itself: hosting is getting close to covered, CDN and domain expenses not yet.

I also don't have any time to work on it at the moment because I'm working on my house, but I do have plenty of ideas about how I can grow that revenue into something that perhaps ends up being more substantial. Not mega money, but maybe enough to cover the mortgage after hosting expenses and taxes. That's nice because it will make me a bit less dependent on earning a regular paycheck every month.

[0] I don't really want to get into this but, to pre-empt possible questions about why this is so expensive (greater than the £60/mo threshold for an Adsense payout), I host it on a physical machine that's way more powerful than strictly necessary at the moment. This is primarily because I want to also use that machine for other things, but also because even a few months ago the site was getting hit infrequently enough that on (e.g.) Azure there'd be this horrible startup delay for most users if I went ultra-cheap, and I didn't want that. I went dedicated with Azure a couple of years or so back, which worked out more expensive than the machine I rent from OVH, so I switched to a much beefier physical box. I also use Cloudflare because I serve up a reasonable number of media assets, and using a CDN really reduces the bandwidth hit on my own box. Yes, I could do this more cheaply, but I don't want to because it would yield a worse experience for a non-trivial proportion of my userbase.

> Where else can I as one of the non-gods of HN, go to argue with millionaires and billionaires, discuss things with them and be treated the same as them in conversation just based on the things I say?

It's not quite the same thing, but, StackOverflow. I won't name-drop, but I've conversed with some pretty high-powered people on there, and I've conversed with some other high-powered people here on HN.

I think a lot of the credit goes to the HN moderation team.

> There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me, or any conversation probably, in person.

Imo, you are wrong. Some of these people (even for wealth > $1bn) are just regular folks. The difference is that there are lots of people around them and lots of rinsers, so they are cautious and it is harder to find them in real life. But beyond that, you can have an average, regular discussion with them. A key point is to not think about their wealth much or at all.

I was disappointed by the content of the article as well, I was hoping for something about the incredible amount of insight and wisdom offered freely, as well as the give an take you allude to.

Even putting aside the money thing, I'm always impressed when I see people considered important in the CS-field come and discuss topics casually.

> equally based on its own merits

unless you have a slightly non mainstream opinion on some of the HN dearest, then you get drowned in flags irregardless of merit.

> There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me

A bit of an inferiority complex here, you can’t possibly be that unpleasant in real life.

I don't think their point was about being personally inadequate in any way, just that such conversations are unlikely to actually happen in person.

Bragging about salaries is always annoying; however, it was one of those braggy comments that led me to reconsider my own job so that I ended up working for a FANG company. I had previously just used Glassdoor to check salaries and did not realize it was not giving an accurate picture of the total, more recent compensation offered at these companies. When I realized how much lower my income was compared to what was possible, it motivated me to start practicing and interviewing. I would have never known if it weren't for those posts.

I agree with this. These comments are toxic and sometimes rude, but they also expose a world that many folks don't realize exists (including myself 2-3 years ago).

I realize it exists, and also realize that I'll never be a part of it. And that's ok, even if it makes me feel shitty.

Money is a tool, and like any other tool it may or may not be useful to you. If you want to be a digital nomad on a little boat sailing about then you need much less money than someone who wants to build a mansion and drive a ferrari.

Money does not indicate how valuable you are as a person, it indicates your ability to optimize for money generation. Or put another way, money won't make you happy, don't let the lack of it make you unhappy.

"don't let the lack of it make you unhappy."

It doesn't... that's my wife's job.

LinkedIn has a feature now called LinkedIn salaries if I recall. Pretty cool to get metrics of salaries around your area and at companies you may have interest in. Gives you a decent picture of the pay scale for your job.

After starting to read HN regularly I noticed most of these types of comments are just posturing. Like any forum, the loudest people tend to be the ones that desire/require the most validation from their peers.

> the loudest people tend to be the ones that desire/require the most validation from their peers

I have a theory that IT is split into "doers", i.e. the people who do things, and "talkers", i.e. the people who talk about doing things. By definition, you hear from the talkers more, perhaps because the doers are too busy actually doing things, and to your point there are times when the talkers can sound dismissive of the doers, for whatever reason. But in HN's defence, you do hear more from actual doers here than perhaps anywhere else.

I can see that. I would probably be on here a lot less if I had an interesting job.

What you described is certainly not unique just to the IT industry.

It's a way to stand out in a field crowded with junior and mid tier developers. Show up and talk a big game, and certain other people will listen and assume you're an amazing asset. Not required and perhaps jaded, but it also helps if you have even a tiny semblance of an influencer lifestyle or a type of WeWorkian God complex.

I had a guy tell me once that "if you're not making at least $250k a year, then you failed as a developer". That was his honest life and career advice. It's depressing.

> "if you're not making at least $250k a year, then you failed as a developer"

This is a trope that runs through HN that gets frustrating sometimes. There's often a follow-up comment along the lines of "Only 250k? A fresh grad in the bay area can expect that much in salary, but if you're even average, total comp should be at least double that to be competitive!"

The depressing advice I once recieved from a previous manager: "Not everyone has the potential to be more than a midlevel developer."

I installed an app called “Blind” which is an anonymous social network for SV software engineers. The amount of self doubt, envy, complaining about not being able to work FAANG / feeling underpaid despite working at FAANG is exhausting. So many people in this industry have a toxic mentality.

Blind self-selects for the worst of these attitudes (in addition to the general shittiness of almost any anonymous community). I would not take this as representative of SV. The private forum for my company is amazingly toxic.

Blind is terrible. I think only the toxic ones stick around though. I doubt most people are like this.

Blind is full jerks. Don’t take their advice as gospel.

Yep, and you’ll find that kind of posturing everywhere, just like the personality that tends to do it.

The scale of it carries some pretty great comedy, though.

I’m convinced that most of the users on this site are sitting in their house that they rent with eight other people in their underwear eating beans out of a can.

Well, $450,000 a year doesn't get you far in the bay area.

It only gets you a ~1.5m mortgage, extremely high savings rate, access to private schools, all while living in one of the most beautiful and desirable metropolitan areas in the world.

Basically poverty, in other words.

And what does a $1.5m mortgage get you in the peninsula? Maybe 1000-1200sqft? How lavish...

You don't get an extremely high savings rate either in terms of ratios (unless you live a very economical lifestyle (small apartments/rooms, old/no car, etc.)).

Monthly take-home pay for $450k is ~$21k in California

Monthly mortgage payment for $1.5m is ~$6.5k

Remaining money for literally everything else, almost none of which is more expensive in California: $17.5k, or $210k per year. You could eat out every single night and buy a new BMW twice a year, and still save more than 20% of your take-home pay.

Not only that, but we're talking about salaries for ONE SINGLE PERSON. Married in tech? We're talking a $900k annual salary. Calling this lifestyle "very economical" is so insanely out of touch with how most people live their lives, it's no wonder tech people are hated as completely out of touch.

Edit: Changed $24k to $21k, the calculator I used didn't include state taxes even though California was the chosen state.

It's ~$21k. https://smartasset.com/taxes/paycheck-calculator#5UaGLn7scu

You're not including taxes - no one cares about mortgage in itself. If you include taxes, it's closer to $8k and then you gotta get insurance (which is going to vary wildly by thousands based on where the home is located). If you're unfortunate with taxes + insurance, your monthly payments could end up being as high as $9-10k/month.

> Not only that, but we're talking about salaries for ONE SINGLE PERSON. Married in tech? We're talking a $900k annual salary. Calling this lifestyle "very economical" is so insanely out of touch with how most people live their lives, it's no wonder tech people are hated as completely out of touch.

Sure - if you can manage to get two 1%'er people together then you'll be living the high life but that's not something you should take as common place. Same with assuming that they'll both be working for their entire life before 65. That's like saying, "Imagine if you were Mark Zuckerberg and then married Mark Zuckerberg!!! You'd be doubly rich!"

Btw - if you're at that income - you have to save at least 25% of your net income for retirement and hopefully you do that at a very early age (like 30-35, if you're starting that savings rate at 45 then you're fucked). Social security won't even pay your property tax when you're retired. So, if you expect to live anywhere near your current lifestyle in retirement... you have to save a lot more (percentage wise) than most Americans.

I'm not saying you'll be poor but go look at what house you can get in a decent peninsula neighborhood for $1.5mil. You won't be impressed. You'll have a nice car and can afford some niceties but what you come home to will be a piece of shit compared to your income. e.g. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/856-15th-Ave-Menlo-Park-C...

If I made $450k per year, I'd be retired already, provided I stayed single (8 years into career currently).

Quiet you, back to eating your beans.

He gets to have artisinal fair trade beans.

> Well, $450,000 a year doesn't get you far in the bay area.

Even if that was true, which it's really not, it's especially not true if you consider the extended radius from which people commute into the Bay Area.

It is the optimal investment strategy, or for the effective altruism folks the biggest impact

Sort of tongue in cheek.

Yep it's locker room talk.

This is ridiculous, there are hundreds of thousands of engineers making these large sums of money and it’s not an exclusive crowd. The amount of work it takes to get a midlevel FAANG or similar job is a lot less than to start a business. I honestly think people think it’s “otherworldly” or similarly impossible for themselves because they don’t have the confidence to try, or have some extenuating restriction that makes it feel unattainable.

Of course the author is right that a $3.7m exit is non-trivial and that $1k MRR is not a bad place to start but it’s crazy to call people making larger amounts of money as employees “gods” and likely a disservice to oneself to use that kind of language to make them seem like some far away, impossible to reach or understand group.

> $1k MRR is not a bad place to start

Right. I don't think anyone is claiming it's not hard to get to. Business is tough, yes. But if you're not making more than working part time at McDonald's after a year or two, then you really need to reconsider your plans. Between $1k MRR and making Facebook or Google money, there is a massive gulf of businesses out there making a respectable profit even outside the tech bubble.

The nail salon down the street is making way more than $1k MRR. I shouldn't need to say this, but if you're a tech company making less than the nail salon or corner liquor store then you're doing it wrong. Or your business model is wrong. I mean, that corner liquor store definitely is paying more than $1,000 USD in rent a month.

You make it sound although everyone lives in a city that FAANG companies hire in? Most of us don't, and most of us don't even have the ability to enter the US to try for most of these jobs. I'm well aware of how Bay area skewered HN is but "just get a job at FAANG" is an incredibly patronising attitude

I think this sentiment is primarily exacerbated when people live in lower CoL areas. Folks routinely balk at typical mid-level comp of ~$500k even here on HN so it doesn't surprise me that the knee-jerk reaction is that ~$4M is out of reach.

Frankly, the software industry has an incredibly low barrier to entry compared to other high paying fields (medicine, law). Sure, not everyone will reach some "distinguished engineer" level but you don't really need to in order to live a life of abundance. Nowadays, if you grind enough leetcode you can land something to the tune of $250-300k (in Seattle/Bay Area). Once you factor in stock appreciation and job hopping every 3 years, comp only goes up. I don't make the rules; it is what it is.

I'm a midlevel. I might make $100k if I'm lucky with bonuses and stuff on the east coast. I hate my job and can't wait to retire.

"Hundreds of thousands" at >$500k/yr? Care to share which orifice you pulled that number from?

If I sum up the number of engineers at Google/FB/Apple/Amazon/Netflix I’m already there and if I include engineers from successful unicorns and decacorns, plus older big companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Intuit I’ve added way more people although probably not in the $500k range unless they are like directors. Then there are other groups like HFT/Prop trading/Hedge Funds but those are probably only a few thousand or maybe ten thousand.

Sorry, I meant these companies have experienced (10-20 years) engineers at $500k where younger employees could expect to rise up to that level, not that every employee at these companies are making $500k.

Yeah, still not gonna believe some rando with no data.

Let's look at 2017.

Approx 143M people pay income tax [1]. Incomes above 500k are less than .8% of all incomes. [2] That puts the number to work from at ~1M people. There are >1M doctors in the US [3]. There are >1M lawyers in the US [4]. Those are top earners, excluding stock traders and investors. That will eat up the majority of the 1M people. Anecdotally, I've worked in tech for 30 years and have been at dozens of companies and only the top handful fellows and principles make >500k and that is with thinks like deferred compensation and options. So basically, unless you can show me some data, I don't buy your claims.

[1] https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-u-s-taxpayers-d77a...

[2] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-10/56575-Household-Inc...

[3] https://www.statista.com/topics/1244/physicians/

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/740222/number-of-lawyers...

Check out levels.fyi or blind or the many people here making that much. I didn’t mean to imply that all the engineers at those companies are making $500k although with 10-20 yoe you would probably be making about that much. Also similarly to engineers, definitely not all lawyers or doctors are earning in that range either.

I’m not invested enough in proving the point to find better data (h1bdata is a good start, but IIRC it only includes salary) but as someone who works at one of those companies I can tell you many people I work with are making $500k or more especially with RSU appreciation.

> If I sum up the number of engineers at Google/FB/Apple/Amazon/Netflix I’m already there

If you sum up the number of engineers at FAANGs assuming they average $500k/y you are already... plain wrong.

Agreed, though I would expect the “balking” would be the same whether someone had 10-20 years of experience at a $500k income or 2 years at $250k

"similarly impossible for themselves because they don’t have the confidence to try, or have some extenuating restriction that makes it feel unattainable."

You forgot a reason - my wife won't let me.

That neatly falls under "extenuating restriction that makes it feel unattainable" :)

> hundreds of thousands of engineers ... not an exclusive crowd

100.000 people represent 0.0012 % of the human population

I think a lot of posters assume that their audience lives in the US, and more specifically in a high cost of living coastal city like SF or NYC.

What "a lot" of money is varies dramatically based on where you live. Take a look at how much it costs to [rent a room](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/d/rooms-shares/search/roo) in San Francisco, the cheapest possible housing option for an individual without a family. If you are working full time on a business that has 1k monthly revenue, your income will be less than 1/3 of minimum wage.

On the other hand, in many places in the world as OP pointed out, 1k a month would be enough to live a comfortable lifestyle.

Yes, dollars are really valorized outside of their countries, $1000 is a heck of a lot in most developing countries. I can buy a new freaking car with $5000

I live in a third world country, can confirm.

I am involved in developer hiring process and I see soooo many resumes with failed startups and failed side projects. Achieving any level of decent, persistent MRR and the ability to actually cash out is impressive and a major accomplishment. Nobody talks about the thousands and thousands of failures. So yes you should be very happy with $1000 MRR.

> [$500k] far outstrips what I can reasonably expect to earn in a decade, and I'm a developer working for a fintech startup with a good couple of years under my belt.

Is he saying that $50k/year far outstrips what he can reasonably expect to earn as a fintech dev? If so, he's at least as much of an outlier as the $500k/year folks on the other end.

For better or worse, HN is a SF Bay Area centric forum. U.S. centric beyond that. All the discussion of whats normal needs to be understood through that lens. It's the digital equivalent to coming to SF and saying $50k/yr is crazy high. Sure, but not where you're standing/typing to.

(I'm not saying $500k is normal, nor that his other statements are off)

>Is he saying that $50k/year far outstrips what he can reasonably expect to earn as a fintech dev? If so, he's at least as much of an outlier as the $500k/year folks on the other end.

From what I can tell, this is pretty common for continental Europe. It's the one thing keeping me from leaving the US at this point. For whatever reason, their pay is total crap. Particularly when you include taxes. My take home pay as an uneducated mediocre javascript monkey in the US is probably 3x the average highly skilled senior engineer with a CS degree in the EU.

> For whatever reason, their pay is total crap

The reason is pretty simple. Companies in SF create massive amount of value to the world and the developers capture some portion of the reward. Companies in Europe don't generate anywhere near the same value to the world as compared to SF. So the pay is low.

Yes, I'm from Spain and here a senior dev gets paid around 50-60k. That would be the salary for a junior dev or even an intern in the US. As I junior dev I get paid 26k and it is considered quite high.

Just wondering how does that work out to cover your cost of living? For example how much is rent, food, etc.?

I live in the Bay Area and my home owners insurance (fires, earthquakes), property taxes, etc. are that much.

Very much looking to leave this area in 2022.

Depending on where you live rents can be higher or lower. In richer cities apartments might start at ~1200EUR, in other slightly more remote areas (everything is quite close together regardless..) 700EUR might be a more normal price. These are prices in the northwest of Europe, in Spain they are likely lower. In eastern Europe, much lower.

Most people in Europe with "normal", even though highly skilled jobs do not make large wads of money. Freelancing and consulting is where it's at (or Switzerland).

Intern salaries typically beat that in the SF at the larger companies, which is pretty wild by itself but is obviously just in line with the rest of the pay scale.

Are those figures pre or post tax?

They are before tax

They're not an outlier - more than half of people worldwide live in areas where a fintech dev earns much less than $50k/year. Another commenter is complaining about continental Europe, but South America, Africa and much of Asia each have more developers and (on average) smaller salaries than Europe.

Right, but

> For better or worse, HN is a SF Bay Area centric forum. U.S. centric beyond that. All the discussion of whats normal needs to be understood through that lens.

It's not a SF Bay Area centric forum - I can't find the stats now, but if I recall correctly, a bit more than half of HN commenters are outside of USA and just 10% or less are from Bay Area. So while the topic of the discussion often is about SF companies (but more often than not it's about generic tech issues that are interesting everywhere), this is a quite global forum and the discussion here quite clearly is not properly understood through a lens focused solely on Bay Area, as 90% of people in that discussion are from elsewhere.

Huh, I'll be damned. I found some stats (from 2011) that were roughly 20% SF & NY (bucketed together), 30% the rest of the U.S., 30% Europe, and 20% elsewhere. I'm surprised. 20% for two cities, and 50% for one country are still a pretty heavy focus, but definitely not to the degree I'd previously thought.

I think the value was the $3.7M mentioned, not $500k.

I love HN but reading the comments is sometimes the most eye rolling thing I could possibly imagine doing. Devoid of humor and personality in favor of some kind of robotic logic-only approach. I get some people want it to be purely academic but it's a public forum and is inherently non-academic. And that doesn't even mention the "impartial" moderation. It's no wonder HN commenters get made fun of mercilessly outside of HN.

I'm not sure it's that these people are "gods" living with unimaginable amounts of money but it might just be an exaggerated form of flexing.

That could explain why the comments are often out of touch with the post at hand - their goal isn't to provide insight with that comment, but more to show off.

I would understand this kind of posturing on Facebook or Instagram, where at least you have pictures and videos to back up your flex on your followers. But why do it on an anonymous forum where no one knows you nor will remember your username after the few seconds they read your comment?

HN is far from anonymous and this type of validation is just about being seen, not making a solid, lasting impression.

> But why do it on an anonymous forum where no one knows you nor will remember your username after the few seconds they read your comment?

Because this forum is attached to a billion dollar Silicon Valley investment firm and Very Important People might wander past the water cooler, and people want to signal their affinity with the Cool Kids tribe. Because there's this impression, deserved or not, that being on Hacker News marks you as one of the intellectual, cultural and technical elites. Or that it would if you tried hard enough.

MRR - Monthly Recurring Revenue, in case anyone else is wondering.

So here is a story about Germany, a standard western country: I recently started in IT freelancing and the loans are crazy compared to most other jobs in this country. It depends a bit on the clients, but in the finance sector 1000€/day are standard. Many colleagues tell me they would not work for less then 100€/hour.

Coming from academia where you are lucky with a 2000€/month postdoc position, this is insane. It feels completely detached from the rest of society. Even a professor, judge or director doesn't make more then 8000€/month (netto).

I thought most postdocs in Germany were on TV-L 13? That should be at least around 2500€ net, right? If you're at 100%, of course, but I would think most postdocs are.

Yes, you are right. Academia is subject to a wag agreement and 100% E-13 corresponds to roughly 4000€ gross (brutto) and 2370€ net. Cf. http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/allg/

When you are contracting, e1000/day doesn't tranlate into ((552) - 25) 1000 * 0.6 net income in the way a salaried position does. If you only just started contracting, beware of thinking that it does...

Can you explain me the overhead costs you have when contracting? Of course you have to pay for your office and equipment yourself. You also might have to pay (more) for health and social insurance, depending on the country where you live in. The same applies for tax (such as VAT). Also, you have to deal with holidays and off-time for yourself.

But given that, what more is the difference between contracting and being employed?

The first thing that came to mind was "All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"

But yeah, all the things you mention. I think it's conservative but not unreasonable to use as a rule of thumb that your net take home is about half of what a 'naive' calculation would net you. Especially in the beginning where you need to reserve a certain part of your revenues as a buffer for economic downturns; 6 months at the least, better a year. Back in May/April, it was the contractors that got the boot first. From what I can tell in IT they've mostly rebounded, but in previous crises that didn't happen so soon.

And you can either choose to work with a middle man, who will take a sizeable cut of your revenue, or do your own customer development, which takes a lot of time. Yes there are people who work for the same customer months on end for many years, but a) that's dodgy from a tax perspective, and b) in those cases you generally don't get to charge e1000/day.

All I'm saying is - grass is always greener on the other side. Yes as a contractor/consultant you'll make (a lot) more as a programmer in Europe, but not as much as the proverbial e1000/day rate makes it out to be.

I think each one has different number but here is a good guide on how to calculate your hourly rate. Mine is about x2.25

https://jenniferbourn.com/calculate-freelance-hourly-rate/

Also, in several countries that I know of, there are websites (the one I have in mind is by a union, but I've seen others in the past) that list out in excruciating detail what sort of costs you need to take into account when setting your (minimum) rates. It varies quite a bit by country.

I've been on this website for a very long time and one of my main rules of thumb is to avoid almost all discussions regarding compensation + VC money + start-ups and the like, it's pretty doable.

I'm a FAANG engineers making a bunch of money, and I mostly agree with what he's saying in this piece. $1,000 MRR is great! I'm starting up a side project and hope to make $100MRR in the first year. (I don't want to spend all of my free time on it, but want to give it a go.)

Before working for FAANG, I had my own business. I was able to pay myself a salary that supported me and my spouse (who also worked) in the MidWest, and it was an exhausting 24/7 job. (I literally answered a tech support call at 3AM on occasion.) Any positive amount of money coming in is great!

FWIW, I make the kind of money he's talking about and I still think that an extra $600/mo. is useful. I just refinanced my mortgage to save ~$400/mo. I'm probably going to move to a different internet provider because mine jacked up prices. It's not at all ridiculous to think that it's good to save money no matter how much you make. (You do have to weigh the amount of time it takes to save the money, though. As you make more, you tend to be less willing to spend a lot of time on doing things to save smaller amounts of money.)

You literally earn 6 times my salary, and I bought my first house, paid cash, no loans after saving a bit a few years.

How do you even manage to burn so much money?

I think it's fair to say that the 80/20 rule applies here. 80% of us are on fair wages for our skill set, and are mostly in semi-comfortable jobs, and are mostly OK with that.

The other 20%... well good on you, but not everyone is cut out for working 20 hour days, 7 days a week for months on end on a startup that may or may not make any money.

Personally, as long as I can feed myself, pay my bills, and look after my family, I'm happy. Also for me, only having to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, is a bonus.

I'd like to push back gently on the notion that you have to work some kind of insane hours to reach the upper tiers of software engineer compensation. While getting a job at the large "prestigious" companies is very competitive, once you get the job it doesn't take any particularly heroic effort to maintain it.

My one great skill, so far, has been to wisely choose fantastic managers at random. I’d strongly suggest everyone randomly choose a series of great managers.

I'm not sure if this is a sarcastic remark but I don't think your past managers will dictate your entry into FAANG very much? A lot of it is based off of the technical interviews and less about if you know someone in the company. Admittedly, I know people who have gotten in almost purely off of their personal reputation/former managers.

My past manager moved to a FAANG, and had that FAANG recruit me nonstop for two years.

Yeah - I've seen this second hand with Netflix and LinkedIn. From what I've seen of Facebook and Google - you can't bypass the interview evaluation process as easily as places like Netflix or LinkedIn.

Did you end up joining the FAANG and were able to not get evaluated on interview performance much? Because - getting recruiter emails isn't really a signal of anything, IMO. (I presume everyone in the valley gets the usual 1-5 email recruiter emails everyday)

I ended up moving to the FAANG, the second time I interviewed; I was offered position(s) the first time, but declined. The second time I interviewed was with a group of engineers who were from a recently acquired startup. I am under no impression that'd I'd be hired now; the interview process is way more rigorous.

Indeed. Big tech actually provides both more money and better work-life balance than your typical startup. I think the main tradeoff is that it's more "corporate," but that will depend in large part on your team.

I agree. Being the tiniest cog in an enormous machine is not for everyone. It can be hard to find a sense of purpose.

After a few minor crises this morning tut tutting myself for not shipping and selling more businesses or whatever, seeing someone express the same feelings that I have (even if I know there's loads of us 80%ers out there!) is very comforting, so thank you.

I think, 20% is too a very high number.

It's not the people, it's the entire atmosphere. With companies like Zoom and Uber reaching marketcaps of like $100B within one or two years, can you really expect the people who are capable of building the technical infrastructure of these companies to feel proud of/satisfied with an income of $1k/mo?

Wait I thought the comment the author is picking apart was about $1k MRR for a startup company. That’s much much much different than $1k MRR for a side project.

Exactly. Any kind of money is great for a side project. Startup implies putting food on the table.

Still the author is clearly not from a 1st world country. And at direct conversion rates anything first world is crazy money. Been there done that. My starting yearly salary was like 5k usd - that won’t get you far in most 1st world

Yeah, the comment he's criticising explicitly says $1k mrr for a side project is impressive

Thank you, I was the person that was quoted. The title was startups after 12-24months and my comment is highlighting that's not much for a startup after such a duration, unless they did mean a side project...

If you really want to see people humble-bragging about their salaries go to Blind.

isn't there a different term for that?

'Humble' and 'look at the number of zeros in my salary' don't strike me as a good match :)

Maybe just bragging.

The term is intentionally oxymoronic: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Humble%20Bra...

It is oxymoronic, but I would say it suppose to be used for someone bragging about good deeds in a way to uplift their character.

"Oh I am so tired I spend whole saturday helping X charity"

Saying I make 2x of what you do is just bragging.

In this case, I think the humblebrag is claiming that the money they make isn't that much. To lift an example from the article, it could be something like "my side project only made $1,000 per month, so it wasn't worth continuing to work on".

Yeah, I think I can get behind that statement.

Its also true $1000 per month is not worth the effort /s :)

Humble bragging was used sarcastically in the comment above. It's just bragging.

FAANG engineers aren't necessarily working on the most interesting or most challenging problems. Having worked at a FAANG I know several FAANG engineers making $300k+ while working less than 10-15 hours a week.

Doing the work at these FAANG companies is the easy part. Getting a job there is the harder part. And you generally have to fit a certain profile (target school, age range, geography etc) to be given a shot at an interview. Tech companies are generally a lot less exclusive than other higher paying industries like wall street though, and you can still score an interview at a FAANG even without the right kind of profile.

> That's $600 per month. Extra. From a thing on the side.

> I realise that I live in one of those cheap, unappealing parts of the world, but that kinda money would easily cover me and my family's rent every month, and then some. Do you realise how much of a mental weight that can take off a persons shoulders? To know rent is covered over and above your day-job earnings?

Well yes, exactly that's the issue with comparing salaries without thinking of cost of living. I live in a smallish apartment that's most likely smaller than the OP but pay 4k usd a month for rent. It changes your point of view of what's decent compensation and does mean that to cover the typical expenses, I have to have a much higher salary than in a lot of countries...

It's all relative, is living in a high cost of living environment nice? Yes, in my case because I'm careful and still try to save a lot of my income but it does require me to take certain type of jobs and reduces my ability to take risks. It also comes with a probably less enviable work/life balance..

$500k a year is unbelievable to me (so is $200k)

At my last job I worked alongside a guy that made $160/hr as a contractor which if you work 50 weeks out of the year at 40hrs a week, works out to $320k.

This wasn't at a FAANG, and this wasn't in the Bay Area. The guy was a stellar developer but he didn't have a PhD or anything and was only 5-7 years out of school.

We got to talking one day and he said that the only reason he's making so much is that he was at the right place at the right time, he worked for this place before and they asked him to come back, and offered an insane rate to do so.

Making $200k to $500k in the industry isn't hard (the actual work). The hard part is finding a company that needs someone of your skill level and are willing to pay whatever they need to. Finding that job is going to be the really hard part.

Billable hours != full time hours. Clocking 8 billable hours a day is actually pretty difficult. Think about how many hours of actual solid work you get done a day - for most devs I know, it's 4, maybe 6 or even (rarely) 8 on a day when they're really pushing for something. Those are your billable hours. Futzing around on twitter or HN, eating lunch, making yourself a snack: not billable hours.

Contractors also rarely have a level of stability where they can work every week. Things crop up - your periodic contract renewal takes a week or two to get approved by legal, stuff like that. These factors are broadly why hourly contracting rates can get pretty high.

You think that lawyer who billed you 8 hours actually sat at his desk for 8 hours?

You might not be billing the time you went to the loo, or made yourself a coffee.

Every other professional in the world is.

Are you seriously only billing 4 hours for a full day's work?

Think of it the opposite way round, of when you're in the shower and have the 'ah-ha' moment of how to structure the code. Or the evening stroll after dinner when you suddenly find that nice elegant solution to the gnarly code. Do you run home and put those 5 minutes in toggl? Because it took your brain far more than those 5 minutes to get there.

We have an intellectual job, the down-time is as necessary and critical to the solutions as the time tapping keys. My brain is churning away in the background, laying things out, figuring out solutions. And that's all extremely valuable subconscious processing time that's not going on my own or other client's projects.

>At my last job I worked alongside a guy that made $160/hr as a contractor which if you work 50 weeks out of the year at 40hrs a week, works out to $320k.

$320k as a contractor works out to $160k per year if you're comparing to a W2 salary working directly for the employer, which takes into account taxes, health insurance premiums, job security, unemployment insurance premiums, 401k, HSA, Dependent care FSA, and tons of other tax benefits of W2 income.

Not to mention you usually get 4+ weeks off as a salaried employee, and probably have to work fewer hours in total.

Levels.fyi shows an E5 Facebook salary of 377k, which sounds about what I heard is reality.

I hope the reason you're being downvoted is that you mentioned E5 "salary" but you probably meant "compensation" which includes much more like bonus, initial grant RSUs, refreshers etc.

Either ways, I've always been met with some degree of rancor when people realize that some devs on the west coast make $$$ for doing stuff that isn't rocket science (ex: shoveling protos around). So the downvotes are not terribly surprising.

It may be a bit frustrating to read but it helped me to understand the true value of the work I was doing and what others are being compensated.

I remember my first job age 20 working for a startup that developed an early version of Twitter but designed for neighbors (this was around 2001).

I had to write drivers for a GSM module, write a server to process incoming/outgoing SMS messages, write an API into an SMS-C, build a website for users to interact and administer on. Do it all in java/linux as we had zero investment to buy anything. For all of this I was paid minimum wage (<$250/month) and had zero equity.

It was only through forums like this that I discovered how horrifically exploited I was. This was a long time ago and the founder had no business sense but was smart technically. Business shutdown after 2 years and I went onto bigger and better things. One thing I will say is that silicon valley pays better than anywhere else I've lived in the world (Asia, Africa, Europe).

> That annual salary far outstrips what I can reasonably expect to earn in a decade, and I'm a developer working for a fintech startup with a good couple of years under my belt. For most people in the world, $500K pa is a preposterous amount of money.

There are developers at fintech startups making $50k/year? After 10 years of employement? Maybe the author is just being superlative here, but I find this surprising. Yes $500k a year is a very high salary, but 1/10th of that is a pretty low salary for an experienced developer - particularly for the latter half of that decade.

Depends on skill level, but I'd suggest any developer making less than (70k + 10k * years of experience) take some interviews to check if they are working for below market rate.

This website is an embarrassment

It doesn't seem like the author's reading past the first line of the comment. The HN commenter says 1kMRR from a side project is indeed impressive. Immediately after, the author states "$1000 per month from a side project is considered meh." The entire article is responding to a straw man.

FWIW the original article the comment came from was about 1k MRR startups. I think if you treat it like a startup, you better be making more than 1k/mo after a couple years (or, alternately, losing 100M per month) to be considered impressive.

I agree, making something and actually selling is can be really damn hard.

Actually, making something and giving it away for free and having people use it, still damn hard.

I made a few games that I'm giving away for free, open source and all.. They're not that bad, still , almost nobody knows about them or plays them, and they're in most major linux distributions too.

TIL I'm a "god". Apparently the quiet type, because I don't make the comments the author is referring to.

looks around It sure doesn't feel like heaven around here... In fact, it's been a bit hot, recently...

Being in the global 0.1% or whatever doesn't necessarily make you feel rich or privileged, if you live in one of the most expensive cities in the world and have similar wealth to most people you know. You still end up competing hard for things that are limited in your locality: desirable housing, prestigious opportunities, a desirable partner, the best schools for your kids.

Traveling can help build perspective. Maybe someday moving somewhere less competitive.

I realise this is an "old thread" now, but I only just got back to it.

FWIW, I've travelled more than most - maybe living in a dozen or so countries in the last 50 years or so.

I started out as a docker's brat in the (at the time) slums of Liverpool, in the north west of England. I was the first kid in our family to ever stay at school past 16 and not just "go and get a job"... Getting to where I am hasn't exactly been a walk in the park, but I've made good choices, and been lucky, in about equal parts.

Regardless of all that, your point is well made - in comparison to others not living in a HCOL area, I'm very well off - I could afford to buy my parents a house for their old age, for example, instead of them renting until they die.

My point, though, was exactly your own. Being (in the words of the article) "a god", is only really the perspective from the outside. From where I sit, I have a middling house in a middling part of the Bay Area. The job is well-paid, but the expenses are still very high - I still budget month-to-month, and I still worry about my kid going to school and all the other concerns that your average family has.

The overall strategy is to build up the financial equity and then leave the area, to retire somewhere cheaper and nicer, of which there are legion. I reckon I've got about 5-8 years left before that's a genuine option, which ties in well with the kid going to college (assuming he does). Then I'm out.

It's hard to keep a realistic perspective from inside that bubble. I often wish for things I don't have, including more money, and I often find myself thinking "it's not fair". However, I have a better life than most people in the world by a large margin. I could be poor, disabled, etc, but I'm not. People are starving, dying, and suffering. If anything is unfair, it is how easy I have it. I really have no right to complain, but I still complain to myself internally.

I remember reading recently that the billionaire head of Goldman Sachs doesn't think he is rich, just well off. It turns out there are ten people living in the same apartment building as him that are wealthier. I suspect it's a fairly easy trap to fall into.

>Maybe someday moving somewhere less competitive.

The last think Nowhereville Arkansas needs is bay area monopoly money turning their economy upside down.

Well it won't work if everyone goes to the same place. Most places can tolerate (and maybe even benefit from) a small influx of wealthy outsiders.

I think it's somewhat common for people to move back to where they came from if they get tired of big-city life.

...I don't make the comments the author is referring to

And yet here we are.

That's a little unfair. The parent is making a meta comment.

You are absolutely right. It was unfair, and I am sorry, spacedcowboy!

Indeed

For some people 100 billion is apparently not much money https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21097736

Yet my friend who is PHd on AI at EPFL makes 3k per month (his role idol is Aziz Sancar,whose parents do not know how to read and write, has Nobel prize [0]).

Humanity will be doomed because of this attitude. Those who have kids will be sworn by their next generation however money you made. Contributions to colleges is not same putting money in PHd's pockets.Do I become rude if I say fuck all of these FAANG's oversalaries? [0]https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

This is what the old Shit HN Says[0] Twitter feed should be about!

[0] https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says

Wow first time being called a God! I’d like to thank my 7th grade math teacher... truly speechless !!!

The epidemic of mental illness isn’t from an abundance of arrogance, it’s from an abundance of low self esteem, anxiety, and depression.

most people’s egos are very fragile. No need to bust their bubble prematurely, except to correct technical and serious inaccuracies / understanding of the world for their own benefit.

I think it's unfortunate people reacted to this point in the way that the author has. At least for me, all I'm saying is, look at everything this guy had to go through! And look what his payout is. It's not pissing on the payout, or the guy's effort, or saying he's a mark. It's acknowledging that most businesses don't even get that far, so this is the good case. Meanwhile, you can sit down and make the same money in less time, taking what I would wager to be a significantly larger number of naps. And it doesn't involve magic, or being a big-cheese VP, or any of this other stuff people say.

Now, obviously not everyone is cut out to be an employee, let alone an employee at a big tech co. Nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur, if that fits the cut of your jib better. It's just to say, let's be honest about the risk/reward situation here. It's not high-risk, high-reward compared to getting a big tech job. It's high risk and middling reward. The job route is much less risk with an equal or greater reward. Why is it so horrible to say this??

Obligatory: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

I realize the spectrum isn't limited to startups vs bigCo's (you can be self-employed as a consultant etc.) but the numbers are almost always met with disbelief. Just look at this HN thread where people are accusing each other of being liars or "lazy".

The “gods” of Y Combinator are developers working for well established companies?

And these are people looking down upon someone turning an idea into recurring revenue on their own accord?

So much for the hacker and start up culture there fellas.

These are the comments that should be downvoted for being obnoxiously unhelpful, but they’re propped up as “God”-like.

I guess this is why a lot of quality old timers left HN.

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