Thanks for asking this.
I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.
I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.
I am discovering that I need to significantly increase prices to compensate for the additional navel-gazing inherent in working with a large company.
It's one of the reasons I still remain bullish on the strengths of small companies: large ones just begin attracting people who apparently enjoy frittering their education and talents away on pointless zoom calls.
Meetings are a way of "doing something" without actually doing something. Most megacorps waste millions spinning their wheels on nonsense, but they're established and make money so it doesn't matter.
A strong small team working on a specialized product will always win - that's why they get gobbled up eventually by the megacorps - there's no way they can compete with that internally.
Also, strong, small teams usually don't scale well - which is why they sell themselves to megacorps who can (e.g. megacorps are much better when it's time to localize to 20 countries on 3 continents and navigate the legal labyrinth necessitated. All that work requires meetings to coordinate, even if legal ends up only asking the engineer a single question)
There's too much bureaucracy to innovate. A potentially great idea could be snuffed out because it threatens the internal ambition of a middle manager, or the silos required to overcome results in burnout and good devs leaving. Even if a good idea is approved, you need 20 different teams, requiring 20 different meetings, and overall meetings, and then you need status meetings to watch the budget, etc etc.
> Also, strong, small teams usually don't scale well - which is why they sell themselves to megacorps who can
They sell to megacorps to make money, not to scale their product.
I should have been more explicit. Scale is the arbitrage opportunity exploited by megacorps: Buying an upstart at $X means they project that they can make a multiple of $X out of the transaction, based on their ability to scale (or integration with other products). If smaller team could easily make the same multiple of $X, then they wouldn't sell at $X.
I find smaller or more experimental companies to be much more unstable, and in my thirties I just want something stable and nice so I can save money and retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40.
Just want to be done with it
Historically, about 4% is the safe drawdown rate. FIRE folks tend to be a little more conservative than that, though, because of the even longer time horizon involved with retiring earlier.
Check out a tool like https://www.firecalc.com/ that is designed to run backtested simulations to see if your drawdown rate from your starting assets would historically be safe for your time horizon. The UI is clunky but the math is good.
Its a mix of some big Investment Trusts some wealth protection like Personal Assets RIT and Capital Gearing and a few more speculative bets
The conventional wisdom in this community is that if you invest a sum of money in equities, you can withdraw a certain percentage annually without ever running out of money. That is, you mostly live off of the growth of your investments. Generally, 4% (inflation adjusted) is considered a safe withdraw rate. So if you have a million dollars, and you can live off of 40K a year or less indefinitely, then you can retire.
Obviously this is a simplification and there are more considerations. Let me know if you have any questions. This is a topic I am passionate about and happy to give my 2 cents on.
One conclusion I've come to is that after people "retire early", they almost never actually stop making money. It just tends to end up being more entrepreneurial stuff that they make money off.
You don't "have to" work, but you "might as well", and all the sudden you may even find yourself in a more lucrative gig than you started with because you changed your focus and found a niche you can fill nicely.
Life is too short to do anything else in my opinion. unless I guess I end up with a family but that's not really in my plans
This basically means either Southeast Asia, or some parts of Latin America. Asian languages tend to be extremely hard, and it might be a lot easier to sort of blend in with the populace in Latin America. The last thing I want to do in my retirement is draw needless attention to myself.
You realize the median US household income is like $40k/ year right?
The median American household doesn't have all this luxuries.
I suppose that's one assumption to make. You know that the last time the US GDP grew more than 4% was back in 2000, right? And 2010 worldwide? Both with a continued downward trend since at least the 60's?
(This obviously doesn't preclude >4% ROI, but that in turn means increasing income inequality, and at some point, there's a price to be paid for that)
It has been outpacing GDP because increasingly, production is being concentrated in fewer, larger companies. So right now, they are growing. There are limits to that growth if GDP isn't growing as well - there are only so many smaller companies you can put out of business.
This - investing into SPX, or VFIAX, or any other market aggregate - is a viable strategy in the face of unlimited growth. It's a reasonable mid-term strategy. It's entirely unclear that there will be unchecked economic growth for 40 years. In fact, there's very good reason to assume there won't.
As for "get some portion to work higher yields" - those yields carry risk. They're not just making you more money, you stand a better chance to lose money, too. Which in turn means much less return, even if you manage to maintain 4%.
And to make matters worse, you're timing dependent - if you'd invested $1M in 1999, you would've been back to $1M in 2012. Except, if you'd lived off it for those 13 years, you'd be down to half your initial investment, ~$480K.
FIRE is a high-risk strategy. I'm not saying it can't work out, but over 40 years, there are a lot of things that can happen, and most FIRE proponents have very small safety margins. The crux is that that doesn't seem particularly problematic in your 20s and 30s - worst case, you start again, right? Except "start again" in your 50s, 60s, 70s is a really sucky proposition.
Ultimately, everybody takes their own risks, but let's not underplay those risks.
And there are a dozen TSLA on the horizon.
And the market keeps making new ones.
In the Atlanta area for example, there are plenty of nice 2-3 bedroom houses for $200,000 or even less, which puts your mortgage at $1,000 / mo. That leaves $1,500 / mo for a car, utilities, and food, which is plenty doable. Rent out a room if you want to for more income.
That would change the employment calculus for a ton of people.
It's hard to figure how much to save for kids college, because the spectrum is so wide. For example, do you plan for the worst case scenario (ivy league, no scholarship or out of state state school, no scholarship) -- $250k and climbing.
Or the best case scenario (they take tons of ap courses and courses at local cc until transferring their jr year to in state school with full tuition scholarship) -- ~$20k?
Maybe try to aim for the midpoint? It's a hard problem.
What I've read that mad sense to me, though, is that kids can borrow for college and you can't borrow for retirement (reverse mortgage notwithstanding).
If you want to get sucked into every ad campaign that comes along, you'll end up broke even if you get a huge windfall. Which is in fact exactly what happens to many lottery winners, sports stars, musicians, child actors...
I suspect the problem of sport stars et cetera is that they have to focus most of their time on their career, thus most don't have time to learn about finance (and not being from rich families means they can't simply copy the strategy of their parents), but it is publicly known that they are rich, and there are scammers who specialize on exactly this kind of victim. That is, I suspect that many sport stars will at some moment of their life meet a "financial advisor" with references from fellow sport stars, who offers to take care of their finance, and they go "lucky me, now I can focus 100% on my training", only to find out later that the money is gone.
To get rich, you need two different skills -- one to make money, and one to keep it -- and they both compete for your time. If you only focus on being good at what you do professionally, you may see lot of money flowing through your hands, but the part that you don't spend will somehow disappear anyway.
> Most people who get rich get that way by saving money. That means living on less money than you can make. Indefinitely.
That's true, but it is much easier to save money if you already started with a large amount. With enough starting money, it simply means not spending more than the interest you get (after adjusting for inflation).
Anecdotally and ironically, many tech people that do this end up making a loads of money after they "retire". They don't sit on a beach and do nothing. The ability to be highly selective about what they work on, and to defer any compensation, often leads them to invest all their time on software projects they are passionate about, which not infrequently ends up throwing off a large amount of incidental income even though that wasn't the objective per se. I like the term "recreationally employed" to describe this lifestyle. I know many engineers who ended here and some of them make more money "retired" than they did work the 9-to-5 grind at a big company.
Shoot, the article yesterday had me searching for how I can apply to Gumroad on top of my day job. They were claiming $50-250 per hour with as little as 10 hours a week. You want to save money? Have a stable day job and work at Gumroad for 10 hours a week. With such a short work week I can't imagine you'd be doing much more than simple bug fixes. I can swing 2 hours of that a day.
> retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40.
You might have to set your sights a little higher. That's not gonna carry you to potentially 85 years old.
Though I have yet to figure out what they’re really about.
An easy way to pass the time? People relying on them to validate their salary? The only way a weasly middle manager can get himself heard? Cargo culting? Probably a mixture of all and more.
Basically nothing can be done / no decisions made without a meeting. Why? Because X number of people feel they need buy in. If you don't get them onboard and give them a chance to voice opinions you'll be pushing uphill to get work done.
And meetings are actually a fairly effective way to do that -- you have a group's attention for a set amount of time. If you just sent a doc then you'd have to follow up, etc.
That sort of becomes the default, so there are meetings even when that sort of buy in isn't necessary, bc meetings are just how things get done.
Now back at another startup (10 people), we have no meetings other than a 20 minute Monday call for some sync-up that otherwise doesn't occur naturally. It's wonderful.
And possibly their unproven business model. Which can lead to managers making petty decisions about money and individual worth.
Since not every 10-person startup becomes the next Google. Instead, most of them becomes the next Froogle, that probably shouldn’t have existed to begin with.
I work at a company this size. We've almost gone under quite a few times. We're still here. It's an interesting way to live. It's certainly not for everyone, but you get an enormous amount of influence and autonomy. The pay isn't "great", but I make enough that my wife can stay home with our three kids and the numbers in the bank account just keep going up.
Of course, a lot of that is lifestyle decisions, but working at a small company is a lifestyle decision as well.
Sure, startups aren't for everyone, just like big corporations aren't for everyone. For me, working for a /particular/ startup is unstable and risky, while working for startups generally has been extremely stable. Other people find them too risky, and that's fine.
Some people love the perceived stability of a large company. OTOH, big corps are known to do across the board RIFs, independent of how well a particular division is doing. Or killing off a whole department on what seems like a whim. YMMV.
In the past 3 years I haven't worked a full year due to the companies I worked for going out of business.
$MEGACORP isn't all bad. The pay is about the same, but I have much better benefits. For the first time in 5 years I have a 401K.
I've decided that I'm not going to work for another startup, unless I'm a founder. That way I have enough potential upside to make it worth the risk.
This was just my experience. These are large companies so there is really no one overall experience, especially at MS.
Oh and I was an IC at both companies. More junior at MS.