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Comment by pjfin123 | Hacker News Reader

With a $100,000 salary, $50,000 expenses, 30% tax rate, and 5% real returns you could put away $20,000 a year and have a million (2021) dollars in 26 years.

Hardly easy but not out of the realm of possibility for a persistent and highly paid software developer.

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But that still doesn't fit the paradigm presented by using Gates as an example. That you work really hard in your 20s and you're set for life.

If you use his definition of working hard, by the time you are 30-year old software developer you'll have valuable skills and a valuable network in addition to a solid amount of money. You may be unable to _retire_ at 30 but you will, generally speaking, be setup for success for the rest of your life.

So if I worked hard in my 20s, then why don't I have a solid amount of money and am not set up for lifelong sucess?

How did you work hard? What kind of career did you choose? What was your budget like? Did you have any bad luck re health or family? There's many possible reasons, many under your control, some not. Should I assume based on your response and the original article, by hard work you mean not just effort on the job, but also effort in finding work you align with, explored other job types, spent real effort networking, studied for job skills a bunch, and didn't have any bad luck to explain it?

Good grades, got a job I thought was good at the time, great grades in a masters program (expanded network outside the company), became an expert at my company, filled a role on the team 1-2 levels above mine. Then got denied promotions based on political games and contrary to policy, more ignored policy to my detriment, even worked a second job for a while, outsourced my team, forced to switch to even less known tech, etc etc. Got AWS and financial certs, filled a role above my grade (again), more politics, more violation of policy to my detriment, etc etc. No other good job options in this area, wife won't relocate, multiple family health issues in the past year and family commitments (ie my wife walks all over me now that we have a kid) that prevent me from throwing in extra hours, not that I feel much reason to based on past treatment when I used to do that.

Budget has always been very frugal. I make my own cheap beer/wine, make soap, grow food in a garden, almost never take vacations (honeymoon was the only expensive one), cook 99% of the time at home, etc.

You can't trust companies to keep their word. Working hard gets you no where. The greedy people at the top are the ones who get everything and will screw you over constantly. And I'm not even talking about success in terms of $200k+ salary and fancy titles like CTO etc. I'm just talking about success as making it to the natural progression of senior dev and techlead with a salary over $100k.

But I must be a loser who didn't work hard since other people made it.

I'm sorry to here about some of your bad luck and run ins with office politics.

My reading of the Essay was that hard work was necessary for great success not sufficient, which would be a very different claim.

But even that isn't necessarily true. I know of several managers who didn't work hard to get there. Theh were just in the right place at the right time, or in some cases the right gender.

We can abstract this a little. You don't have to work hard. You just have to appear useful to the people in power.

I worked hard in the past. I'm not working hard now - I'm really slacking now that I know I'm screwed. I'm still getting paid the same.

I’m glad you phrased it like that, because I think it explains a lot of the talking past each other that’s going on here.

The article is not titled “How to be rich af”. It’s How to do Great Work.

So Gates is the example here because he built a huge company that made software used by almost every human on earth, and because every reader will know who he is.

I guess the author could have used RMS, or John Carmack, or Bill Joy, but that would have excluded people who aren’t into free software or gaming or Unix etc.

Ideally the money would go into tax-advantaged accounts like 401Ks first, which would reduce the effective tax rate and thus boost savings.

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