Today, after a lot of negotiation, we've agreed that I'll be brought on as a contractor for 3 months at $200/hr.
The difference between those two outcomes is nontrivial. By paying myself through an S corporation, and then distributing out 40% of the income as tax-free dividends, I'll be further magnifying this opportunity.
In my opinion, I wasted too much of my life not doing this. And all it took was playing a little hardball and being willing to walk away.
(For curious readers, my secret superpower was that I already had a banking job I was happy with. Sure, this was my dream job, but from a game theory POV that really doesn't matter. What matters is whether you're spending your days doing something you want. Are you sure you want to make small, lateral movements?)
Part of the reason this is hard to discuss is because I truly never believed that opportunities like this were ever going to be available to someone like me. The choice between a $200k/yr salary and a $200/hr contract is so far of an outlier that you read it on HN and just roll your eyes. Right?
Or at least, I did. For years. And then one day I woke up and realized I should've had kids about 8 years ago. It's a lot harder at 33. It means that by the time they're 18, you'll be so old they can barely relate to you. I try not to think about it too much or I'll get a bit sad.
The real motive was that IVF costs $40k in America. $40k! Forty fucking thousand dollars to have a baby.
That really lit a fire under my ass. I looked at it from the point of view of "Okay, my wife's salary pays the bills. I've heard of people making $40k. It's a thing that happens. How can I make $40k?"
It's more tractable than it seems. But it requires you to be "selfless" in a certain sense: it's so tempting to take a cool programming job that you really enjoy. It was almost physically painful to decline their original offer. It was like, which would you rather do? Banking, or ML? Hell yes I'd rather do ML. Give me that ML!
... Except the salary would be the same. And unlike banking, where everyone is pretty chill (we're all here for the people and the money), ML is often on a time crunch that reminds me of gamedev. Which means I'd be trading a relaxing job for a stressful job, with no compensation other than "being happy with the salary and the work."
Why? Why do that, when you don't need to? All you have to do is say no and shop around. But us programmers rarely seem to do it.
By the way, if the amount of money here seems enormous, it turns out to be roughly standard salary for a Google ML engineer. That was my baseline: step one was to ask a buddy at Google "How much would you get paid for this?" and step two was to refuse offers less than that.
Google pays RSUs, which startups can't offer. But they can pay you equivalent amounts of cash. Think of it like selling your stock today rather than waiting for it to vest: I won't be receiving stock, so I won't have the chance to become a millionaire, but I will be having a reliable stream of "holy crap, my bank account isn't negative for the first time in a decade" amounts of money.
Honestly I think there's something wrong with me, because I can't even talk about this without feeling incredibly guilty. I know (too well) how much people struggle just to make end's meet. And I know how many programmers struggle too. I was one of them. Here I am, making it sound easy.
... but what do you do when it actually is easy? All it requires is for you to focus on it for a year or so. I am incredibly lucky, but I also know how to exploit opportunities that fall in my lap. I encourage you to do the same, dear reader; the diff between me and you isn't as big as you'd think.
I'll console myself that this comment will be buried nice and far down the site, and that the story is falling off anyway. (For some reason, audiences are starting to scare me.) But I did want to encourage some lone reader to stop and think. Are you sure you're not inventing reasons why you can't do this?
If you decided to buy a car for $100k over the course of a year, you'd probably wince. Yet I didn't realize I was doing the same thing. Turns out, you have to focus on making money if you want to make a lot of money.