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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

200k is not chump change for every other profession. Get off your high horse. You're not special because you know software.

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> You're not special because you know software.

The article is about how hard it is to recruit developers, so presumably they are in fact at least a little bit special because they know software.

Money really doesn't much once you've hit financial independence. I can live out the rest of my days with $1m invested. $200K-$500k annual salary, hell, even $100k, is enough at that point.

“I can live out the rest of my days with ... $200K-$500k annual salary”

Sorry, but this isn’t “living out the rest of my days with” money, this is a top 5-1% pay range you’ve just suggested. I don’t necessarily disagree with your point but anyone who needs a $500K salary clearly is not financially independent

In the bay area, a $500k annual salary is really not that much in the grand scheme of thngs.

It's literally an elite salary. It makes no sense to imply you're living a frugal, simple life if you need an elite salary to do it.

I wasn't the one who said I was living a frugal life.

You hopped in to defend the point, but go ahead and take your exit then

It's all relative to cost of living (including taxes) and asset prices... even in relative terms though, it is possible to save a lot in the Bay Area if you're not consuming at the high end or have your eyes set on real estate.

I mean, if you're living in an area with COL high enough to eat through $500k, you are splurging on location, which isn't really any less infrugal than it would be to splurge on travel or imported luxury goods.

I'm from Canada. I make ~$100k/yr at the moment. It's considered a top 10% salary. I am content. Top 1% here is ~$200k/yr. It's a lot of money, but not a lot of money is needed frankly for the average Canadian. I don't think I'll ever reach $200k/yr+, so the $100k/yr I'm at I'm thankful for.

Mind you, I'm not including housing. Housing in Vancouver in Toronto require I make more than $200k/yr which further solidifies the fact that Vancouver and Toronto are owned by the wealthy elite. I am not the wealthy elite.

Our social healthcare has us covered in old age. I can live off $30k-40k/yr once retired. That's a 4% withdrawal rate off a 7% globally diversified ETF of $1m.

The problem with housing in Toronto and Vancouver is that like many other commonwealth countries, Canada isn't particularly strict about shady foreign money entering the country and driving up asset prices (in fact, it seems they welcome it).

This is similar to why London real estate is off the charts expensive for the people who live there... this still happens in the US, but it seems like a smaller deal relative to the size of the economy and banking regulations around things like proving source of income are a tad stricter.

There was a ban on foreign investors last year for two full years, but it's mainly a scapegoat. The real problem is realtor facing, with shadow bidding, cheap access to large mortgages, over zealous campaigning of the "Canadian/American dream", and my personal favorite: total lack of rail infrastructure. The GTA does it better than Vancouver, with it's Go Train system et al, but Vancouver is totally cramped with its encircling USA border and mountainous regions. On top of that, with what available land there is, homeowners and city workers petition to prevent construction of new homes. It's NIMBYism at it's finest, allowing homeowners to gladly rake in yearly appreciations at 10-30% while Vancouverites with "generational" down payments of 200-300k out-shadow-bid each other for East Van / Surrey / Coquitlam sloppy seconds.

The silver lining here is remote work. Both Vancouver and Toronto are in dire need of a physical brain drain. Allow remote workers to work from across Canada. The demand for in-city workers will lower and home prices will fall

I think the point he is making is in context of software engineer, which matters. When you have several option to get paid twice, 200k does seem like chump change (in Bay Area at-least). It is all relative. Don't think I'm special or deserve the pay I get, but given I've options no way I'd settle for less for same work.

I wrote banking software that took a company's valuation from $400 million to $6 billion when it went public. That's not a special ability?

There's probably a bunch of other people could have writeen it just as well or better and it wouldn't have made a difference to the valuation of the company anyway.

That's actually quite an insulting thing to say.

But probably true nonetheless.

I'm not going to write a trieste on why my abilities were unique and let me write this software beyond to say I had worked in that specific industry for a long while, but there were not many people that could have pulled it off. When I left, they had to replace me with significantly more people at a significantly higher cost and it cost their growth and stock price quite a bit.

You can throw up what-ifs and counterfactuals all day long - gsibble was the one who wrote the software.

The problem is everyone else who worked for the company could claim the same nexus to adding $5.6bn of value to the company.

Or were you the one that made all that money and the only one who could do it?

> You're not special because you know software.

Of course not. But the market says otherwise. My partner literally saves people's lives on a daily basis and is lucky if she can earn a 1/4 of what I can. I console myself that at least my taxes pay for her salary.

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