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Comment by yrgulation | Hacker News Reader

Tech pay is indeed high but not that high and it has a hard ceiling. Thanks to tech i manage to live a pretty decent life style, compared to shop assistants, or say daily construction workers. But going higher means i have to change careers and potentially go into tech business (which is not really tech, but business). A chartered accountant or lawyer, let alone surgeon, would earn as much as i do a day per hour without really “solving problems” in a saturated market (i.e. those jobs dont open source their ip to the point where its worthless).

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I have never hit a ceiling and most of my friends have not either. My income has increased significantly every year of my 20+ year career.

There -are- ceilings within a given company though, which is why job changes every 1-2 years are pretty normal. Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them.

When you do finally max out what any one company will pay but have broad experience, you can pivot to independent consulting where $300-1000/hr is normal, and work the number of hours you want.

"My income has increased significantly every year of my 20+ year career."

"Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them."

I feel like you're living in another reality. I have not had significant increases every year, and I feel that's the experience for the majority of devs. A 30% jump every two years is unimaginable (at least prior to the last 3 years). Maybe you're just a top tier dev and me and everyone I know is just shitty.

How do you jump jobs every 2 years if your shares don't vest for 4?

I have never paid attention to shares or vesting schedules in contracts. I would stay until I had made the improvements I sought out to make and was bored. I would leave with whatever has vested at that point. I do not acknowledge golden handcuffs ever. Leave when you do not enjoy the job anymore, or are not bringing maximal value you know you could elsewhere.

Startup stocks are ephemeral lottery tickets unlikely to ever make as much as 30% base pay bumps every 2ish years.

Now as an independent consultant I have no stock at all and still make more than the total comp of any FAANG friends.

> Now as an independent consultant I have no stock at all and still make more than the total comp of any FAANG friends.

Would love to hear your experiences doing this. I took a break from FAANG to do this, and I was making the same (which is great!) but doing utterly boring work (control over my hours was the point). And now I'm back at FAANG making almost double the equivalent since salaries there accelerate after 15+ years exp. You make 150-250 in the lower bands, but like 350-1M after that.

Can you provide any thoughts on what kind of activities and tools you use on a day to day basis? And how your clients measure your success?

Question for you, have you always moved directly from one job to the next? I'm contemplating leaving my current role and taking a couple months off before the job search, and while I'm not worried about landing a new job, I am concerned that being unemployed may result in lower offers.

Late, but my understanding is that in the non-FAANG world this is extremely true. If you are currently employed you are desirable and they have to lure you away. If not, you are some desperate loser who got fired god-knows-why in the recruiter's eyes.

This may be mitigated at FAANG because they vet heavily on leetcode grind.

Usually you have a cliff of 1 year, getting something like 25% of the shares then. Now include the fact that you got a signing bonus paid for the first 1 or two years, you can get a new signing bonus in a new company… I’ve seen people doing that. From a career progression I had the feeling they were slower and doing just the greedy optimization

There is usually a 1 year cliff. So as long as you stay longer than a year, you're not losing out on any stock options.

In the US, a surgeon would, but a “chartered” accountant or lawyer would have higher probabilities of not having as high of a pay to quality of life ratio.

Even the surgeon would have gone through hell during their 20s and maybe even lower 30s (their best years as a human) to command the $500k+ per year.

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