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Early retirement and, to use rui's word choice, "earn a comfortable income" are not inconsistent.

But to your credit it does sound that rui saved Google (vastly) more money than they ever paid him.

There are hundreds of people in platforms, language tools, ads, search, and probably everywhere in the company that have saved Google way more than they ever got paid. The thing to understand is that Google's scale is not your scale, as an employee. You make a change that saves the company a million dollars per month. The number is large because the company is large, not because you're amazing.

I think a single employee netting even a single digit percentage in a year's worth of effort in improved performance for all of Google is an astonishing accomplishment. Trivializing a "million dollars per month" improvement just says so much about how little programmers here realize their worth to technology companies, and intellectualize ways to justify it.

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