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Comment by bonzini | Hacker News Reader

At levels comparable to Facebook's E7/E8 they absolutely do. Most tech companies do not have an IC ladder that reaches that level.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook&track...

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Even an E5 can become a millionaire pretty quickly. You can definitely save around 100k/yr at that income and with a 6% return (very reasonable) that ends up giving you $4m after 20 years or $8m after 30 years. So you will end up quite well off in retirement.

Most FAANG ICs never reach those levels.

We're talking about several hundreds of people, 99% of which are located in a few high cost of living locations.

Considering the fact that we're talking about millions of individual contributors, these people are statistically insignificant.

You don't need to make 1M a year to become a millionaire. Becoming millionaire doesn't mean having a 1M paycheck a year. You can get there in a couple of years with 0.X * 1M paychecks. For example can be E5 for 5 years at 350K/year, and that gets you there too.

And there's not several hundreds E5s or equivalent, there's thousands+ of them.

$350k paycheck takes a fair amount of time to make a millionaire. You could be paying $72k/year in rent and $130k/year in taxes. If transit food and other expenses are $25k/year you pretty much need an 8 year run to save $1Mil.

I’m also not sure $1M should be the standard for making people rich when the typical house where they live is $1.8M-$2.5M

Or you can just not live in a high cost of living area…

Right. When I worked for Facebook in Boston my partner and I each paid $1500/month for a 2/1 in Cambridge. In-unit dishwasher but coin-op laundry in the basement. I also drove a 10-year-old Nissan.

Maintaining a (grad_student)++ standard of living while working at big tech means your savings go up fast.

Alas, my current monthly mortgage is certainly not $1500.

Sure but most of tech companies have regional income adjustments and generally speaking your income adjusts in proportion to cost of living. Usually that means its worth living in a high cost of living area because your savings also scale. If you get $220k in rural montana instead of $350k in SF I don't think you come out ahead.

But then you got to live in SF…

But the adjustment isn’t that much different.

The adjustment at the FAANG I work at is 15% less for base salary for the lowest cost of living areas. Stock grants are the same, if the stock price were to be perfectly stable this would be bit less than half of my total comp. This means at my level I make ~9% less because I live in the Midwest instead of the Bay Area. You definitely come out ahead.

The adjustment in base for me would have been about the same.

E5 is millionaire net worth accumulation.

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