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Comment by ro_bit | Hacker News Reader

> Now I’ve got nothing to show of my life of work, while other people who just picked a better company to work at 20 years ago and never left have been growing their wealth by a couple million dollars per year every year for almost their entire career, all working as just some rando middle manager at multi-trillion-dollar companies.

The authors repeated insistence on incredibly inflated salary numbers makes me question if I'm on the outside of some inside joke

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I don’t know, my former colleague joined Amazon back in 2014, just as I quit to start my own company.

He became a solutions architect and got promoted multiple times and now makes close to $1 million a year, he’s not very technical and I’m not even sure what he does. But I’m sure it’s mostly bureaucratic.

It all comes down to hard work and luck, being at the right place at the right time. And you can't have one without the other

"Middle manager" means you're managing managers (i.e. director/vp). Those people do often make $1M+ at FAANG.

But he is certainly still exaggerating, as most people with 20 years experience didn't spend "almost their entire careers" making $1M+.

For his direct peers (very senior), in one particular historical period (~2010-2021), for one particular small set of fangs… they would have, on average be at least 1mm, probably 2 or 3. Due to stock price appreciation. You had to have been very lucky globally speaking, but locally to SV over that time not so rare. So I can understand and appreciate the jealousy, but I wouldn’t expect that set of circumstances to repeat.

You aren't on the outside of a joke you just don't live in the same bubble they live in.

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