Ask HN: Best way to optimize career for money in IT?

Hi,

The best advice I can give is do not go for the money. I fell for it, and all it gave me was unhappiness and stress. I used to earn about 11k a month doing technical work for an American big tech company. It was not worth it. I earn not even half now, but I can smile again and enjoy my life.

That being said, it's really a simple equation and there's a few options.

The lottery way: Try to join a promising startup, or start one yourself. Maybe you will hit it big and have a nice early retirement. This is kind of rare though, despite the lots of news of succesful founders. most people find themselves working shit-tons of hours for average rewards.

The American way: In america, the tech budget is trillions, rather than billions or millions. This due to the large number of HUGE companies there. You can get a regular job for one of them, get stocks from them and do fairly regular working hours. Your pay will be much larger than anywhere else in the world in a general case, as they simply have much more budget to spend to find those high quality engineers.

This does require a certain level of skill, so be dilligent in your learning, buy books, try and understand the domain you are working in fully and be open to learning new things all the time and elevate yourself. You can make a killing (as per most peoples standards) working even fairly simple tech support jobs in the cybersecurity sphere for example.

Some notable companies in that area: Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne. Their start salary for techsupport on their products is fairly big. (I say the American way, because it's my experience, but in essence, this tells you, certain countries might pay more than others in general - Germany is also pretty good, but there you need a degree to fill certain roles. America is more tuned to you having skills rather than papers in my experience).

I did not work _in_ America. just for a company there. It litterally trippled my pay overnight. (and quadruppeled my stress.) It was good for a few years, but i dropped out for a better balance.

My experience in general is: more money == more stress. Chose what fits your lifestyle and mental capacity wisely. Burnout is not a game. I've seen people drop off and never go back to fully working or enjoying life due to severely stress related issues. - Take care of yourself, and beyond that, go for what feels good :)

for the record. i did this without any certifications in cyber nor computing, nor any education. skills and knowlege will take you the way. And those can be gained in any way that fits you personally. They might make it easier to land an interview, but having actual skills will get you through the interview successfully. Everyone has subtle preferences of their own in learning things.

It's good to have something on the side that can 'prove' your skills. like a blog or a github with some public recent 'work'. (this does not need to be superhero stuff, just a proof that you do anything relevant.)

last comment: advice i got from a very professional and good guy who helped me in my early days.

structure your learning. He was a pentester and did it along the lines of: I am learning windows priv-esc now. I am learning linux priv-esc now. I am learning sqli now I am learning XSS now.

Then go over all the topics you wanna learn, becomming expert in them one-by-one. It can be a mess of 1000 things at once. Take lots of notes, save stuff for later, and focus on certain areas one by one.

Thanks a lot for the advice.

Yea I can hear what you wrote about Germany. I currently work with a client who outsources some of their management work to Germany and apart for the titles people have before their names, their technical knowledge is really poor.

As far as the startup route, I'm experimenting with various things on the side but do not rely on them. I suppose it might be worth trying to build some "pluggable" integrations into processes of non-tech companies and charge monthly for the service. I don't wanna call it a SaaS yet, but well see.

I also know a guy that's more on the dev side but he makes really good money being an expert in various banking systems. Rarely works overtime and is fully remote. That sounds like a pretty good strategy as well.

id like to emphasize i didnt say anything about the skill levels of german engineers. ive worked with really talented ones, and poor ones. but for me its impossible to land a job there, having no education and certs. definitely feel u. a lot of people u meet in corporate arent the hackers you expect. like anywhere, most people do the minimum not to get fired. and some people do all the work and suffer burnouts :D. wonderful world!

I completely feel this. I won't go back to paid JavaScript work for less than half a million in a low cost of living area. The alternative is that I will just have to continue to be happy working in something different that isn't a complete race to the bottom.

I'd echo this advice. It's a tale as old as time, young workers chasing money, status, and prestige, only to realize later that they gave years of their life and energy to a faceless corporation.

If you want to optimize for money and time, what you're looking for isn't how much money you can make, you're looking to find the perfect balance of money/stress that will satisfy your financial needs. What is the lowest salary you can make which will still meet your lifestyle needs. You want to aim for that.

Try not to lose sight of the fact that we pursue money for financial independence and leisure in the future. But if your job is one that you enjoy and doesn't burden you, then you can fast forward to the leisure part right now. Every day of your working life will be easy and stress-free. That's huge.

I disagree with your general point that more money == more stress. I switched from working for an EU company to working for a small US one (<100 employees) and it 2.5xed my income overnight (from $100k remote to $250k base remote). I would say my stress levels _decreased_ at this particular US company.

This was a combination of a few things

- The company was financially successful and this lack of financial pressure trickles down through the whole culture.

- The company was expertly managed. I believe the presence of a lot of tech companies is a great training ground for managers in the US. This made my day-to-day easier.

- The coding standards (and that of teammates) were higher and it was less frustrating to work with their codebase.

- Knowing that I was making that kind of money gave me a lot of inner calm because I knew that I would be able to build the kind of wealth that I could retire on. For example, my apartment cost $300,000 and I was getting $250,000 per year. That feels good.

- The company is always talking to me about whether I feel adequately compensated etc. and I was always made to feel I was valued and also that if the company does well, I will too (e.g. I got a random bonus of $100k for a project)

How did I find the job? Literally right here on HN in a Who's Hiring post.

FWIW I am more senior than OP (15 years' engineering experience)

Not a right or wrong answer here either. Have had 215k+ tech jobs since I was 24 and now 30 making 300k.

I’ve learned it’s now so much the amount you get, but the company culture.

To answer question to OP more directly. Save and invest intelligently and don’t spend what you can’t afford. Been fairly frugal and sitting over 1 mil. My dad had a boring desk job and just retired with same philosophy and currently sitting at 10 mil networth.

He drove a truck for 20 years that he sold for 500 bucks and a crappy car he drove for another 15 years that he sold for 1k.

Not saying you need to enter the extreme to have happiness, but financial growth is like a snowball. Slow and steady

This is fairly straightforward imo. Most money is in big tech. Look at levels.fyi to get an idea of the roadmap.

Big tech hires mostly off leetcodes. There are other factors too.

Your journey begins with practicing leetcodes and reading all the books on teachyourselfcs.com

Study dilligently. Watch YouTube courses too but this should be considered supplemental.

Apply for big tech jobs. This will probably take several trys, especially in this market. Just keep applying and studying.

Once you're at a big tech company keep studying, learn from the smartest people you meet, and ship a lot. After a promotion or two apply to Meta (or someone else if they're paying more on levels.fyi at that point, but Meta pays especially well)

Start giving presentations at conferences. At higher levels in big tech this is encouraged and sometimes even expected as part of promo packets. Also practice your writing. Starting on writing a technical book on a subject your an expert in by this time would be good.

Keep shipping, keep learning, keep getting promoted. Once you're on that track you're well on your way to $1M/yr TC.

Okay, sounds solid but dummy question: What are my chances of doing this if I'm from Europe? Also, I don't have a full UNI degree, I dropped out after I got my Bachelors.

Fortunately big tech jobs are available in EU too. Highest salaries might trickier without moving to US, shouldn't be too hard to transfer to US once you get a job at one if you want to. Making quite a high salary without moving is possible too (though still need to be a in a major metro that has big tech companies.)

Getting a US visa without a degree will be extremely difficult, and so migrating may not be an option for you.

There are basically only 2 ways to scale up your income beyond current market rate (nobody would pay you more if they can buy it for cheaper):

1. Obtaining a very unique yet demanded enough expertise, so that certain companies hunt for you because it is critical for the business and there is not many people in the world who can do that (for example building facebook scale datacenters from scratch, or being a creator of java).

2. Having your own business and your own customers.

Optimize the rate, not the money itself. With Remote work, automation, now I can work only around 20 hours a month with a full month salary.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you automate replying to emails? Coding? Or just general productivity?

I'm going to address your TLDR question. In order to get more money, the impact you have in your company needs to be higher. As a manager, you are a multiplier for your team - this is why you get payed more. In order to get that without being a manager, you need to be in a company that allows individual contributors to have independence from the managers, so that ICs can be multipliers for others. Those are usually very big companies, but with a dynamic way of communicating internally - ie. you don't need to go through "gatekeepers" to expand your scope. A place where the manager needs to approve you working on every single task, or a place where engineers report to "project managers" are not that.

Leaving that aside, if you want money go to places where you are on the critical path for the company to make money and become more important to the company by what you are doing there - either solving hard problems, or solving problems that no one wants to touch, or problems that only you know how to solve. The toxic way is to create problems and then solve them; please don't do that, because we have enough of those assholes.

"the impact you have in your company needs to be higher."

Really just the preceived impact.

In addition to all the good technical advice here, I would recommend paying attention to soft skills like written communication, presenting, persuading, reading comprehension, listening, being organised, setting priorities, etc. They will open up doors that you may not value now but perhaps might later. And they are the kind of skills you build just by paying attention to them every day.

I think a lot of it is luck.

I usually take (half seriously) Machiavelli's view: luck does play a role, but it's not the biggest factor and the rest is up to you.

So, focus on what you can control, and luck should impact the result less.

To maximize for money without moving into management here are the options:

* Follow a trend, as in do what everyone else does. For example be great at both Java and JavaScript React. When I say great I only mean above average at programming but administratively great at agile and closing tickets. Beef up your resume with numbers and move into a role as a corporate principal. AI and cloud infrastructure are hot right so try spinning those into a primary focus.

* Get a PhD and become a researcher for Google or Microsoft

* Get an MBA, a PMP, and focus on the business of IT.

That’s really it. If you really want to make money go into management, and you don’t need any experience as a developer to do that.

Always be a salesperson. Sociopaths will get further than everyone else if they aren’t completely assholes.

It’s never about technical excellence. If you waste effort on technical excellence, especially in a trendy area, you will race to the bottom arguing best practices with people probably shouldn’t be there in the first place. Software is laissez faire, so most businesses just try to retain boring people and most people aggressively pushing their careers lie about their capabilities.

Do researchers make any real money? I feel like all around I hear about it being stale there as far as funding goes.

Researchers are in a unique position to get paid to discover things. Its a lottery in that what they publish could potentially be worth tremendous money in industry, but its a safe gamble because if everything else goes wrong they are still employable with a higher than average salary doing work that is less boring than average.

Also, the data doesn't seem to show that people who follow trends end up making more. It's quite the opposite - focusing on niche languages like Go, Rust or frameworks like Flutter can make you more.

You have to advance your career. Just being employed will not get you more money.