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Comment by steelframe | Hacker News Reader

You should try leaving a company for money sometime. Financial independence really is life-changing, and you can get there surprisingly quickly in the tech industry by putting yourself on the market more often.

Anecdotally, at my current company nearly everyone I know who left did so within a few months of hitting the 4-year cliff on their signing equity. I've left 3 companies in my career primarily because the next company doubled my comp. I've only left 1 company for reasons other than pay.

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I make low six figures in a low to medium cost of living area. I don't think even doubling my income would change my life too much.

Money isn’t everything, but the math behind retirement saving is compelling.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

Yep, I look at every extra dollar I could make (that I don't technically need to survive) as some number fewer minutes until I can retire. So every extra dollar is worth it, no matter how frugal my lifestyle is.

Here’s hoping you’re lucky enough to live until then. Don’t forget to live in the meantime. It’s a lot easier to hike across Europe in your 30s than in your 50s.

The sentiment is right, and sure, there are some differences, but please dont think your 50s is some geriatric period of your life where hiking across the alps/europe is not thoroughly enjoyable!

"Here’s hoping you’re lucky enough to live until then."? The median lifespan is over 80 and developers are paid above the median, often by quite a bit. It's far, far more likely in your 50s that you'll be staring down the barrel of a layoff + industry downturn and cursing yourself for the money spent on your trip across Europe and other frivolities in your 30s.

If you spent a ton of money to hike across Europe, you've done something terribly wrong. I spent a month traveling across Europe by train a few years ago, and it was fairly cheap, certainly FAR less money than I would have spent on any vacation in the US.

Taking a vacation (any vacation) in the US is a frivolity, even if you live in the US. If you could theoretically rent out your home in the US while you're gone (for the same cost as your current rent+utilities, so no net profit), you'd probably end up saving money by spending a 2+ week vacation in Europe instead of just spending that time at home and going out to restaurants in your own town.

This is only tangentially aligned, but I live in Canada and find the same equation in the winter. I travel south, to a low-cost area, and get to shut down the heat in my house for 4 months. The result is a $2000 savings over those months on heating costs.

I don't think this is true for most people, when you ask older people about their regrets, it's often that they worked too much and didn't live enough.

There are many people who don’t get asked about their regrets when they’re older. And there are many people living lives of quiet desperation.

Yes but the set of people we're talking about in this context is software engineers often paid well above median.

I’m at that point where I’m working less and making more money and I’ve done most of the stuff people want to do traveling, hiking, gaming, etc. and I’m still in my 30s. Now everything starts to feel same old boring there’s no excitement.

The median lifespan is no longer over 80, at least not for middle age males in the US, though it is for females:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

It also depends a lot on what your current age is. If you're 60 or older it's 80 or more. If you're younger than that and male it's under 80, going down the younger you are. Covid and other things reduced life expectancy in the US. This is the 2021 table, the most recent, life expectancy may go down further as new tables are published. However the graphs here tell a different story:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Part of these graphs are future projections, so it's difficult to tell what to believe. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the first table is what the insurance industry and Social Security uses.

> Covid and other things reduced life expectancy in the US.

It reduced life expectancy for people who were alive in 2019. Those statistics say nothing about the life expectancy of people who are currently alive.

There are some uh, relevant socioeconomic correlations here.

to a degree, yes.

but obesity -- which correlates with income level and area code -- is what's killing people early. if you're fat as hell at 19 you're probably going to be even fatter at 60, and heart disease or cancer is going to kill you.

I couldn’t imagine living like that. Yes, it’s possible that I’ll get screwed since I started my money making career late, but I might have died of depression much younger otherwise. Everyone needs to find their own route through life and working your youth way is really really scary when you turn 59 and realize you haven’t lived yet.

In my 30s my single driving goal was to pay off my mortgage and be debt free (I came to home ownership late).

Thanks to this industry, I got there at 42.

I’m sure as shit not going back to the treadmill, for what?

So I am taking my young family on trips and experiences I never had growing up (visiting other countries, camping, hiking, etc.), and working on the health I neglected in my 30s.

Also being more assertive at work and not sacrificing like I used to.

Because of this, I’m probably not going to have a wealthy retirement, but I have a lot of peace of mind knowing we could keep the family afloat working minimum wage jobs, with the house paid off and no debts.

A lot of my swiss neighbours are more fit than half my friends in their 30s, and they are 70+.

I'm not sure what the secret is but I'm fairly sure just moving here added an extra 10 years to my life expectancy.

That's because we hike across our 30s, and don't stop until our 80s (at least a part of the population). Work is fine, but being outside makes you live longer and better.

My grandfather was still skiing while being 80.

Also I think less dependency on cars, in my experience (living in Switzerland) moving around by foot/bicycle/public transport is normal.

Wow. Is this really true? Do you live in a studio apt in the Midwest while working for a FAANG?

I consider myself a "FIRE devotee without the compensation necessary to actually FIRE." So yea, time to retirement is definitely a variable that I actively try to minimize however I can. I don't want to be one of those guys who has to wait so long to retire that they're dead.

I’ve known far too many people who die within 3 years of retirement regardless of age.

Quality of life now is more important to me.

Right but what if you enjoy your job and don’t want to retire?

Knowing that you have F-you money in investments makes it a lot more likely that you can enjoy your job and removes other stresses in life, or at least it did in my case even with only lowercase f-you money.

Then take more unpaid sabbaticals, or buy a boat.

"Too much money" is a solved problem

I love my job but having too much money would let me email someone 4 higher in the hierarchy to give them my opinion on things. :)

Paradoxically, I think the willingness and ability to do that (assuming it's used at all reasonably) tends to increase your visibility and perceived value to the company when averaged over a large number of trials.

"This is stupid, but I'm going to keep my mouth shut because I like to eat and live indoors." vs "This is stupid and I'm going to tell the CEO that and suggest a better alternative."

Work is more enjoyable when you don't have to do it for money

What if you stop liking your job?

This happened to me sometime between my first and second kids (last year or so). It was some mix of changing priorities, less time, starting to feel my age, work becoming more difficult, company cultural changes, etc. I think I've stuck a decent balance of saving and living, but man does life come at you fast. Went from happily working 60-80 hours (including some side projects) to struggling to work 40 hours. Reminds me of how one day something switched and I just couldn't drink anymore. Age is probably the biggest factor, and I can't imagine what this is going to be like in my 50s (just turned 40).

Having the option is better than not having it

Soon to have 25% skimmed off every year and that's assuming you get to live long enough to spend it.

I assume you're talking about the proposed tax on unrealized gains that only applies on holdings over 100 million. 100 million dollar threshold being a critical piece of information you conveniently left out.

How many people did the original income tax apply to?

I don't think it matters. I'm in favor of the tax as proposed. If it changes I'll adjust my stance accordingly.

Doubling your income would mean you can take 50% of your time off with the same income.

Pretty sure that would change your life!

It doesn't really work like that. The reality is that you can't work 50% of the time for half the salary (if that's what you mean). When you make more money you typically want a nicer place to live, maybe a nicer car, your standard of living will go up somewhat. Now to maintain that standard of living you're going to need to save more money.

Maybe you have kids and you want to be able to pay for their education, or buy them a place to live... Maybe you're helping your family.

Personally I could have "retired" a long while back if I wanted to have a lower standard of living and also take some risk. But I don't hate my work, I do things out of work as well, I prefer a nicer house and a nicer car, I'd probably be bored if I didn't work.

Developers in the USA earn far beyond the level where the lifestyle creep that you describe is so compelling that it makes any sense at all to say "you can't work 50% of the time for half the salary".

A more solid factor is that companies don't want to hire part-time developers, because coordination overhead means twice the number of developers each working half as many hours are far less effective.

I meant it in that sense. Even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to work 50% for half my salary (likely) because my employer would have a problem with that. For the reason you gave and others.

I have asked to work 4 day weeks at 80% of my salary a few times, and not had a problem. When I once asked for a 3 day week that was turned down.

The other way to work 50% is to take a few months or years break between jobs.

I've enjoyed doing that. It's certainly not for everyone.

If anything, most tech company contracts are written the other way around - there is almost never overtime pay and any thinking/work done both within and outside work hours is completely owned by the company.

Typically with a higher income you taxation rate increases even more. So 50% more salary might only end up being 20% more in your hand.

    > So 50% more salary might only end up being 20% more in your hand.

Can you give an example of a tax regime where this would hold true? I find your example hard to believe.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/10/blog-post.html

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax

Even under a progressive tax things don't work the way conservative fiscal armchair economists would like to have you believe.

Poor people still, comparatively, spend more of their income to taxes. That's because poor people have to spend more of their income on direct consumption, i.e. not investment.

If I'm poor I'm easily spending 90% of all my money on stuff for me, right now. If I'm rich that drops to 10%, and the rest goes towards stuff that isn't taxed.

So, while income tax may favor the poor, sales tax very obviously favors the rich. The only reason a progressive tax exists is because rich people are so powerfully favored in modern tax systems, we need to try to bring them back in line to the burden poorer people face. Even still, poor people face more burden.

> you can take 50% of your time off

The economy and society isn't structured like this. I'd happily take half the pay I have now for half the time. But the only way to get that time is to make 10 dollars an hour flipping burgers.

Have you considered worst-case scenarios?

An injury that prevents you from working, or something like cancer in the family, could be a whole lot easier to deal with if you have a sizable nest egg.

I have considered it and it is a legitimate concern to think about. I'm still fairly young and healthy and I have enough money to not work for years if it came down to it so you could call it hedging my bets but it is something that does lurk in the background as time passes.

On an unrelated note, big fan of your work :)

for me, I like donating. So more money is great!

I've had my income more than doubled now, nearly tripled in the past decade. Just because I was willing to move where I would be paid market rate.

There's a lot of companies in high cost of living areas that may be willing to split the difference in salary.

I love it when people guess how changing or trying something new will affect them without doing it and never having done it.

What's your FIRE number? When are you going to retire? Doubling your income shouldn't change your current lifestyle but it should change your trajectory towards retirement. Why retire at 65 when you could retire at 55, or even 45?

Maybe not for you, but for your family and future children it could be a life changer. If something happens to you, having a few millions in the bank is also very nice.

I always find my salary very difficult to replace, and it's not particularly high. I'm assuming it's all pay cuts from here on out with the economy the way it is.

The economy has been objectively really great last few years.

Many people say the economy is bad, whatever the measurable macro-economical state of the economy is.

If you find it almost impossible to get jobs I don’t know if it matters.

Your immediate situation is equally shitty, sure.

But if you realize the problem is not "the economy" (which you can't possibly affect), but something about you (which is the though you can affect the most), you have a chance to find a better path for yourself.

You see, according to that one HN commenter everything is always fine (they own capital)

This is because the idea of economy has been highjacked by armchair capitalists.

The economy has almost nothing to do with the average person's quality of life. We've completely lost the plot. That's why a country like the US can have such an insane GDP and GDP per capita and have comparatively much lower quality of life than countries with worse economies.

When people say the economy is bad, they mean the things that actually matter. When economists say the economy is good, they're speaking of some theoretical economy nobody can see. They're speaking of numbers on a screen, that don't go into your pocket. That's where the discrepancy comes from.

For the next few years at least, probably

> Financial independence really is life-changing.

This.

All companies want you to be loyal to them and them only. But they won't reciprocate it. Only the C-suite is deserving of hefty pay bumps.

I've never been in a position where I had any kind of leverage to negotiate a serious increase.

I've even been in an extreme situation in crypto sector where I was putting pressure on the company founder for a salary increase. I was earning like USD $100K per year comp total. They had over $100 million of assets. The founder, a multi-millionaire who had more money than he knew what to do with said that the pressure I was putting was like "Holding a knife to the company's throat." Guess how much of a raise he offered? 2%! I quit. Within 1 month after I quit, they fired half of the company. Coincidence? They didn't even need to do layoffs, they still had over $100 million in liquid assets/runway. They were spending at a rate of like $1 million per month. WTF!

Out of the 10+ tech startups and corporations I worked for over the past 20 years, that was the closest I ever came to receiving a raise and still didn't get it.

The whole market feels fake. Like a kind of weird social engineering PsyOp.

Getting more money from your current company based on market conditions almost never works. Even star performers get shafted on the regular.

I'd have to make it into FAANG or similar to double my comp. I'd certainly be open to the idea, but the path seems awfully narrow for senior level midwestern engineers like me.

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