Someone joining now on the other hand, might have to resort to physical work at some point in the next ten years of things go south.
Most developers in the US don’t work for tech companies and will never make ovdd $200K inflation adjusted. Developer salary is very much bimodal
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal
If you are working for boring old enterprise companies like banks, airlines, insurance companies or even most YC funded companies, “senior” developers will top out at around $160K-$170K inflation adjusted in tier 2 cities.
I spent my pure developer career [1] in Atlanta GA. Well known companies based there like Home Depot, Delta, Coke, and GE Transportation are paying their top developers around what entry level developers getting in BigTech.
But choose your non west coast city and you will see the same.
(say: AMD, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Facebook)
The answer is about 10M, which is not that far from what I estimated, even without including Nvidia. Now add in house price appreciation.
There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.
Just magically turn 10x 100k into 10M!
You could have looked up the numbers for indices yourself, but here you go -
S&P500 -> ~4 million
NDXT (top 100 tech) -> ~14 million.
> just save 100k out of your 170k comp
Yes, that was my starting salary, and that's almost exactly what I saved.
This calculation assumes your salary is somewhat constant and maxed out as the person I was responding to claimed, but in my experience you can expect your tech salary to double every ~5-6 years.
NDXT went from ~2300 in 2015 to ~12500 in 2025. That's ~5.5x return. So even if you had your whole 1M saving in 2015, you'd only have 5.5M now. No idea how you get nearly 3x that?
And it's way worse if you take the actual scenario which is 100k added every year instead of starting with the 1M.
S&P500 is worse yet, at about 3.5x total return if you had the whole million at the start.
Realistically fooker's investment strategy into NDXT of 100k over 10 years would have produced around $2.5M depending on exact timing in the year and partitioning of that 100k. Way less than $15M nonsense. Also would have required extreme conviction alike the crypto types and completely counter how typically multi-million portfolios are managed (diversified).
Also, who needs 15M, at 5M net wealth there honestly is no reason to be working at a $200k/year job. You'll make way more after-tax income even assuming lousy 5% yearly return thru capital gains. Same story for 2.5M @ 10%.
If I had $5 million of investments outside of my home, would I work? Maybe? My job is far from stressful, I work from home, I “retired” my wife over 5 years ago when she was 44 eight years into our marriage so she could pursue her passions and we could travel a lot.
All of my friends still work so what could I possibly do with my free time that I don’t do now? The only restrictions that not working would lift is that we could more easily spend an extended amount of time outside of US time zones.
Yes though the propose is not to retire. There's better things to do with your life (IMO) than work a standard 9-5 job for some corporation once you've accumulated sufficient wealth to have financial independence.
> Even 5% is not conservative enough while you are in the withdrawal phase.
Assuming you spend 5% per year. 5M@5% is 250k, 200k+ after tax for CG + eligible divs. That's a lot of money to spend every year, more than most families get to earn thru their labor yearly. Can be secured against downturns with higher 4%+ bond allocations too. 5M is financial independence for vast majority of households. 2.5M can be as well for many if their baseline spend remains at 100k.
> All of my friends still work so what could I possibly do with my free time that I don’t do now?
Financial independence provides vast opportunities for those with ideas but lacking time. There's a reason most businesses are pursued by those who have financial wealth on their side.
I obviously decided to stay in consulting and work full time for a third party consulting company.
And again, expecting your salary to double every six or seven years is not realistic for most developers.
Most developers making around $120K in 2013, aren’t making $480K now.
That’s only twice the minimum wage and even in Atlanta they are offering cashiers at McDonalds more than that.
Also, now, I am fully working from home so that helps with saving on gas and not eating out as much. I make my coffee every morning instead of Starbucks on the way to work and I make my own lunch and dinner 95% of the time.
What is the average rent where you live for a one bedroom? What is the tech hiring seen like?
Do you have kids?
Yeah, but there also isn’t enough wealth in the system for everyone to do this.
Like suppose that a) we’re now at a reasonably correct valuation for Nvidia b) assume a hypothetical where everyone in the US had plowed all of their savings into Nvidia in 2015. Result: The market cap of Nvidia is still $6 trillion, and the median American owns less than $10k in Nvidia stock.
About a 1:1000 ratio I'd guess.
Yes, "Everyone with a good tech job" has a significantly higher chance of keeping or holding tech RSUs, and have conviction that investing in tech is going to pay off.
> but literally cannot work for everyone at the same time
Yes, that is how the world works. Anything that makes you successful would not work for everyone at the same time.
To me this reads as a particularly misanthropic view of the world that only considers zero-sum (or less than zero sum) actions.
Any investments in yourself that aren’t at the expense of others (education, exercise, diet, therapy, living space improvements, etc., etc.) or investments in family and community, benefit both you and others and would work for everybody; indeed, many such investments would work better the more people undertook them, rather than the fewer.
> more
and
> everyone
?
If more people bought Nvidia stocks, the value would be higher. If everyone bought, something would give (and that is exactly what we are starting to see).
Some of the comments on this thread highlight just how disconnected many people were/are from everything outside of the FAANG bubble.
> Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar?
Yes, suppose spouse contributes to household expenses, but assume separate savings and investments for this calculation. Do you see you'd easily get to 100k saved?
The difference between having a large fraction of your savings in your bank account versus invested for the last 10 years can be quite a few millions, which is what most commenters here are failing to see. I'm sure the story was different between 2002 and 2012, but that was not what I talking about.
I managed to save about 100k per year in Denver and Salt Lake City with mid tier tech and govt lab jobs. I'm suspicious of the claim that Atlanta is significantly different. From what I have seen, it's usually bad financial decisions.
And for context, saving about double that during and post COVID by obtaining a remote job where the employer does not discriminate by location too much other than for maybe career growth.
And while I work remotely, remote jobs are getting more scarce and more competitive. Every job gets hundreds of applications within the curse few hours.
I assure you that my hometown in South GA (a cheap city) didn’t have $170K a year developer jobs.
A friend who moved to Columbus GA after college in 1997 I doubt is making $170K now.
I know my friend who still lives in Atlanta and is a lead developer at Home Depot (one of the few F500 companies based in Atlanta) just crossed around $170K and he has been there 10 years.
https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/salary/georgia/resul...
So to invest $100K a year let’s say some pretax and some post tax, they would have to live off of $1700 a month. They are not going to be buying a house with that.
As far as wealth through equity in a house, that’s not liquid. What are you going to do borrow against it?
And actually I can speak for one of the best case scenarios for buying a house. I had a house built in 2016 in the most affluent county in GA for $335K - a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath - and sold it in 2024 for $670K and moved to state taxe free Florida and bought a condo in 2022 for half the cost (we kept both for awhile)
Even then, we could only do that because my (step)kids were both grown and I pivoted to customer facing cloud consulting in 2020. A niche that hasn’t suffered from the return to office mandates - ironically enough except for AWS ProServe (former employee) and Google’s equivalent internal department (who has been trying to recruit me for years).
Most people won’t and shouldn’t be picking individual stocks. Of course it’s easy to be a genuis saying what would have happened if you picked stocks that went up.
You’re not realistically saving $50K a year.