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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

This is very much tech bubble thinking.

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.

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Okay, assuming you could invest 100k out of your 170k per year into companies you know were doing well on tech from 2015, how much would you have ?

(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.

Sure, just save 100k out of your 170k comp, that's totally how normal people operate. And not only that, also pick the right stocks rather than just sticking everything in an index!

Just magically turn 10x 100k into 10M!

I haven't got to 10m yet, but I saved 70-80% of my take home pay since ~2008 and I have enough to quit at any time and live the rest of my life without working. That is just by investing in the 3-fund portfolio and without the crazy SF salaries.

No one knows you here. Give some real numbers. How much are you paying for housing? What’s your gross pay?

Numbers don't matter. If you can save 80% of your paycheck for 15-20 years and you invest it wisely, you are FI on the 4% rule.

So exactly how do you save 80% off of $175K and live off of $30K a year? Especially considering everything above your 401K max is post tax?

That’s only twice the minimum wage and even in Atlanta they are offering cashiers at McDonalds more than that.

Before Covid, I lived on about 25K a year since I had a paid off condo then. Now, I am renting and live on around 36K a year. I realize my situation doesn't work for everyone. Some people cannot fathom not buying a new phone and computer every year and a new car every 3 years.

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.

We aren’t talking about buying a new phone. We are talking about buying a place to live and food to eat.

What is the average rent where you live for a one bedroom? What is the tech hiring seen like?

Do you have kids?

No kids, rent is $1800 a month for a 1 bedroom. I could rent the same for cheaper but I like this place. I'm in Washington State, Software Devs make decent money where I am but not SF wages. I make good money but nowhere near the top. I have an easy job, WFH and rarely work over 40 a week.

You do not understand compounding growth.

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.

Your math seems way off?

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.

Really appreciate your comment, literally the only comment in this long sub-thread that picked up on the nonsensical numbers fooker put out.

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%.

Counting on 10% returns long term is way to aggressive especially when you have to consider sequence of returns risks during withdrawals. Even 5% is not conservative enough while you are in the withdrawal phase.

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.

> Counting on 10% returns long term is way to aggressive especially when you have to consider sequence of returns risks during withdrawals

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 calculated saving $100K out of $170K gross some pre tax and most post tax is living off of around $1800 a month.

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.

$170K as a starting salary, scratch that, as any salary, is already way beyond the average SWE salary.

That’s true. I said “top out at”. When I left AWS working in the ProServe (cloud consulting division) in 2023, I was seeing “architect” positions in Atlanta - I didn’t live there any more, but most of my network was still there - topping out at $175k. But for “senior” developers it was even less.

I obviously decided to stay in consulting and work full time for a third party consulting company.

Shit, dump that $100k into bitcoin at the low point of 2015, and you'd have $37 million today. Easy!

$170K a year after taxes is $9900 a month net if you are living in GA - with fairly low state taxes. I calculated this on paycheckcity.com. That’s without taking into account health insurance cost.

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.

> There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.

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.

I meant everyone with a good tech job, not everyone in the country.

About a 1:1000 ratio I'd guess.

Sure, but there was nothing stopping people with $10k in savings in 2015 from buying Nvidia. If someone with $10k in savings had bought Nvidia in 2015, they’d have $2.5m today. But that only works for a relatively small number of people before the $2.5m is no longer $2.5m - they’re all drawing from the same $6 trillion pot. “Everyone with a good tech job” is accurate, but besides the point, it would work exactly the same if you limited it to “everyone who’s a plumber” or “everyone who’s a fedex driver”, but literally cannot work for everyone at the same time.

> it would work exactly the same if you limited it to “everyone who’s a plumber” or “everyone who’s a fedex driver”

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.

> 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.

Do you see the difference between

> 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).

If only someone knew in 2015 that Bitcoin and then AI would be a big thing and choose the one stock that was going to benefit the most from it…

170k after taxes leaves you with about 130k net, maybe 140k; if you live in a big city and have a family, it's almost impossible to save 100 grand of that 140k. More realistic you would save about 50k and still come out ok, but lets be realistic noone is saving 100k from 170k gross salary

$110K a year is more realistic after taxes and then you have housing, health insurance, car insurance, food, clothes, school expenses, etc.

You’re not realistically saving $50K a year.

In GA, after taxes your take home would be ~125k. So you think someone can live in a big city like ATL for 25k/year? What if they have a family? Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar? The 125k also doesn't have healthcare deducted yet.

Some of the comments on this thread highlight just how disconnected many people were/are from everything outside of the FAANG bubble.

If you live in an expensive city and do not have a proportional salary, obviously you are going to save less.

> 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.

Ok, so you need 2 people working in tech making near top end salaries for the area? You do see how this simple idea of saving 100k/year isn't so simple for anyone outside of FAANG?

What's a realistic number in your opinion?

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.

I posted calculations. $170K a year after taxes is $9900 a month before health insurance. To save $100K a year since only some of it would be pretax means you are living off of around $1600 a month.

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.

> If you live in an expensive city and do not have a proportional salary, obviously you are going to save less.

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.

I did the math by going over to PayCheckCity.com. It’s actually $118K before health insurance.

https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/salary/georgia/resul...

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