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Ask HN: Those with make 200k or more what do you do?

10 points by oralight ↗ HN
I work for a tech company and still can't believe that its extremely hard to buy a house,save for the retiremet, my future children and have a peaceful life. I define peaceful life as not having to worry about money every day and night. I know from reading online a lot of men/women make 200k or more in comp.while working for top tech companies.

I am wondering how much experience do you have? Did you go to Ivy/MIT/Stanford? Are you software engineer or in managerial/director role?

I have saved a few bucks for buying house. Do you think if I go to eMBA from MIT/Wharton or MBA from UCLA would help in getting a high paying job?

I have a decade of software dev. experience and now starting as a project manager. However, it seems to me that my manager does not support my career growth. I get a feeling that he is worried I might outsmart him. I could have left for another company but I might stay for personal reasons. He talks to me about career growth for everyone but never says a word about me. When I bring it up he makes excuses.

Thoughts?

9 comments

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Artlav
Well, people who make $200k tend to live in places when you spend $40-80k on rent or mortgage, $10-$20k on food and utilities, god knows how much on medical insurance, and all after 30%-40% taxes, leaving you with about zilch to save. Or so i heard from this side of the ocean.

In general, it's rather unusual for a job to pay noticeably more than the local median lifestyle cost.

Me, i made that type of income if you scale to the local costs. I went to MSU, graduated with a specialist degree in computational mathematics and specialization in parallel computation, got a PhD for AI-related research while working for a supercomputer development company at average income. After getting the PhD i found a new job working on the backend of mobile internet provider (my first employer covered the PhD, so i couldn't leave before, on itself it's not worth much employment-wise), where i started getting serious money.

Sadly the crash of 2014 quartered that income back to about average, but it was nice while it lasted. However, it was still nowhere near enough to buy, say, an apartment here in Moscow - one of the top 10 most expensive cities out there, since as i said before the income a job provides tend not to be too far above the local median costs.

I could drive 200km to a nearby city and buy a 3-room apartment for a month's salary, but a 1-room one next to where i worked costs more than i made in my entire life.

hapbringer
Very interesting insight.

How much do you think this depends on the industry you're in?

For example, right now, natural language processing and machine learning are all the rage; if you were a specialist in those areas, would you be making significantly more than people in other areas?

Artlav
It certainly depends on the industry. I.e. here in Russia if you work in the oil industry you would be making mad amounts of money. It is hard to get into, however, and you would have to live in middle of nowhere, Siberia for years.

Not quite sure about subdivisions in tech - i never worked for any buzzword "all the rage" things. I suspect that if you are a rare expert in a field with a lot of demand, you would get a good income regardless of the level of buzz.

seattle_spring
> Well, people who make $200k tend to live in places when you spend $40-80k on rent or mortgage, $10-$20k on food and utilities, god knows how much on medical insurance, and all after 30%-40% taxes, leaving you with about zilch to save. Or so i heard from this side of the ocean.

That's only true of people who either have kids with one working parent, or are extremely irresponsible with their money.

* $80k is almost $7k / month in rent, or payment on a mortgage well over $1m.

* Utilities are incredibly cheap in a temperate climate like SF, unless again you have an unreasonably large house to heat/cool. The rest of the "$10k-$20k" for food could buy a person a meal out everyday on the low end, and all meals out on the high end. This is especially crazy when you consider that most $200k jobs also provide catered lunch.

* Medical insurance is always included with $200k jobs. Not true with contractors, but they are probably making a lot more than $200k, if they were able to pull that salary at a regular full-time job.

If you're making $200k and not saving anything, you really need to reevaluate your priorities. Just because your parents lived in a $5m house in Palo Alto and paid your way through Stanford doesn't mean you deserve to continue that lifestyle immediately after graduation.

Artlav
Perhaps it all goes down to lifestyle inflation more than any inherent expense scaling with income opportunities.

I've heard of people in SF spending $1-$2 a day on food, living in a trailer and showering at work, while making 6 figures of $.

I've also heard of people complaining about $2k a month not being enough for food, and bragging about being debt free aka "mortgage doesn't count. A car doesn't either. Credit cards are temporary. Other than that, debt-free!".

It's a subtle beast - just before i got latter job i had $3k equivalent fall into my hands from a lucky investment. It was a big deal, and totally worth the effort of navigating the bureaucracy of extracting it into a spendable form. A few months later i got a new job and soon looking back it felt like a waste of effort and a bad decision, since i was now making that much in a month.

For a while i just went through my wishlist of equipment faster, still managing to more or less break even every month. It took the crash of 2014 to really make it sink in why saving is important.

twobyfour
Needing $200k to not be constantly worried about money seems excessive to me. You may want to revisit your budgeting.

I haven't been worried about money day to day or month to month since my salary hit $60k. Nor have I had any difficulty saving 15% or more of my salary every year. And I live in NYC, which was until a couple years ago the most expensive housing market in the country and is still one of the highest taxed locales.

What are you spending on that you think you need $200k/yr to get by comfortably?

madamelic
Definitely this.

I save >$1000 / paycheck and I work in NYC. If you are childless and scraping by on an engineer's salary, there is (likely) something majorly wrong.

I recommend mrmoneymustache.com (Obviously you don't have to go full Mustache)

limeblack
This isnt software related exactly but my dad was several tiers above the IT managers for years in health care. Forgive me if this doesn't help. My dad works as a Cheif Strategy Officer for a top 20 health care system in the US(I am in college now). He makes more then 200,000. That was his salary several years ago though. He has a stem degree and an MBA. He consulted for many years before this. Health care seems to be really big but from what I gathered doesn't really have a start up culture as much from what I have gathered.

EDIT: He actually has a second graduate degree. Not sure how much he uses it.