This sounds absolutely wonderful to me. At this point we have 2 generations straining for opportunities and advancement while the wealthiest and luckiest generation in the history of the country sits at the top of the ladder. Time for them to go enjoy their good fortune in Florida and let the rest of us crack into that turf they've been hoarding.
Not really. Most boomers and are not rich at all. Go to your local food store and you will probably find plenty of older employees...it's not just 20-somethings who are stuck in crappy professions or in a rut. Many boomers did not save for retirement and face the same problems young people do.
Also there are plenty of 20 and 30-year-olds on Reddit (such as on investing and FIRE subs) and hacker news who have sizable investments in real estate and stocks. The post-2009 bull market is the biggest and longest ever ,surpassing even the 80s and 90s in terms of real returns. Plenty of young people have and are getting rich from that, plus also the rise of lucrative FAANG jobs and also online marketing, social media, etc. This is not representative of all young people obviously, but to say that young people are being denied wealth due to older generation hoarding it ,is wrong too. There are plenty of opportunities for young people to get rich.
Regarding luck, boomers did not have as many ways to become wealthy compared to young people today. Although homes were cheaper , mortgage rate were much higher, inflation was much higher, there was no employer healthcare, real stock and real estate returns were poorer, professional jobs did not pay as well, etc. Adjusted for inflation, college grads 40 years ago made less compared to grads today.Homeownership rates were not higher during the 60s, 70s, and 80s despite homes being cheaper, in part because mortgages were so expensive and wages were not that good.
By looking only at share of wealth, this is missing the fact that total wealth in the US has grown tremendously over the time period in question. In absolute terms, the inflation-adjusted amount of wealth held by the Baby Boomer and Millennial generations at similar ages is about the same.
In 1989 (the first year in the Fed's data), the Baby Boomer generation held $4.33T in wealth, which would be $9.5T in today's dollars, while in 2021, the Millennial generation held $7.47T in wealth [1]. While that's a little bit less, it's important to keep in mind that the median age of the Baby Boomer generation was 34 in 1989, vs 32 for the Millennial generation in 2021. If you linearly extrapolate Millennial wealth growth, the generation would hold $10.5T in wealth at a similar age.
So what the linked chart really reflects is that the total size of the pie has gotten much larger in the past 30 years. Most of the increase has gone to older generations, but I think that's neither surprising nor undesirable -- after all, 30 years ago, the Millennial generation ranged from not being born yet to elementary school. Will the pie continue to grow over the next 30 years so that Millennials can see a similar increase in wealth (and hear complaints from the kids being born right now)? I'd imagine that's largely up to the decisions we make today.
One of my elderly grandparents has a pension from doing what would today be considered a "gig economy" 1099 job (was W2 w/health insurance and a retirement account back then), and this has payed enough for him to live off of for the last 25 years of his retirement. He get's $1800/month because he worked as a bag boy 30 years ago. It's nuts.
Not saying you're wrong, just playing devil's advocate that you could say $4.3T was worth a lot more in 1989 than $7.5T in 2021 based on the outsized pace of inflation for necessary goods to continue living well and growing your personal wealth (homes, healthcare, education). It all depends how you define inflation, and arguably the method to weigh inflation currently does not reflect the growth of those previously mentioned items accurately when compared to their importance.
I read it, but I was playing devils advocate arguing the inflation number are incorrect relative to the value of the dollar 30 years ago on essential goods.
Well "rigged" is a bit much, but if people spend large amounts of their money on things that are not included in the CPI basket, then the CPI is an incomplete measure.
That is a terrible chart. Of course share of wealth goes up as you get older - you’ve had more time to acquire it. They’ve attempted to adjust for age, but it’s not helpful when the oldest millennial has barely entered the workforce.
The chart also ignore the population share of each generation - Baby boomers made up a massive part of the US population - 70M out of a population of about 210M (1980) or 33% when they hit working age.
Millennials are slightly larger in numbers - 72M, but smaller part of the total of 330M (2020) or 21%.
Crude analysis and you’d have to assume everything else remains the same (it doesnt), but if all wealth was equally distributed by age you’d expect Millenials (of the same age) to have about 33% less share of the total wealth based on population alone.
Which isn’t far off from that chart if you assume Millennials track similar to Gen-X.
Except the vast majority of them own property that they originally purchased for under $50k which, if sold, would net them hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Many of them are on pensions (something that doesn't even exist anymore), plus they receive social security payments.
This is only true if they have been able to live in the same place for 10+ years. There aren't that many places or fields where one can keep working without interruption without a significant move. And each house transaction starts the growth clock over.
It's not like boomers in the '70s and early '80s had $50k just lying around. Even today that is considered a sizable amount of $. Wages were pretty low back then even when adjusted for inflation. Saving $50k would have been a major challenge even for professionals back in the 80s. It's easy to see how cheap things were generations ago and think that this meant things were thus more affordable, but not necessarily so.
You make an interesting point, and I wonder if hearing about the very high incomes supposedly being earned by employees at certain tech companies explains the willingness for young people to incur large amounts of student loan debt.
Fwiw, starting salary for a chemistry PhD in industry was somewhere in the 30-40k usd range in the early 80’s. There was a downturn during that time that made looking for anything but a postdoc difficult.
Edit: unless it’s changed recently, the ACS publishes their salary survey for chemists in the us yearly so you can look it up if you seek data on pharma salaries.
Maybe in high-COL areas, but a lot of the older people in the US also tend to live in areas that young people have mostly left, like rural areas or small towns.
Owning a house for 30 years in Berkeley in 2021 is a lot different than owning a house for 30 years in Gary, IN.
If you’re going to make those assertions, bring data. Certainly some have done well, but the assertion that most of the boomers have done well or even disproportionately well relative to other generations should be supported by data not handwaving
Another thing that boomers didn't have is access to information. These days everybody can learn anything from the web but in the pre internet era there was no way for people to know how to manage their finances unless they had someone close to them who guided them. Even then, predicting the future was always very hard.
> There are plenty of opportunities for young people to get rich.
Can confirm. I was directionless in life until I read a comment on a message board about working from home on Google with the potential to earn $5,000/week. I made my first million in a year and a half by investing the earnings from that into meme stocks, pink sheets stocks and SPACs I found on Reddit while living at home with my parents.
I am sinking in debt thanks to my college, and you think boomers have that problem? No, they don't, and I wonder how old you are considering your views -- I honestly don't think you know any boomers with views like this, considering your only argument is the ones at grocery stores. My grandfather worked at a grocery store for 30 years and has a pension still going to this day. No jobs have pensions anymore. And I bet all those boomers working there have houses, but we Millenials cannot even get a down payment for a home. But sure poor said difficult life of the boomer.
I certainly agree that a subset of 'boomers' had unique access to stable careers and an outstanding real estate market. But I do have a few question...
What degree/program were you enrolled in? And how much debt is 'sinking in debt'?
It seems to me that its been well known for years which degrees/careers are profitable and which aren't. Most school's graduation outcomes are publicly published so it shouldn't be too hard to do the calculus. That said I do understand how can easily get into a bad situation since most college decisions are made when you are ~18 plus a lot of people depend on parental assistance which can be unpredictable to say the least.
On another note, it is important to consider that owning a home prior to the modern super low rates had the opposite problem; the purchase price and corresponding down payment was easy but the payments are 'expensive'. Unless you had prior knowledge that interest rates were going to bottom out, there was little reason to think you would make much in real estate and for middle America making the mortgage payment was a constant struggle. In some ways the bull run on the stock market is an even better 'generational-specific-early-investment-strategy' for millenials because you can make 10%, 20%, even 30% YoY returns without any risk or upfront cost.
Really at this point, the most worse off are the last of the millennials and future gen-z individuals entering the labor force. Asset prices including both stock and real estate are at all time highs and pretty much everyone agrees both are in a bubble but both continue to give >10% YoY returns which makes non-participation very difficult to recommend.
The narrative is that boomers have it easy and are retired and enjoying a leisurely life. the fact that many boomers and gen x are still working low-paying jobs, suggests maybe this is not so. As a whole boomers are better off, but they are much older too, so had more time to accumulate wealth. Adjusting for age, the disparity disspears or not as great.
Not an American. I want to understand college debt. Is the situation so binary that if people don't take un-returnable debt they'll be stuck in lower end minimum-wage manual jobs? I understand state colleges are relatively cheaper.
No, a lot of people have no college debt at all, but for that you need to be strong academically to get academic scholarships. It's like in Europe only 1/3 go to university, so that's about the number that could go with little or no debt in the U.S. But the rest can also go if they don't get a scholarship and pay their own way.
And for a lot of people, they are strong academically to get a full ride to a less prestigious school but only get a partial scholarship to a more prestigious school, and then choose to go to the more famous school but then take on debt. Sometimes a lot of debt. So there are many people who go to the most prestigious school no matter the cost. I think that attitude is starting to change now.
There are also affordable state schools you can go to rather than more expensive private schools.
I went all the way to an advanced degree without any loans or personal spending (but I had to purchase books), just using scholarships and financial aid. But I didn't go to the most famous schools. In my high school I was in the top 10% in terms of both scores and grades, so that was enough to get admitted to most schools but not to get a full scholarship. So I got tuition waivers for the local state university and lived with my parents, and then for grad school I got full tuition waiver as well as a TA job that paid enough to live (barely).
But I know many other people who had the same high school grades and SAT scores as I did but went to Dartmouth or other places and took on huge debt. I didn't even consider those schools as I wasn't willing to take on any debt. I always went to the best school that was free.
If you don't go to university, then you have to find your own way in life. You can be very successful if you get a trade, but there is no good system of trade schools -- you have to find the trade yourself, and finance it yourself. Unlike the network of financial aid and scholarship for universities, there is nothing like that for trade schools. The US has no trade school system because it offends our sensibilities which say that everyone should go to college and that tracking is wrong. For the same reason, every high school styles itself as "college prep" but then they have to dumb down the curriculum to allow students to pass. Thus we have no gymnasium system where you are learning useful skills before (or instead of) college prep.
So it's really hard for people who are not college graduates because there is no equivalent support system to train them. The US has terrible problems with lack of skilled workers -- both a shortage of technical students in universitites and a shortage of machinists, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. People in these fields find their own way. Many figure it out -- they meet someone who talks to them and shows them some options, or they have a friend who is an electrician and they find a school and borrow some money to attend, etc. But it's really random and it's easy to fall through the gaps and just take a series of unskilled retail jobs.
In terms of raw wages, it seems like overall the millenial generation does have either lower wages or higher debt than the boomer generation. Page 16 (table 2) compares wages from 1979 to 2019: the wages have gone up for college grads but have gone down for non-college grads. [0] Do note, of course, that to get those college wages, most students needed to go deeply in debt.
In terms of the larger economic environment, the boomers were generally born and raised during the Golden Age of Capitalism [1], but they likely entered the workforce around the time of the early '70s recession. However, the '80s and '90s appear to have been good times to have a job, but as each year went by, it became less and less good to have non-college jobs as the stats above show us. For millenials, the non-college jobs have been objectively worse in terms of pay, and the job opportunities that did exist were hampered by the .com bust (more a Gen Xer hindrance), the '08 bust, and of course, the covid shit show.
True, but that doesn't account for higher risk and cost associated with finding or switching jobs as one's education and specialization increases. Higher wages but fewer opportunities.
The research I found from the FRED Blog tells me that "the college premium may or may not be very strong depending on birth year, family, and other inherited characteristics. When looking at the wealth premium instead of just the income premium, the college premium was weak for all races and ethnicities in the 1980s cohorts, whereas the college premium exists for cohorts in earlier decades." [0]
When we put that in the context of the conversation, it does indeed seem like non-college earnings are lower, and the advantage of going to college has lessened.
Anything and everything? 50 years people thought we’d have flying cars and unions. Who would have imagined all the automation? It is a world of work that was inconceivable to most people then.
Flying cars had mostly already proven to be impractical, but at that point there was at least some optimism in some areas left (like space) and the massive reality check that was the OPEC oil embargo had not happened yet.
A big part of older folks wealth is based on gains from housing. Do you think that will continue at the same pace and leave us with an inflation-adjusted doubling or tripling of home prices?
Do you think migration trends into cities will continue unabated?
Do you think US population growth which drives much of the housing market will continue?
I think as long as retiring folks keep their burn rates low and make it to the age where social security and Medicare kicks in, they’ll make it from there to death without a substantial reduction in quality of life (assuming non-crazy retirement burn rate). Reverse mortgages will be issued at today’s valuations, not forward looking.
Those of us under 50 though? Much harder time ahead than this discussed cohort, all the juice has been squeezed and growth will be at a reduced rate as the population pyramid compresses.
My guess is a big war over resources will happen, e.g. https://asiatimes.com/2021/01/china-risks-a-himalayan-water-... . Worsening of the climate refugee crisis, even within the US itself, with people moving from flooded (due to sea-level rise) or dried parts or burning parts of the country to other parts. Dry or burning California also can't supply food, in 2010 Russia stopped exporting grains after big forest fires, and the rise of food prices pissed of many people and led to the Arab Spring.
Would have been nice in 2001, when I saw upmost decision makers aging and getting more risk-averse. Would have been nice in 2008-9 when I saw folks 70+ delaying their retirement because of anxiety about their balances.
When I started professionally networking, I kept hearing that I needed to weigh the experiences of those close to retirement. I learned the most from people who I could tell would retire before 50.
There are a bunch of 60+ senior developers sitting there occupying positions in the modern software industry? If so, they must have been damn lucky not needing to look for work after they hit 45 or so... Or, are they doing stuff "nobody in their right mind" would be interested in doing, like Cobol or Fortran?
> If so, they must have been damn lucky not needing to look for work after they hit 45 or so... Or, are they doing stuff "nobody in their right mind" would be interested in doing, like Cobol or Fortran?
I think the key(s), whether you're sixteen or sixty, are natural intelligence and a great work ethic.
I'm fifty and am full-stack in whatevers with a side of devops/architecting. I frequently have to walk into a room and in less than thirty minutes figure out what the hell is going on, how I'm going to add value, communicate that to the stakeholders and then deliver. People seem to dig it.
COBOL is what gets a lot of people paid and probably underpins far too much in govt and larger companies. It’s rumoured to be the reason IBM keeps binary compatibility in their mainframe line as “they lost the source code long ago.” Supposedly, it’s a meal ticket for mostly old fart consultants.
FORTRAN, on the other hand, is used to melt compute clusters while trying to make things go boom, or model micro- or macroscopic properties to design various things. Damned language still optimizes or runs large scale better.
As you all know, few pay to rewrite code that works well.
That is a bizarre characterization. Many (most?) people designing and building state-of-the-art data infrastructure software, for example, are 40+ and in extremely high demand, the opposite of unhireable and they are paid silly money. This isn’t unusual.
Age has nothing to do with it, relevancy does, and some domain expertise is difficult to acquire without decades of experience, even on the bleeding edge.
I'm not talking about ICs, who are the grunts and sit at the bottom of the pyramid with little autonomy or budgetary discretion. I'm talking about the leadership and management of course.
I would think the original title was more valid or pertinent. Given the hassles of the last two years re: where to work, how to work, how to get to/from work, ... pretty much anybody who could make retirement work thought hard about it. Particularly those outside the US or with the ability to pony up for US healthcare for people in their 60's.
I wish articles like this provided some data as to what "affluent" is. How much money does the 48 year old have, and how much "house", that retirement looks to make sense to them? I'd rather have the dollar figures than the people's names.
The idea that the FAANG gravy train can last 30 years is not realistic.
If at least half the letters in FAANG aren't blown away in that time period, it would suggest a tech environment so stagnant that it would be impossible to justify the compensation.
And lasting 30 years at a surviving FAANG company is such a low-probability prospect that it's not something reasonable to include in any future planning.
Very few FAANG engineers can actually expect this outcome.
EDIT: Removed shock word "preposterous", sorry about that.
The idea that professional software developers will have their negotiating power depleted is preposterous.
Barring an AGI that can take care of knowledge work, companies will continue to pay a premium to developers because they are often times the core value creators of the business. Even in traditional areas like finance, quants with CS PhDs are displacing Harvard MBA’s trading on fundamentals b/c their returns blow the latter out the water.
There's a difference between "software developers" and "FAANG software developer" though, which is a source of great cognitive dissonance when people see that industry averages are only slightly above $100k/year but FAANG compensation is like 3-4 times that for basic engineering work.
Both are paid a premium, but FAANG is paid a massive premium, and there isn't much precedent for collecting that massive premium continuously for 30 years.
EDIT: Actually in that spreadsheet I would argue that the $250K compensation is too low, the 10% return on investment is too high, and the 30 year timeframe is not sustainable.
Lotta software developers out there at non-FAANG companies getting paid FAANG or near-FAANG wages. Probably more software engineers making 250k+ outside of those five companies than inside them.
Also I kinda question the assertion that these companies being active and important in thirty years would suggest something untoward. In most other industries, the "Blue Chip" companies are pretty durable. JPM's lineage goes back to 1871, and that fact does not prevent its current employees from being well-compensated.
> The idea that professional software developers will have their negotiating power depleted is preposterous.
Lol, I heard the same arguments in the 1990s about webmasters, which at that time were also commanding large premiums over the market median. I also remember when any engineer who touched a linux kernel could make 3x "normal developer" wages. Most FAANG engineers aren't working on anything too special; the biggest competition will be off the shelf frameworks/libraries/application which can do what previously required custom work.
We are also in a period of easy investment money - the biggest threat to FAANG companies is the market demanding a return on their investment - P/E ratios are at historically unsustainable levels. Either "this time is different", or this will all end very badly for a lot of people, just like the first dot-com boom.
Yep. We haven't hit a real bear market in quite a while -- even 2008 was mostly a road bump if you were in tech. We'll see what shakes out when everyone isn't getting trivial 20-30% gains in the market every year.
There are good years, and then there are bad years...
I almost fully agree with you, but a small part of me wonders if this is different, and we've created a sort of aristocracy that exists outside of normal competition and the rise and fall of companies. In some measure, it's going to depend on modernization of monopoly regulations. But I think there is an outside chance that were due for 50+ years of stagnation and increasing inequality, after the sort of cambrian explosion of tech we've seen since the 70s
every FAANG is almost 20 or over 20 years old. Certainly engineers that have spent those last 20 years (if they haven't already) will retire probably over the figure in the spreadsheet. Will the particular FAANG companies last another 20 (or 30) years? Who's to say but I don't see whatever replaces them not being glad to hire former FAANG engineers. So yeah it's kind of a gravy train that you needn't disembark if you don't want to.
I mean I can generally negotiate higher than 20% bump every two years or so going to a new employer, not sure my incentive to stick around longer. My understanding is that’s prevalent throughout the industry
It's a misleading article and the study was misinterpreted across the industry. For example here, "The average number of years at tech disruptors and titans"
At it's heart, FIRE is a reaction to how tenuous, unsustainable and unstable the job market has become in recent years. I don't particularly want to sit on the couch and binge Netflix, but I have such low faith that I'll be able to maintain decent employment that won't destroy my physical and mental health till the age of 67 that FIRE is a completely reasonable thing to aim for. The only unreasonable thing is the core assumption that past performance is a guarantee of future results. Oh well.
Yep, my wife and I are growing into this mindset. We both generally enjoy our careers and doing something meaningful, but we're focused on getting to the point where working is only for the "fun" things in life.
In my case, dinks. And aside from the basics of budgeting, I think there's a huge difference in mindset that would make it difficult to FIRE with kids. You are making a decision to reduce your children's opportunities because you don't want to keep struggling. It's much easier to decide for yourself when enough lifestyle is enough, but much harder to decide that music lessons or language exchange trips or a college fund or a generous baby shower gift are not needed for the kiddo.
This exactly, after looking for my first job I feel like I'm always going to need a backup pan that can be Sustainable with very long periods of no income. The upside to having that in place means the minimum I need to retire is very low. I'm pretty pissed that everything seems to be blowing up this year because my 401k is just about there.
After five years out of the rat race, you couldn't drag me back with a locomotive. I just turned down a fairly enticing prospective offer this morning. I was flattered, but I'm really having a blast. The money would be nice, but the aggravation would not be nice.
I didn't actually want to be here. No one wants to work with us "olds," so it's not like I had a choice. I could have gotten a job, but the only companies that showed any interest, made it clear that I would be treated like garbage.
I've been amazingly productive over the last five years. It's crazy how good things are, without middle managers (Disclaimer: I wuz one) pissing all over my work.
Putting aside the worker shortage in the burger flipping type jobs, I’m an engineer currently interviewing and these companies all still think they can hire an “entry level” with 3 years of experience and then pay them only $60,000.
The hiring managers also had a position opening in 2019, cancelled it because pandemic, then 2 years later don’t think they have to inflation adjust the benefits package (~7%!)
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadAlso there are plenty of 20 and 30-year-olds on Reddit (such as on investing and FIRE subs) and hacker news who have sizable investments in real estate and stocks. The post-2009 bull market is the biggest and longest ever ,surpassing even the 80s and 90s in terms of real returns. Plenty of young people have and are getting rich from that, plus also the rise of lucrative FAANG jobs and also online marketing, social media, etc. This is not representative of all young people obviously, but to say that young people are being denied wealth due to older generation hoarding it ,is wrong too. There are plenty of opportunities for young people to get rich.
Regarding luck, boomers did not have as many ways to become wealthy compared to young people today. Although homes were cheaper , mortgage rate were much higher, inflation was much higher, there was no employer healthcare, real stock and real estate returns were poorer, professional jobs did not pay as well, etc. Adjusted for inflation, college grads 40 years ago made less compared to grads today.Homeownership rates were not higher during the 60s, 70s, and 80s despite homes being cheaper, in part because mortgages were so expensive and wages were not that good.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-depressing-chart-show...
In 1989 (the first year in the Fed's data), the Baby Boomer generation held $4.33T in wealth, which would be $9.5T in today's dollars, while in 2021, the Millennial generation held $7.47T in wealth [1]. While that's a little bit less, it's important to keep in mind that the median age of the Baby Boomer generation was 34 in 1989, vs 32 for the Millennial generation in 2021. If you linearly extrapolate Millennial wealth growth, the generation would hold $10.5T in wealth at a similar age.
So what the linked chart really reflects is that the total size of the pie has gotten much larger in the past 30 years. Most of the increase has gone to older generations, but I think that's neither surprising nor undesirable -- after all, 30 years ago, the Millennial generation ranged from not being born yet to elementary school. Will the pie continue to grow over the next 30 years so that Millennials can see a similar increase in wealth (and hear complaints from the kids being born right now)? I'd imagine that's largely up to the decisions we make today.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
The chart also ignore the population share of each generation - Baby boomers made up a massive part of the US population - 70M out of a population of about 210M (1980) or 33% when they hit working age.
Millennials are slightly larger in numbers - 72M, but smaller part of the total of 330M (2020) or 21%.
Crude analysis and you’d have to assume everything else remains the same (it doesnt), but if all wealth was equally distributed by age you’d expect Millenials (of the same age) to have about 33% less share of the total wealth based on population alone.
Which isn’t far off from that chart if you assume Millennials track similar to Gen-X.
The oldest millennials are turning 40.
Edit: unless it’s changed recently, the ACS publishes their salary survey for chemists in the us yearly so you can look it up if you seek data on pharma salaries.
Owning a house for 30 years in Berkeley in 2021 is a lot different than owning a house for 30 years in Gary, IN.
Can confirm. I was directionless in life until I read a comment on a message board about working from home on Google with the potential to earn $5,000/week. I made my first million in a year and a half by investing the earnings from that into meme stocks, pink sheets stocks and SPACs I found on Reddit while living at home with my parents.
What degree/program were you enrolled in? And how much debt is 'sinking in debt'?
It seems to me that its been well known for years which degrees/careers are profitable and which aren't. Most school's graduation outcomes are publicly published so it shouldn't be too hard to do the calculus. That said I do understand how can easily get into a bad situation since most college decisions are made when you are ~18 plus a lot of people depend on parental assistance which can be unpredictable to say the least.
On another note, it is important to consider that owning a home prior to the modern super low rates had the opposite problem; the purchase price and corresponding down payment was easy but the payments are 'expensive'. Unless you had prior knowledge that interest rates were going to bottom out, there was little reason to think you would make much in real estate and for middle America making the mortgage payment was a constant struggle. In some ways the bull run on the stock market is an even better 'generational-specific-early-investment-strategy' for millenials because you can make 10%, 20%, even 30% YoY returns without any risk or upfront cost.
Really at this point, the most worse off are the last of the millennials and future gen-z individuals entering the labor force. Asset prices including both stock and real estate are at all time highs and pretty much everyone agrees both are in a bubble but both continue to give >10% YoY returns which makes non-participation very difficult to recommend.
And for a lot of people, they are strong academically to get a full ride to a less prestigious school but only get a partial scholarship to a more prestigious school, and then choose to go to the more famous school but then take on debt. Sometimes a lot of debt. So there are many people who go to the most prestigious school no matter the cost. I think that attitude is starting to change now.
There are also affordable state schools you can go to rather than more expensive private schools.
I went all the way to an advanced degree without any loans or personal spending (but I had to purchase books), just using scholarships and financial aid. But I didn't go to the most famous schools. In my high school I was in the top 10% in terms of both scores and grades, so that was enough to get admitted to most schools but not to get a full scholarship. So I got tuition waivers for the local state university and lived with my parents, and then for grad school I got full tuition waiver as well as a TA job that paid enough to live (barely).
But I know many other people who had the same high school grades and SAT scores as I did but went to Dartmouth or other places and took on huge debt. I didn't even consider those schools as I wasn't willing to take on any debt. I always went to the best school that was free.
If you don't go to university, then you have to find your own way in life. You can be very successful if you get a trade, but there is no good system of trade schools -- you have to find the trade yourself, and finance it yourself. Unlike the network of financial aid and scholarship for universities, there is nothing like that for trade schools. The US has no trade school system because it offends our sensibilities which say that everyone should go to college and that tracking is wrong. For the same reason, every high school styles itself as "college prep" but then they have to dumb down the curriculum to allow students to pass. Thus we have no gymnasium system where you are learning useful skills before (or instead of) college prep.
So it's really hard for people who are not college graduates because there is no equivalent support system to train them. The US has terrible problems with lack of skilled workers -- both a shortage of technical students in universitites and a shortage of machinists, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. People in these fields find their own way. Many figure it out -- they meet someone who talks to them and shows them some options, or they have a friend who is an electrician and they find a school and borrow some money to attend, etc. But it's really random and it's easy to fall through the gaps and just take a series of unskilled retail jobs.
In terms of the larger economic environment, the boomers were generally born and raised during the Golden Age of Capitalism [1], but they likely entered the workforce around the time of the early '70s recession. However, the '80s and '90s appear to have been good times to have a job, but as each year went by, it became less and less good to have non-college jobs as the stats above show us. For millenials, the non-college jobs have been objectively worse in terms of pay, and the job opportunities that did exist were hampered by the .com bust (more a Gen Xer hindrance), the '08 bust, and of course, the covid shit show.
[0] Wages: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf [1] Golden Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_econ...
When we put that in the context of the conversation, it does indeed seem like non-college earnings are lower, and the advantage of going to college has lessened.
[0] Premium: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/07/is-college-still-wor...
Do you think migration trends into cities will continue unabated?
Do you think US population growth which drives much of the housing market will continue?
Those of us under 50 though? Much harder time ahead than this discussed cohort, all the juice has been squeezed and growth will be at a reduced rate as the population pyramid compresses.
My guess is a big war over resources will happen, e.g. https://asiatimes.com/2021/01/china-risks-a-himalayan-water-... . Worsening of the climate refugee crisis, even within the US itself, with people moving from flooded (due to sea-level rise) or dried parts or burning parts of the country to other parts. Dry or burning California also can't supply food, in 2010 Russia stopped exporting grains after big forest fires, and the rise of food prices pissed of many people and led to the Arab Spring.
When I started professionally networking, I kept hearing that I needed to weigh the experiences of those close to retirement. I learned the most from people who I could tell would retire before 50.
I think the key(s), whether you're sixteen or sixty, are natural intelligence and a great work ethic.
I'm fifty and am full-stack in whatevers with a side of devops/architecting. I frequently have to walk into a room and in less than thirty minutes figure out what the hell is going on, how I'm going to add value, communicate that to the stakeholders and then deliver. People seem to dig it.
Fifty ain't so bad. What's COBOL?
FORTRAN, on the other hand, is used to melt compute clusters while trying to make things go boom, or model micro- or macroscopic properties to design various things. Damned language still optimizes or runs large scale better.
As you all know, few pay to rewrite code that works well.
Age has nothing to do with it, relevancy does, and some domain expertise is difficult to acquire without decades of experience, even on the bleeding edge.
Unpopular opinion: Silicon Valley is not the center of the universe.
If at least half the letters in FAANG aren't blown away in that time period, it would suggest a tech environment so stagnant that it would be impossible to justify the compensation.
And lasting 30 years at a surviving FAANG company is such a low-probability prospect that it's not something reasonable to include in any future planning.
Very few FAANG engineers can actually expect this outcome.
EDIT: Removed shock word "preposterous", sorry about that.
Barring an AGI that can take care of knowledge work, companies will continue to pay a premium to developers because they are often times the core value creators of the business. Even in traditional areas like finance, quants with CS PhDs are displacing Harvard MBA’s trading on fundamentals b/c their returns blow the latter out the water.
Both are paid a premium, but FAANG is paid a massive premium, and there isn't much precedent for collecting that massive premium continuously for 30 years.
EDIT: Actually in that spreadsheet I would argue that the $250K compensation is too low, the 10% return on investment is too high, and the 30 year timeframe is not sustainable.
Also I kinda question the assertion that these companies being active and important in thirty years would suggest something untoward. In most other industries, the "Blue Chip" companies are pretty durable. JPM's lineage goes back to 1871, and that fact does not prevent its current employees from being well-compensated.
Lol, I heard the same arguments in the 1990s about webmasters, which at that time were also commanding large premiums over the market median. I also remember when any engineer who touched a linux kernel could make 3x "normal developer" wages. Most FAANG engineers aren't working on anything too special; the biggest competition will be off the shelf frameworks/libraries/application which can do what previously required custom work.
We are also in a period of easy investment money - the biggest threat to FAANG companies is the market demanding a return on their investment - P/E ratios are at historically unsustainable levels. Either "this time is different", or this will all end very badly for a lot of people, just like the first dot-com boom.
There are good years, and then there are bad years...
Here’s How Long Employees Are Staying AT The 10 Biggest Companies in Tech:
It doesn't say average numbers before employees leave: https://insights.dice.com/2017/08/22/tech-jobs-last-2-years-....
r/financialindependence has almost 1,000,000 followers.
After five years out of the rat race, you couldn't drag me back with a locomotive. I just turned down a fairly enticing prospective offer this morning. I was flattered, but I'm really having a blast. The money would be nice, but the aggravation would not be nice.
I didn't actually want to be here. No one wants to work with us "olds," so it's not like I had a choice. I could have gotten a job, but the only companies that showed any interest, made it clear that I would be treated like garbage.
I've been amazingly productive over the last five years. It's crazy how good things are, without middle managers (Disclaimer: I wuz one) pissing all over my work.
The hiring managers also had a position opening in 2019, cancelled it because pandemic, then 2 years later don’t think they have to inflation adjust the benefits package (~7%!)