This is good info. Bookmarking it in case I ever make those pay grades (unlikely). Also if the current bubble pops during my lifetime, that'll really reduce my ability to save...
Yeah, as a youngling in Europe I feel like I'm about to get the shitty end of the stick by the time I hit my 30s. 600k/year (inflation-adjusted) seems like a pipe dream...
It’s a pipe dream. 100k€ a year is exceptional for an engineer in Europe. Outside of finance and some American company, it is an exceptional salary period, very rare for someone under 30. I know senior managers in some consulting company who don’t gain that in my country.
I like how people always feel the need to shift a discussion on actual salary that normal people experience to a few job mostly in finance negotiated directly with key stack holders to pretend things are comparable.
Let’s forget that salaries in Europe are ridiculously low to focus on the handful of people who might get an extraordinary position - still paid less than an equivalent one in North America nevertheless - and pretends its doable and everything is fine.
While London is a finance hot spot, jobs from Google, Facebook or similarly competing company will also be in that range.
And that's not even the top salaries, there are also jobs that pay in millions.
You'll also find similar salaries in Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich...
I'm just stating that jobs that pay the same as in the article do exist in Europe, and I don't believe they're as exceptional as you suggest.
There just is a large spectrum of salaries for software engineering, and as we all know, 90% of everything is crud, so of course the median will be much lower.
Engineering salaries in the US are so high I think these “retire by 35” posts should be put into perspective. Saving 250k USD in a lifetime would set me up for life where I’m from. Never mind over 500k in a single year.
Tbh it's a pipe dream for essentially everyone else as well, even 95-99% of Americans. For instance the American President makes 400k/year. That's a wild annual salary and only possible for an exceedingly small smidge of the population. And this guy is earning more.
The president's salary is sort of a joke though, everyone knows that every single president will have a lengthy tour and series of book deals after their term. They'll be paid advisors to companies and non-profits.
Back to tech though, there are probably 100 100k roles for every 400k role. So if you start out making 100k in tech, you have to be 1 in 100 to move up to a 400k role.
I'm a software developer in the US and this is all a pipe dream to me too - I started in the (software) workforce a few years before this person but at close to half the salary. After my first year of employment my net worth was nowhere near positive, especially not five figures positive - I had a student loan burden that was more than my yearly salary. I didn't get into the positive net worth territory until around year ~5 in the workforce.
2009 was also a recession year where it was difficult to find an entry level job at all, at any salary. I went without (software) work for half a year when I was laid off at the end of 2008 and ended up having to relocate for employment.
I'm in my late 30s now and I'm well off by almost every measure (I max out all retirement accounts, I have a six figure brokerage account) - but I'm nowhere near a millionaire or financially independent. I'll need to work another decade best case scenario.
The biggest boost to my savings rate/financial position came from getting married and sharing income/bills with my husband.
If I did it over again I'd pay off my loans slower and put more in my retirement accounts earlier.
Very well done. The best part is that a modest 4% return on net worth/investments will yield about 100k a year which is a very good amount for most people.
Living off 4% works in retirement because you can in part live off principle. In early retirement it’s not going to work out nearly as well because you get the reverse of dollar cost averaging, removing money in down markets is more expensive than in good ones. You need either dramatically reduce spending when your portfolio is down or to live well below the expected returns.
Agreed completely. I meant in the sense of having this 100k once you retire and to continue to work on this high paying job for a few more years assuming you do a proper asset allocation.
I’m not sure I understand. Is it really true that you can’t extract 4% cash money per year off of a million dollars, even in a down market, without shrinking the principal?
$100k should be enough to live comfortably off of in the Midwest.
I'm confused by your question. If you take 4% of the principal and the market does not return at least 4%, your principle has shrunk. This does not account for inflation either.
The Trinity study that the 4% rule comes from is based on having some assets left after 30 years, not the original principle being intact.
But in the Us, you are currently free of 7.5% payroll tax and your income tax caps to 15%. Plus, you no longer need to save 15% of your income for retirement.
The most expensive early retirement tax in the us is health insurance.
Saving on payroll tax is a benefit, but it’s also a significant risk for early retirement. Up to 50k/ year for a single person is a real cushion if you start to run out of money. Retire at say 35 and you can probably still get something from SS, but you need to be significantly more cautious.
Similarly saving 15% for retirement is critical, but saving enough to cover inflation is just as important with an early retirement.
The straightforward 4% analysis is a simplification. It’s pretty easy (and pleasant, even) to do independent contracting for a couple months of the year and cover almost all your living expenses - so no or very little withdrawal. Since you have lots of leisure time to explore your interests, you can also get lucrative niche-of-niche contracts in your specialty.
You can also live comfortably in most of the US on 30k per year assuming you have no dependents or disabilities. It’s simply a comment about spending not the ability to retire.
If the author lurks around: the investment part would be more convincing if you added the gains you got from it to the table, at least between the first and last year.
625k a year? Doing what exactly? Good for you, but I have never seen a spec with even a third of that salary. Or is it that it's only FAANG who's paying that big?
Never set foot in SV nor in the States, but from half a world away it does seem that that figure (i.e. ~600k) for total yearly comp at a FAANG company, given OP's experience, is in the general ballpark, so to speak.
I think people who are graduating now will have a hard time replicating this. My cohort (now in our early 30s, cs majors from a top school) were incredibly lucky because we were in a permanent bull run so as long as we were invested in almost any tech stock, we did well. Almost all of us hit one million mark before early 2020 and that became 2 million at the end of 2021.
I would love for this to continue forever but can it really? For example the author (and my friends) are in similar situation where their compensation are now in the ~500k range but that number is based on the stock value at the time of offer. It is now essentially double that. So we're in a situation where your everyday senior FAANG engineers are locked in a golden handcuff unless they are offered million dollar packages to jump ship.
Golden handcuffs are a good thing. It's such a first world problem to complain about golden handcuffs. "Oh no, I'm making $300k/yr over my nominal market value!"
The golden handcuffs are only handcuffs if you’re in a terrible environment. I’ve walked away from a 7-figure TC. Handcuffs be damned. I wasn’t going to take the abuse anymore.
Some people don’t have the strength to walk away and instead will obsess over money for anything. It’s funny how I’m sure people would require much bigger numbers if they were given an offering where they’d have to go to a terrible prison for 2-3 years in their prime years.
There's no question that equity valuations are due for a massive collapse, the federal reserve has even admitted this. But there are a few things that make me thing that software engineer compensation has nowhere to go but up:
- The world is becoming increasingly computerized. The demand for software is skyrocketing.
- Software engineering is extremely economically efficient. You can produce infinite quantities of a piece of software with no marginal cost.
- Outside of the HN / CS bubble, most regular people still think coding is either boring, stupid, or too hard.
I really think it would be tough to do this job without some major interest in computers that most people simply don't have. And you can't really fake this. This puts a cap on the supply of engineers.
TLDR he rode the tech bubble, lived frugally and poured his savings into what happened to be a very favorable stock decade, which together with his tech stock options from employers made him a multimillionaire.
Not to disrespect the effort that went into this, but let's make this very clear: this type of trajectory is only possible for a very limited few, in a particular moment in history.
Everything seems to indicate that, save for a few samurai, the tech overlords are a powerful force driving inequality today.
The eating part might be more literal than most expect.
For example, it's hard to argue that software made journalism better. Sure, there is some efficiency in using a phone to record interviews and sending the results of your work on seconds on the other side of the world - as opposed to things like notepads and telexes.
On the other hand, Google and Facebook almost completely eviscerated the revenue streams that fed traditional journalists, without putting anything in it's place.
Instead of a large number of local papers and ad agencies earning local revenue and funding journalists, you have a massive revenue stream going into Google's offshore tax shells, of which a part is used to fund their software mercenary army, and the bulk is reimvested into further tech monopolies.
The corrupt and the despots surely welcome the tech overlords.
Worse than that, they're taking away money from local businesses. Local markets, local stores, local shops, local newspapers, local magazines, small businesses, etc.
They're vampires centralizing local revenues worldwide and for what?!? That money gets reinvested or offshored so that about 100 billionaires live like kings with about 2 million millionaire flunkies working for them.
Also you need to be extremely lucky to be born in the right country and the right area, have a healthy childhood and access to learning, have no physical or psychological illness, have no moral qualms with working for those companies, and the list goes on.
> this type of trajectory is only possible for a very limited few
We are talking 0.1% of human population if not less.
> the tech overlords are a powerful force driving inequality today.
I would truly disagree; tech is transforming lives across the class spectrum, globally.
In fact, what you should be concerned about is how other industries think it’s acceptable to significantly underpay their average employee. And the ironic part is that tech companies still pay managers and executives way more than the average SWE - at FAANG, often directors make more than their entire reporting chain.
To have 1 MM USD/EUR at the end of your thirties given an average 4 % yearly return on investment, you need to save around 4.000 USD/EUR per month starting at age 25. In Europe, if you earn around 100k EUR per year your free income will be around 5.000-6.000 EUR per month. Saving 4.000 EUR / month is doable with that but you'll have to live very frugally, not traveling much and you better not start a family unless you have a partner who will supplement your income.
And regarding the authors' experience: Yeah, if you happen to be employed in the area that ranks in the top 0.05 % quantile for engineering salaries worldwide you will easily become wealthy, especially if you're lucky enough to be paid in company stock during a stock market bubble.
Maybe HN is more likely to be in that quantile than the general population of developers; “more likely than not” implies that most people on HN are in that quantile which I kind of doubt but I don’t have data to support either way.
European countries usually don't pay 100k for 15 year olds, also after tax it is (well depending on country) 4.5k in Germany. If you live frugally you can save 3k.
Yeah I don’t get how their outgoings are so low given where they must live… rent or buy it simply doesn’t fit even if they are renting a room and living of cup noodles based on rent in the Bay Area some of their outgoings are suspiciously low.
So I think getting a house gifted by your parents is also a requirement for their path.
Their outgoings aren't particularly low. I guess early on they were, but that's "living with roommates". Their current col is very much in the "rents a two bedroom apartment and spends whatever they want on food" category, but they probably don't own a car.
My personal expenses are a tad lower than theirs, and I rent an apartment in San Francisco that I live in alone.
Not really. An appartment alone is $2000 a month according to the post. That's 24% of your income at $100k, and not even 4% at $620k. I don't know how much people in the US usually spend on rent/housing, but anything under 30% of your income seems low to me.
Not to mention some places (Ireland) kneecap your gains by taxing even unrealized gains via a rule called deemed disposal. Nevermind 52% income tax that kicks in extremely low.
The fresh graduate salary for 100k is higher than the majority of US workers will peak during their entire career of 50 years (adjusted for inflation).
Yes. My friend and I are both self taught engineers (as are several others in our social circle — all coming from similar roots and places)
We are continuously flabbergasted how much we are paid, and it’s not even FAANG levels; still, it’s more than many other skilled and important roles in the workforce.
Part of me understands that there’s still a lot of money to be made and thus, salaries should continue to be high but other parts of me wonder (especially with increased ability to work anywhere) when/if we’ll see salaries normalize.
Salaries won't decrease until the demand of people to work in tech eclipses the demand of society for new tech. This works both ways. If a ton of people suddenly become interested in coding, this could pop the bubble. And if society suddenly stops demanding new technology (perhaps due to some catastrophic hack), then the bubble pops as well. The scary thing is that the latter is probably more likely to happen than the former.
The high demand is for experienced developers and not juniors. In recent years there has been an uptick in coding interest and the pool of newcomers is bigger than ever before. However, the _quality_ of this torrent of new developers is seen to be lower than previous years.
$100K first job which is around £74K in the UK… you aren’t likely to get anywhere near that as a grad masters or not here but after taxes and student loan payments (which are deducted from your income in the UK) and all other deductions you’ll end up with £42,908.26 per year, that’s $56K.
And this is where this breaks down for people in tech outside of the US at least.
In the UK the path was at least until IR35 kicked in was to slave for about 10 years and become a contractor at which point you’ll charge per day nearly as much as you used to get per week if not per month…
You can do a lot of it without moving to the US or working as a small but niche consultancy outfit (I get 200+ euro/hour from and in the eu); wfh for a US company, as a company in a cheap EU country that has favorable tax for companies. Then optimize. For instance, a UK company can deduct a lot of things especially work from home, you just need to optimize for them. Works fine for programmers at least. I do not think people who 'work jobs' know how much they can optimize their position; which is comparable to the US in rights really in many EU countries.
That’s part of the issue, with consulting you’re forced to act and think like a company rather than an employee. It requires more research or hiring professional advisors. There’s potential tax benefits, but also corresponding legislation to ensure you and your clients aren’t dodging social security contributions. I’m sure once you have some experience it’s simple, but from the outside looking in, it seems slightly risky.
Well here in the EU you can have jobs with almost 0 risk but less than US money, or a bit of risk (which you would also have in the US; easy to fire people there I think?) and make US money with Healthcare etc intact even if you lose a client. No more stupid interviews (they are hiring a company, not a person; I never had to do one because of that) and you have a safety net in the EU whatever happens anyway... Maybe I should write something about it as I have been doing it for 30+ years.
You should reconsider your worth and attempt to re-negotiate pay.
I started out 6-7 years ago at £30k and am now at £100k + options (worthless). Have only ever worked at startups. You can 1.5x that easily at a big tech (some FAANG jobs exist in London).
You then end up paying London rent…
You won’t be able to afford to rent a luxury London flat on 100K or even 150K but a 2 bed in any decent area is £2-2.5K council tax and utilities would be another £200 p/m easily.
You are probably better off making £80K in Manchester as a senior dev than £100-110K in London.
Newcastle has also a decent tech ecosystem tho it is very much focused around Sage.
Maybe. We own our flat in Zone 1 (Soho, 48k down payment, 12k closing costs) after 5 years saving, mortgage is 2.29% ~ 1900 a month. Save about 2500 a month. The one thing I will say is that the "single tax" certainly exists in London, and I find my situation affordable because I have no kids, and my partner brings in an other £35k or so. If we wanted a 3 bedroom or something, forget about it. That's when it becomes absurd to live in central and totally prohibitive.
Also, my experience with London companies + recruiters in the last 3 months has been that permanant remote roles have been cropping up. I would say its about 50/50 of whether a job requires any on prem time, and about 90/10 that the job requires 1-2 days a week on prem.
For a 2019 purchase there is no way that’s more than a studio maybe maybe a tiny 1 bed, if I want to buy where I rent now (W2) I’m looking at 1M+ for any two bed that isn’t a 50sq/m lower ground closet, the non council is a given I don’t think there are any council properties in Soho…
The 2 bed flat I’m renting got recently evaluated at 1.7M it’s very nice and very large (for London)but the lease remaining on it is 68 years and the Victorian building it sits in would need a lot of work very very soon so the buyers are looking at 350-400K bill within a few years of buying the flat (leasehold renewal and building repairs) on top of that which also is why the current landlord is looking to sell.
As it stands now if you want to buy a property for £600K you are looking at £60K deposit, £20K stamp duty and probably another £20K for misc costs.
£600K is a below what an average new build in a Zone 3 would cost you these days outside of the few units they reserve for HTB. If you can save £3K a month you’re looking at 3 years of saving. Since most people / couples would struggle to save even £1K a month especially in their early careers they are probably looking at a decade of saving for a property or even more if the house prices keep on rising as fast as they are now.
I stayed at my ex's flat in W2 around twenty years ago, the estate was selling 2-beds for 240K then - are you suggesting those flats are over £1M?? I dare not look at prices.
Edit: Reader, he looked at the prices
Found almost identical flat at 499,999K, so coming in at less than Millbank flats were going for in 2016. Those flats are only £25K more now. This seems perfectly doable for software engineers who have a good permanent job or are contracting.
We lived in NW1, W1H and SW1 for fifteen years and it was totally doable with two earners even starting on a perm salary of 35K, and as the income increased we stayed, but within three years of kids arriving, it was clear that we needed to make a choice. Stay with a two-bedroom in Zone 1 - and pollution etc - or jet to Zone 4 and triple our space.
Five years later I think it's more feasible to stay in Zone 1 or 2 with kids as the air becomes cleaner and you should have saved up enough to find a bigger place. A friend travels from Zone 1 to 4 every on the train for the school run, so it's perfectly doable given flexible working.
Not any more I’m on £150K base and total cash comp of around £200K with bonus, car allowance and some other perks.
Whilst it’s true that I probably won’t find a pay like this outside of London it’s also quite hard to get it within London if I lose my job it’s more likely that I’ll have to take a pay cut than not.
In fact once you get to 6 figures in the UK outside of contracting it’s not uncommon to essentially bounce up and down by as much as 30% between jobs.
Looking at the more median salaries especially post COVID the pay gap has shrunk considerably.
Finance/Fintech is still very much London centric and those places pay the most in uk tech outside some senior FAANG roles but not everyone is lucky enough to land those.
It’s even not about being good or asking for more it’s really about just landing a job with an employer that is able and willing to pay that much and being able to justify that to them and it’s not as easy as it seems to be in SV.
In fact just before the pandemic I was looking to make a move and I went to a few recruiters and their honest advice was pretty much stay where I was (less than what I get now but 20% (5/15 split) pension and very very good benefits).
I did managed to move in early 2020 to my current role but that was through my network.
Overall considering it the loss of pension I probably came out even it was more of wanting to do something new in a different setting than the pay.
At my last company we hired new computer science graduates at more than $100k per year.
A friend of mine has a son that just got a job offer right out of a medium tier computer science school with total compensations more than $200k per year.
In the UK, the stronger drag on wealth accumulation for the poor is the absurd taxation on the middle incomes (50K+), especially given the very low level of service of public schools, healthcare system, childcare, etc…
Agree that the stronger drag is the cost of childcare, but the poor don't earn 50k+
In fact, if you earn 50k as a single without dependants (or if you are a couple with 2x50k income) you're definitely richer than the majority of folks.
Also, the UK tax system is incredibly generous to high income folks: 40k+ tax exempt pension contributions, 20k ISA allowance, 12k cgt allowance. It means that you can accumulate a good chunk of capital before you'll even have to start paying taxes
You start to lose your income tax allowance at £100K that more than offsets the CGT tax allowance and puts you in a hidden 60% tax rate.
Childcare is expensive as fuck and you lose your childcare allowance at £50K in fact if you share a household with anyone who claims it and you earn more than £50K they’ll deduct that from you…
Living on wealth in the UK is as easy as in the US I would agree to that perhaps even easier since there are no property taxes and probably even more tax schemes to leverage than in the US but getting to that point under PAYE even whilst earning well above the median wage isn’t easy especially if you want to have children and have to live in London for that pay.
The main issue is just how depressed many of the wages in the UK are and thus just how narrow the tax base is.
My point is that if you start your career owning nothing and work hard, you pay an insane amount of tax on it. Even if you make 100000£ per annum, it will take 20 years to accumulate as much wealth as a guy who inherited a 60 square meter flat. In the meanwhile this other guy hasn’t paid a pound of tax and is maybe receiving some benefit.
I should have specified that the problem is the taxation of work-related income (the main source of income of the poor) compared to the taxation of wealth. On this respect I find particularly egregious the NI hike (an increase of the income tax or the introduction of a property tax would have been more appropriate).
Not making a judgement call on which is better (its all trade offs), but this is what Americans don’t get - all those social benefits have a cost and a good portion falls on the middle to upper middle class.
I think a lot of Americans envision finding a European style social safety net by only taxing billionaires.
I don’t think the UK has a European style safety net, they don’t tax enough people for that the first £12.5K of your income (below £100K) are income tax exempt the UK has the narrowest tax base in Europe.
I think the UK managed to strike the worst possible compromise between the Europeans and the Americans. The NHS provides some basic service, but if you want a French or Italian style healthcare, you’ll end up spending thousands of pounds per year, assuming you are relatively healthy. Childcare is nonexistent, nurseries cost in the order of 1500£ per month per child. State schools are so bad that it’s normal to send your child to a private school. Unemployment benefits are offensive.
All this while everybody with a professional job faces a 40% marginal tax rate (plus NI).
USA salaries are really unbelievable. That £74,000 which seems to be a poor salary in the USA judging the the OP would be a really very good salary in the UK
Are UK salaries quoted post-tax? USA salaries and wages are usually quoted pre-tax. Obviously not a 5-10x difference, but that still makes comparison more difficult with regions that usually discuss post-tax earnings.
Quoted before income tax and employee national insurance (50%ish) and after employer national insurance (13%). Most people seem to forget about that extra 13 since it disappears before the 'gross' number on the payslip.
Hahaha I wish these numbers were quoted post-tax... unfortunately UK numbers are in my experience all quoted pre-tax, just like in the US. So yes, that £74,000 really is before ~22% tax (income tax + national insurance).
IR35 hasn't really affected that path, you can find contracts that are outside of the legislation and as long as your working practices are also outside you're fine, there are also insurances now for these things.
A lot of companies don’t hire contractors under their own LTD anymore they only take those that come through an umbrella company that pays them under PAYE.
There is also nothing -- literally, nothing -- to prevent you from finding a remote work contract with a US company, and billing them at a rate appropriate for the US market. From your point of view, there is no VAT chargeable on B2B services supplied to a customer located outside the EU, and you can get paid easily using a Wise account. From the client's point of view, give them a W2-BEN-E and they can effectively consider you as 1066 status.
There is little point in discussing money and using yourself as an example when you are extremely well off.
Congrats to OP for having a lot of money in the bank, but there is nothing special or unique about their advice. It's the usual invest your money, don't spend too much, try to get into a top company, etc.
Even for someone in a similar situation, there is very little here that I haven't seen repeated elsewhere countless times.
I think the real luck is getting on the ladder in the first place, where you have a prestigious job that is a natural step to even more prestigious jobs, ie you are always a likely candidate for the job above. Most hedge funds and FAANG employers get a lot of resumes that will never even be read.
Also you really don't know what you're actually applying for when you're a graduate. You think you know but only those who are fortunate are able to get it right. Plenty of people get a job thinking it leads somewhere. For instance, I've interviewed a lot of financial ops people who think they're on the ladder to becoming a trader. It does happen, but not that often.
But good on him, it still takes work and dedication to do something like this.
> For instance, I've interviewed a lot of financial ops people who think they're on the ladder to becoming a trader
I think it is definitely possible to know. My college friends with parents in tech certainly knew.
When I was in college, I looked over H1B data to get a sense of what was really going on. The conclusion: finance, consulting, law, all vastly overrated in compensation unless you are doing quantitative finance or have a very rare job.
True in my experience. The path is set long before you think it is. Yes, you can jump on the prestige track later on (in my field, this means joining Apple after 5-10 years of working), but a Stanford grad naturally walks into these jobs. My spouse and I have the same degree and background, aside from alma mater, but they joined a FAANG, in a design role, out of school because that’s where everyone in their Stanford circle was going. I joined a tier 2 company in QA because that’s where my school was feeding people. 6 years later, my spouse is a multi-millionare* and I’m around 1 with 4 more years of experience.
I’ve been trying for years to jump to a FAANG and correct my initial career mistake, but it’s extremely difficult and I’ve only seen the top 10% of my company, in the right positions (not QA), do it. I need to do two jumps: QA to design, then tier 2 to tier 1. As a result, I’ve actually decided to throw in the towel and “reroll” as a software dev.
* For the purposes of retirement we track our net worths separately
[Edit] I also would like to mention that the article says as much
Absolutely. What's incredibly frustrating is that as I've moved up the employer prestige ladder, the level of talent definitely goes up, but so much of it is just a rise in credentials (e.g., better schools, better past jobs). Levels of motivation/effort don't seem too different: there are still the same groups of lazy people that put in the bare minimum and others that do a great job.
Each hop up takes a good mix of hard work and luck but it always results in a massive jump in pay
Changing career tracks like that is so hard. You almost need to hide your experience in interviews. I’ve had so many interviews get derailed because the interviewer finds out that I’m looking to switch away from a field I don’t enjoy and realizes that they have another opening there they’d rather fill.
> The author was lucky to earn a huge amount of money.
He's not earning "huge" amounts of money for jobs in that field. (Additionally, it's a field that most intelligent people can enter with 1-3 years of study.)
What can we European devs do to boost tech salaries in Europe?
I love my five weeks of paid holiday, 14 weeks of paid paternity leave, and free healthcare. but I would still prefer early retirement instead of working till 65.
Independent contractor or entering management. Employment salaries go high currently only in Switzerland, though they have definitely been rising in recent years also in Central Europe.
> What can we European devs do to boost tech salaries in Europe?
Basically, build a network of tech monopolies which engage in unethical, if not criminal practices, then build a VC ecosystem that is ready to spend king's ransoms to get startups to join that club. Wait as these companies compete to buy your soul.
Kill particular countries languages, cultures and laws to create real single market. At least US Congress has sole authority to regulate interstate commerce, compared to EU.
Not only the amount of investment poured in European startups not the same, but also the culture isn't. It seems like in Europe people prioritize paid holidays and other things given by the state, high taxes etc over big ambitious audacious achievements like you'd see in the US (that later Europe has to combat with regulations instead of innovation). Why pay a SWE in Europe 300k to work on a delivery app? 300k would make sense if they are working on something of the caliber of FAANG (yes, Facebook is just a social network/messaging app, but they possess data that not a single state in Europe or elsewhere can dream of, unfortunately).
Child care in the bay area is $2-3k / month per child. Plus you need a bigger home with one more bedroom so an additional $1-2k/month. Then a bigger car. This is without all the expenses related to having a child such as healthcare, food, activities…
So it sounds like $8k per month for a child is pretty reasonable, but then you hit economies of scale so the next kid will be a bit cheaper than the first to have.
If you have kids and live in Europe already with a spouse who also has their hopes and dreams and works in a different field, kids cost you 500k out of the total 600k compensation because you can't (really - don't want to) move to bay area :)
It is probably easier to be a millionaire if you do not feel the need to socialize with other millionaires, live where they live, do what they do, send your kids to the same exclusive schools etc.
Of course, without networking with other millionaires, becoming a millionaire is a bit harder...
On yet another hand, a millionaire living in the well-to-do coastal communities of California might actually still be financially insecure, while a not-yet-quite millionaire living in rural Montana may be secure for life.
I am instinctively drawn towards the rural Montana thing, but mainly because I am introverted anyway.
It’s more like 3 or 4 years due to taxes, even if you don’t spend your money. Feels like government is hellbent on making sure you don’t become a millionaire.
> Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I’ve been very privileged, especially in the educational opportunities I’ve had.
This might sound reasonable from a US-centric perspective, but to me it reads like utter nonsense. The main privilege here is access to the US labor market and tax policy. There are no stories like this one where I live (in Sweden). Absolutely none.
Yeah I d say he s been dealt very bad cards, had no problem being independent growing up in Normandy, France. I think we're priviledged by not being in the US and that guy is at the top of a turd pile...
One of the biggest tragedies, in my view, is what a lovely place Europe is to live, and what utter lack (seemingly for no great underlying reason) of class mobility exists there.
What an absolute joke. The United States has terrible class mobility compared to the Netherlands or Germany for example. You don’t have anything to support what you said other than a skewed perspective created by American centric media.
I moved from Europe to the US, and so have a lot of other people who aim to become rich. In europe most rich people inherit everything, mobility to upper class is basically non existent. Here it’s Very much possible
I’m kinda surprised by these numbers. My impression of the us is that many immigrants will be unskilled and have low incomes, but that their children will be much better off in comparison. So a few reasons these numbers could be this way:
1. My intuition is wrong
2. There are lots of people in low income groups where there is little i regeneration along mobility for structural reasons, or maybe immigrants children who often see the biggest improvements are excluded for some reason.
3. The chart talks about reaching mean income. Particularly in the US, mean income is higher than median income so even if achieving the latter is easier, achieving the former could be harder. To some extent the metric may disadvantage countries where the highest-earning few percent of the population earn a lot more than the median person.
That graph, and "social mobility" analysis in general, shows the movement from low income to average. This is good for a country overall, but it's irrelevant to the discussion that people are having in this thread. Most people here are more interested in the median to rich movement. Unfortunately this movement is practically impossible in countries like Sweden and NL (for an employee).
Let's take a typical profile that HN users would be interested in, a top10% engineer working for a big company. This person would never become rich in NL, but almost always become rich in the US.
>Most people here are more interested in the median to rich movement. Unfortunately this movement is practically impossible in countries like Sweden and NL (for an employee).
Same in Germany why I assumed the diagram would be appropriate. But you are 100% correct and I agree with
> This person would never become rich in NL, but almost always become rich in the US.
I don’t think that measurement of social mobility makes much sense in this context.
Sure, moving from lower working class to upper middle class is probably easier in Sweden than in many other countries. But the thing is: it doesn’t make much of a difference.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Nordic welfare state kind of games the social mobility score in this way, by having such a compressed income distribution. If you go from $20k after taxes to $35k after taxes you’ve moved through more or less the whole income distribution, but your life is pretty much the same.
> If you go from $20k after taxes to $35k after taxes you’ve moved through more or less the whole income distribution, but your life is pretty much the same.
100% agreed - my sibling comment about NL also implies the same.
The report itself [0] notes many of the contradictions in the US:
> "Despite scoring high on the Work Opportunities (83.0) pillar—because of its low unemployment rate—as well as on the Technology Access pillar (90.2), it has the lowest score in the region on the Fair Wages pillar (43.8 against an average of 64.6 for the region). With an incidence of low pay (less than two-thirds of median wages) at 24.9, it has one of the shares of low-paid workers among OECD countries. The lack of effective social protection in the United States also translates into a low score on the Social Protection pillar (61.7). The minimum guaranteed income benefits for a family with two children (where one partner is out of work) is only 20% of median income. The United States could also improve on the Health pillar, where it performs quite poorly compared to peers in its region (75.8) due to a low healthy life expectancy at birth (66.6 years)."
When you average things down to a single number, you lose a lot of nuance.
For the US, the data the report collected generally supports something like 'You have the opportunity to succeed greatly, and be rewarded extremely well, but this requires financial resources at birth.' While also being true that 'If you are less successful, there are few and poor support nets for you, and serious pitfalls to avoid (f.ex. health care costs).'
No, it is not. The opposite would be that it requires financial resources of the class you want to be part of to be part of a class.
Which wasn't what I (or the report) said: the idea is that it takes some level of financial resources as a prerequisite for a chance at top-level success.
Given my experience in NL, I would disagree. I see a very clear class divide here, which is just mostly ignored by the middle/upper classes and government.
Most of the population spend the majority of their income on rent, commuting, and essentials. Students also have lots of debt over the past decade (15k on average). Owning a car is expensive, but so is public transport (esp. for a family). Renting is expensive, but so is buying a house.
Income tax brackets range from ~40-50%, while corporate and dividend taxes are minimal - 15-20%. VAT is regressive and applies on almost all goods incl. groceries, ranging from 5-21%. There is no capital gains taxes, so this obviously benefits the economically active upper/elite classes who have assets/savings to invest - while middle class families do not own much at all.
Since the Mobility Index rankings focus on lower -> middle class mobility, it shows the Netherlands in a positive light. However, the income divide between the two classes is actually not as pronounced as the USA, while the gap between middle to upper is incredibly massive (like most of the world).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that despite the expected policy differences and rankings, NL is quite strongly divided economically. In my experience, the average Dutch don't mix with the poor, nor show off their riches, nor think too deeply about the elite classes. This mindset is essentially ignorance - neglecting poorness, brushing off government corruption, and assisting the funneling of taxes & wealth.
You forgot to mention you do have a wealth tax. For wealthy people, those tend to be one of the "worst" taxes, because it is payable regardless of whether your investments do well or bad.
You’re right, I missed commenting on the Wealth tax.
However, it’s equally ineffective - there are multitudes of ways to avoid paying it, as the wealthy here continuously do. Further, the percentage itself is quite small:
- 0.58% for 30k-100k
- 1.34% till ~1MM
- 1.68% afterwards.
It is hilarious to me, that 30k is considered “wealth”. This means saving for your children’s studying expenses (rent, food, etc), would require exceeding 30k and paying taxes.
The wealthy are wealthy. It doesn’t seem to affect them at all. Instead, people like you and I have to think about the arbitrary amount of money the gov wants to extricate from our small savings.
> Most of the population spend the majority of their income on rent, commuting, and essentials. Students also have lots of debt over the past decade (15k on average). Owning a car is expensive, but so is public transport (esp. for a family). Renting is expensive, but so is buying a house.
> Income tax brackets range from ~40-50%, while corporate and dividend taxes are minimal - 15-20%. VAT is regressive and applies on almost all goods incl. groceries, ranging from 5-21%. There is no capital gains taxes, so this obviously benefits the economically active upper/elite classes who have assets/savings to invest - while middle class families do not own much at all.
I hate to tell you, but the US practically invented all those issues. Average Americans pay a far larger percentage of their income in taxes than the wealthiest Americans or corporations do. You say VAT, we say "sales tax," and, yes, it's still just as regressive. Rent, student loans, etc.... yeah, that's all bad here, too.
I don’t believe that the Netherlands has inherited these ideas from the USA. In fact, NL invented capitalism and stock markets.
Every Dutchie I speak to about the inequality here, loves comparing themselves to the USA memes. It’s that whataboutism and the ignorance that bothers me.
> I don’t believe that the Netherlands has inherited these ideas from the USA. In fact, NL invented capitalism and stock markets.
Of course, I'm aware that NL invented stock markets and pioneered a lot of ideas behind modern capitalism. That wasn't where I was going with it.
Not to turn this into some weird anti-pissing contest of "my country is worse than yours," but, if you look at the numbers, the US fares worse than NL on:
Gini coefficient [0]: US 41.4 vs NL 28.1
Global social mobility index [1]: US 70.4 vs NL 82.4
Human development index [2]: US 0.92 vs NL 0.944
Now, I don't think capitalism is the best system for maximizing any of the above, but, if you look at the tables, it's pretty clear that the Nordic model of capitalism is basically as good as capitalism gets. When you look at some of the things that go into these indices, other than stuff like "GDP per capita," it's pretty clear why: having a strong safety net and other social programs for workers makes people better off.
If nothing else, reducing the consequences of failure from "total personal and financial ruin" to something more manageable is more likely to encourage people to take chances that may or may not pay off. That's what economic freedom really is. That's also the part of capitalism the US didn't pick up, so, that's what I was getting at when I was saying that the US invented those issues. Again, not to get into an anti-pissing contest, but, that's why the US recently got compared to Jurassic Park [3] on here. I don't see anybody comparing NL to a land where dinosaurs will eat you if you're not always vigilant.
> Every Dutchie I speak to about the inequality here, loves comparing themselves to the USA memes. It’s that whataboutism and the ignorance that bothers me.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but I'd like to know. Are you just saying that people you talk to are saying what I said, but without the facts and figures?
> Not to turn this into some weird anti-pissing contest of "my country is worse than yours,"
Fair enough, though I wasn’t trying to imply that either.
> it's pretty clear that the Nordic model of capitalism is basically as good as capitalism gets
I can agree from the data and personal experience, that the QoL for the lower/middle classes in the EU is better than most of the world.
However, I don’t think that it’s as pronounced as the local EU politicians would have you believe, when they advocate for higher taxes every year.
That’s essentially the divide I’m talking about in my comments - the broken capitalist dystopia of it all. They set the benchmark somewhere in between the USA and the post-colonial world, and act like they’ve solved everything.
> reducing the consequences of failure from "total personal and financial ruin" to something more manageable is more likely to encourage people to take chances that may or may not pay off. That's what economic freedom really is.
Yes, I agree that this sounds intuitive. Unfortunately, the EU has one of the least risk-taking people I’ve ever seen. People don’t startup nor attempt businesses.
> Are you just saying that people you talk to are saying what I said, but without the facts and figures?
Not exactly, but rather, they are unaware of the situation outside their social bubble in NL. And see memes about the USA and think they’re doing great.
I can’t speak for the OP, but usually QoL refers to essential things like housing, food, education, etc. Outside of that, the average Dutchie has very little disposable income.
This means that the extra money they make in the USA, is still quite useful since you can spend it on all the other stuff that gives you joy in life.
What do Medicare supplements cost, like $100-$500/month? If health insurance is your primary reason to leave the US, it might make sense to spend years working in a job that offers health insurance after you retire, or moving to a lower COL area within the US (medical costs in rural Texas are drastically cheaper than San Francisco, for example)
I have friends who started out in middle-class families and sunk lower. I also have friends who started out middle-class and rose.
IMHO, the biggest factors seem to be raw intellingence, willingness to move & chase money, and some 'luck' factors. But I can't imagine a world where nobody could change fortunes given reasonably common circumstances.
>In Germany, it would take a child whose parents' earnings are in the bottom 10 percent of the population six generations or 180 years to reach the average national income.
>The average across the entire OECD, a group of 37 industrialized countries, is five generations. Children in low-income families in Denmark would need two generations, while children in the United States would need five generations.
Seemingly it's easy to reach the middle class, or even upgrade into upper middle class (assuming you started with middle class parents). But then there's this big gap.
And people in the middle are squeezed from the both sides.
The modern "progressive" thought-process is to feel guilty about having a good education. I went to private school in the UK and the only thing I feel is infinite gratitude to my parents for forking-out the money to send me there (they were not rich, they were both teachers).
I don’t think anyone said that. Lots of people _do_ think you should feel guilt for privilege. Pretending those people don’t exist isn’t helping the progressive movement. It’s important for progressives to acknowledge and counter the people who wave the progressive flag but espouse the opposite of progressive ideals.
I disagree. I see vastly more people claiming that privilege acknowledgement is tied in with guilt who oppose the notion of "privilege" than I see "lots of people" espousing the notion of privilege guilt who actually think we should talk about privilege.
I don't personally believe in reparations as commonly framed, but saying that reparations ought to be paid is also not the same thing as saying people should feel guilty for actions they didn't take.
> It’s important for progressives to acknowledge and counter the people who wave the progressive flag but espouse the opposite of progressive ideals.
I think this can be taken too far. Disavowal can be important at times, but I find there is often a trend among the Right to highlight random views held by an extremely small minority of people (ie. a single tweeting American among 315 million Americans) and demand a disavowal of that rhetoric. I think this is in bad faith.
This comment thread, in my view, is emblematic of this in that simply by using the word "privilege" we are now being asked to disavow something that some nebulous "lots of people" attach to that word, even though the word was clearly not being used in that context here.
Frankly, it’s not a strawman. Look on twitter and you’ll find plenty of evidence of that kind of thinking.
> but I find there is often a trend among the Right to highlight random views held by an extremely small minority of people (ie. a single tweeting American among 315 million Americans) and demand a disavowal of that rhetoric. I think this is in bad faith.
Agreed. Where I disagree is that the left doesn’t do this exact same thing, or that these views are held by “a single tweet” and not, say, entire online communities.
For the record, I generally agree with you, but to the same extent that avowal can go too far, it is very easy to go too far in assuming all ridiculous positions on our side are strawmen. A lot of people do think that way. Nothing wrong with acknowledging privilege — but you don’t need to feel personally guilty over things out of your control like your inherited wealth or your skin color. I think we can all agree on that.
No it’s not. We’re debating about the ways people think about privilege. There’s no requirement that those ways are all expressed in this particular thread. It doesn’t terminate anything — the discussion can continue, but “I don’t see an example of that right here” is not a counter argument.
Yes yes, in the end everyone's success can be distilled down to luck or environment (which we were born into so also luck) or inborn qualities (which are also luck). Merit does not exist and everything is luck.
Or we could notice that merit is still a useful concept, that good decisionmaking is a skill regardless of whether everyone is in a position to use it, and that the previous poster's parents made decisions that were highly beneficial to their child, above and beyond what other parents in comparable situations might have, and that the poster is quite right to be thankful for that. Which funnily enough is the only opinion they voiced, so it's rather a mystery what your needlessly nasty comment is replying to.
You are equating guilt with acknowledging privilege, and those aren’t the same. I feel privileged for having gone to MIT, and acknowledge that privilege. I feel privileged for having grown up Jewish and white-appearing, and acknowledge that.
I feel guilty for neither, and acknowledging that particular privilege takes nothing away from how hard I worked anyway. The son of two very poor Russian Jewish immigrants, I worked extremely hard to get to where I am. I also feel privileged for growing up in a loving and non-abusive family.
Lots of people don’t have those things, and I’m thankful I did. That’s not guilt.
> You are equating guilt with acknowledging privilege, and those aren’t the same.
This is one of those fundamental misunderstandings I see when discussing things with folks of a particular political persuasion. It's the same folks that belueve we shouldn't consider outcomes when evaluating processes. There's just something different about the way they think, I guess.
No, they aren’t. They are saying you should consider if and how your privilege helped you out, because sometimes that isn’t transferable to other people; someone black in a job interview may not have the same experience someone white does, and that’s okay, but it’s important to recognize if and how being white helped so that someone who isn’t white can account for that and adjust.
It does have something to do with guilt, because the ultimate concession of acknowledging privilege is that you didn't truly earn your advantages, which is a root cause of perpetuated injustice. That's where the guilt lives: being the beneficiary of systematic injustice. This doesn't make you a bad person, of course; pretty much anyone in a position of privilege will capatalize on it, as that is human nature.
Acknowledging privilege doesn’t imply you didn’t earn your advantages; it implies there were some that were handed to you. Plenty of others need to be earned.
It is rare, extremely rare, to meet someone with absolutely no privilege, and that isn’t a place to aspire to.
> They are saying you should consider if and how your privilege helped you out
Yes, they are. "Check your privilege" is often used to say "you didn't do that."
Even if you assume that "privilege" is a big reason why you had an opportunity, there are almost always many people with the same "privilege" who didn't do said thing.
Moreover, it's almost always some skin color argument. There are many "don't look white" people who had privileges that I didn't have but I'm supposed to "check my privilege."
The idea is simply to acknowledge where your privilege helped you, and how others may not have had the same experiences or ease of access to certain things, etc.
The trope of “he’s black and rich, and I’m white and poor” is irrelevant, as there are different kinds of privilege. In rural Alabama, being white and poor is going to lend you a much closer set of relationships than being black and rich. In SF, it may be the other way around - the point is everyone should simply be aware of how various privilege has helped them.
And again: this takes nothing away from hard work. It simply acknowledges that another person who worked just as hard but had a different set of lived experiences and privileges may not have the same result. That’s not bad; just fact.
And again: it has nothing to do with guilt. You shouldn’t feel guilty about it; ~everyone has some kind of privilege. But ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist is the exact opposite of the point, which is, at the end of the day, an exercise in empathy.
Bull. I've seen "check your privilege" used to shut people down, to shame them, etc. I've never seen it used as a positive thing.
It's telling that you really want to say that no black person has privilege. You'd certainly never tell one to "check your privilege."
How much time have you actually spent in rural Alabama?
I say that because the most racist places in the US are urban, the NE and the coasts, not the south. Yes, there are racists everywhere, but the only places where blacks and whites interact productively at scale are in the south.
Calm down, and stop assuming malice where there is none, please.
Firstly, I never implied or said that no black person has privilege.
Second, my entire point that you seem to be missing is that everyone should recognize what privilege they do have and have benefited from.
I’ve spent plenty of time in the South; I am not implying there is no way for a black person to interact productively with white people in the South. I am suggesting that, generally, in a lot of rural areas of the South, being white lends you more “immediate credit” than being black.
And, to your point, that was but one example. I could have said “inner cities,” and made the same point. That does not, in any way, change the point; it only serves to reinforce it.
I get that you want to be a white knight but you're defending malice, said defense being that you can imagine that "Check your privilege" being used differently than it actually is.
And, you've yet to explain what good comes from said "recognition". What, exactly, do you want me to do differently because I benefitted from succeeding in a situation that actually was available to many? (I'm pretty sure that you won't be satisfied with me just saying "hey, I built on stuff that had happened before.")
Yes, there are lots of places where being white lends you more credit than being black. Similarly, there are lots of places where being black lends you more credit. So what?
My point is that the south tends has more successful interaction than the north. That's actually more true in the rural areas.
I don’t think we’re going to agree here, even though I’ve tried to find common ground a few times. The good that comes from recognition is being able to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and empathize better with their lived experiences, thus enabling you to better understand their situation. If you don’t find that worthwhile, I don’t think I can convince you to.
But, for what it’s worth, I’m certainly not trying to be any kind of “knight.” I’m just trying to have a calm and open discussion.
> I don’t think we’re going to agree here, even though I’ve tried to find common ground a few times.
You've repeatedly said that "check your privilege" is used in ways that it isn't used and denied that it is used the way it is used. My "ground" is reality.
> The good that comes from recognition is being able to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and empathize better with their lived experiences, thus enabling you to better understand their situation.
That's all well and good. The reality is that it has nothing to do with how "check your privilege" actually works.
I note that you didn't both to come up with anything other than your opinion to support your interpretation. Meanwhile, I've provided cites showing that you're wrong, by proponents of "check your privilege".
There's also the Atlantic article.
Can you point to ANYONE who interprets "check your privilege" the way that you do? (In fact, even you don't, as your refusal to use it with POC demonstrates.)
Guilt is too strong of term. But it is very much used as a kind of penalty box, or way of distancing the receiver from the speaker. And as far as enlightening those who supposedly need uplifting to the higher, more evolved plane that the speaker inhabits -- it just doesn't do much.
I agree people often misuse it, in the same vein that people often misuse other “you are the other” type arguments like equating conservative with Trumper or liberal with “socialist” or pick your favorite.
But it’s misuse shouldn’t change the meaning of its intent. At least I hope it doesn’t, because I believe there is still value in empathy.
> But it’s misuse shouldn’t change the meaning of its intent.
The use is the intent. And it's used as a weapon.
Notice when it's used, and when it isn't. (You'd never say it to a black or brown person. Did I have "privilege" when I lived in a labor camp?)
> At least I hope it doesn’t, because I believe there is still value in empathy.
There is value in empathy, but "check your privilege" isn't empathy.
You know nothing about my "privilege". You have no basis for telling me to "check my privilege" and saying that only proves that you not only have no empathy for me, you have no interest in me except to accomplish your political goals.
I absolutely would, and have, said it to people of color when it applied. (Although, admittedly, I have never phrased it as “check your privilege” because of precisely this vitriolic response which defeats the purpose; I normally phrase it as a question about if any exists)
I didn’t say anything about your privilege. Were I to, I would be asking. There is nothing here to be defensive about.
I have no political goals here. We’re having a non-political discussion.
Privilege as a concept, and acknowledging what privilege one has, is what we’re discussing. The particular phrasing is less important than the idea, and that appears to be the disconnect.
Use whatever phrasing you want, and it doesn’t have to be politicized. But when describing an experience, and particularly when trying to provide advice to others to do similarly, or when trying to glean information from your experiences that might be applicable to others… yes, check your privilege to see how said privilege may not apply to others’ lives.
That is all. What we’re discussing isn’t, at its core, a “hot-button political topic.” You are making it that.
> But when describing an experience, and particularly when trying to provide advice to others to do similarly, or when trying to glean information from your experiences that might be applicable to others… yes, check your privilege to see how said privilege may not apply to others’ lives.
I teach people how to do things and "privilege" doesn't come into it. It is neither necessary nor sufficient.
There are always lots of folks with "privilege" yet the only thing that actually matters is whether you can do the work and actually do.
Privilege as a concept, and acknowledging what privilege one has, is what we’re discussing.
Actually we were specifically discussing the "check your ..." phrase in current usage, expressed as an imperative. Not privilege as a general concept.
And yes, the "phrasing of phrase" is the whole point of the phrase. Along with of course, who is saying it and to whom. Especially when the recipient most likely wasn't asking you to "provide advice" to them in the first place, now were they.
BTW here's what seems to be the definitive article on its origin:
I don’t think we’ll agree here, but point taken at the end - I shouldn’t have said “you are making it that.” Apologies - I was getting a little annoyed.
When someone says "check your privilege", they're saying that you've done something wrong and should feel guilty.
This shouldn't be downvoted. It's become a socially acceptable insult, in some circles (which basically means the receiver is less empathic / socially aware than thou) -- or at the very least, a thought-terminating cliché.
I know there's a bunch of nice and wholesome stuff it's supposed to mean (like the sibling commenter points out); but the way it's typically bandied about in modern discourse (as an STFU signal, more or less) -- it isn't what it really means.
There is a lot of encouragement of guilt in the USA today. In general, shouldn’t we embrace a value system that encourages good behavior? Eg honor those who do relatively well in life, given the circumstances they are born into?
The immediate leap to discredit the success of others through assertion of privilege seems like it would discourage doing well.
A better solution imho would be to celebrate success but to also encourage the successful to share their insights with others so as to spread the fortune - much as the author of this post has done.
I agree with you in general but a useful question to ask is: How easy is this to do outside of tech (and other competitive industries like finance)? Competitive industries have high upside but inherently have limited opportunities at the top.
You even see in this thread how people within tech but unable to pull FAANG salaries see this story as impossible. It's one viewpoint to think that it's possible for everyone to become skilled enough to work at a FAANG-like job (including passing the interview); probably correct so some degree. It's another (less rational) to think that every software engineer can work at FAANG-like jobs simultaneously; there just aren't enough positions.
This gets even more dire outside of tech. What job are you going to switch to every 3 years that nets you a 30% salary increase? If that kind of opportunity was wide-spread, there would be a lot less income inequality (or at least more social mobility).
> A better solution imho would be to celebrate success but to also encourage the successful to share their insights with others so as to spread the fortune
Ideally yes. Though IME often the advice isn't applicable, so beyond a few fundamentals they break down. For example I cannot un-have kids, and getting a master's or doing a startup on the side would basically require neglecting them for too long. (Or quiting my day job and burning through our savings.) Lifestyle advice like modest living or moving far away also requires buy in from an SO or a painful break up/divorce. It's also a risk since they may change their mind early in the plan. Or they may decide the outcome wasn't worth the sacrifice and want to (or you to) return to the grind.
Completely agree. This guilt culture is little more than an attempt to retain the benefits of the "privilege" vs sharing the spoils with the less fortunate.
> but to also encourage the successful to share their insights with others
laughing my ass off ... I expect the successful first and formost to share their success through actually paying taxes - then we can talk about their advice which won't be useful for the majority anyway b/c success in monetary terms is always defined by being focused on a minority.
I'm not sure where you live, but in the US, the government has done a terrible job with capital allocation and for every dollar given to the government in taxes what % do you think goes to helping those in need who deserve the help?
"Good" education alone is not a meaningful predictor of anything, in Europe at least.
So the guilt is about receiving the correct credentials to be granted further access to jobs and opportunities. It seems in UK/USA, "good education" is used as a euphemism for "received privilege".
The only difference between myself and my other friends (who also have advanced degrees from top universities in the bay area) is that I abandoned my field of study and jumped into tech.
After 10 years, we have vastly different financial outcomes now.
A lot of hard working, well educated, dedicated people struggle financially around here, because they happened to not choose tech.
Add in the teachers and other under-appreciated careers, I do feel guilty that I should have so much, and they so little.
Part of working smart rather than working hard is seeing the salary signals the market is sending and responding to them strategically. This is worth more than mastering a skill that is saturated with competition relative to demand.
It took me a long time to accept this as I was wedded to the idea that hard work and skill alone should be well compensated. But that hard work and skill needs to be pointed in a good direction in the first place.
If you had an advanced degree in math or physics, hedge funds in NYC was always an option to maximize your talent in exchange for money. But one also had an option to choose something different and still make an upper middle class living.
It seems these days, only the finance/tech offer such living. NOT choosing tech is choosing barely middle class living, and everyone else is delegated to hand-to-mouth living.
Where I live (DC) most people are not in tech and they still have an upper middle class lifestyle working for the Federal government or a contractor (in a non-tech role). Nationally, purchasing power has been declining for many years.
Besides Fed Gov, Tech/finance are the probably the only sectors left with large work forces, great margins, a culture of rewarding talent (vs health care for example), AND rooted in the USA (vs manufacturing and heavy industry). These factors combine to create a super class of tech/finance labor.
> This is worth more than mastering a skill that is saturated with competition relative to demand.
The job market is not an efficient market. It doesn’t respond to offer and demand signals.
Nurses have been in short supply in most of the developed world for the past three decades yet are still paid peanuts. It’s all about your proximity to the handling of money and historical trend. That’s why even people doing menial jobs in banking are well compensated while people working in heavy industries are paid relatively little compared to the complexity of their jobs.
There is a difference between acknowledging privilege and feeling guilty.
I got a fantastic education at two of the best public universities in the US, mostly funded by public money. Do I feel guilty about it? No. But I acknowledge that it was only possible because of policy choices made by Americans who came before me.
> The modern "progressive" thought-process is to feel guilty about having a good education.
This is what happens when there is a lack of religion and belief in God. In Islam, we know we're going to be asked about the blessings that were bestowed on us, no matter how small, so it's always in the back of our mind that we should be grateful to God, and to use those blessings in the ways of good, not evil.
The atheists are downvoting you but I find it pretty interesting. Can you link to more info / verses about getting asked about blessings? I assume this is after dying and being asked by God. Sounds like a form of gratitude.
With the effective marginal tax rate at 67% for regular income in Sweden, excluding VAT and other point taxes, the only real possible method is to start a company.
So just doing some cursory research - and I admit, I'm not Swedish - 67% seems to be on the high side as far as EMTR estimates go. So I think you'd need to make a pretty hefty amount of money in Sweden to pay that much. Wikipedia, for instance, claims that the EMTR for an income of over 675 000 SEK is only 60%; Glassdoor tells me the average software engineer in Stockholm makes ~500 000 SEK (though Glassdoor estimates can be questionable).
I bring this up because I don't think taxation has much to do with this. In NYC I was paying around 50% of my income towards taxes (federal, state, and local); when you factor in what I was paying towards things that the Swedish social system provides, I'm sure it amounted to very close to 60% (maybe even more!). But NYC is full of plenty of engineers or similarly well-paid professionals who've achieved financial independence. And, well, at least per Glassdoor (caveat emptor), the average software engineer gets paid literally twice as much in NYC than in Stockholm. IMO that probably has more to do with it.
Most self employed in Europe have access to similar tax policies. You could think about and approach things differently to attain a similar result.
I live in Belgium with similar high income tax rates to Sweden, but I know quite a few people that I grew up with who have done very well. Better than his story. All mid 30s and all came from nothing. Even as an employee. No excuses, man.
These stories might not be listed in the newspapers, but that does not mean there are none.
You know people in Belgium who make $600k a year as employed software engineers? Yea, sure...
In Sweden you can incorporate and work as a consultant. That lets you accumulate capital on the corporate side of the tax barrier so to speak. But the tax authorities can show up at any time, claim that your one man company is “overcapitalized” and force you to pay income taxes on your earnings.
You can't just work your way to wealth. You need to reinvest what you make into other assets and let them compound...
That said, I know self employed developers making 150-200k (EUR) gross per year as contractors. But I also know employees that get allocated a few 100k/year in stock options as part of their compensation.
Yes, you do need to be exceptional. And you need to be smart in the choices you make. I thought that was a given, since millions of dollars don't just come falling from the sky.
> That said, I know self employed developers making 150-200k (EUR) gross per year as contractors.
There’s nothing unusual about that. I was making that kind of money 15 years ago.
But one problem is, that’s about what I can make today as well. There is no upward mobility in pay. And it has nothing to do with ability. It’s a cultural thing.
(Also, the deal is typically that you sell your social career progression. So you’ll be doing the same kind of job endlessly.)
> You can't just work your way to wealth. You need to reinvest what you make into other assets and let them compound...
This however is where the real problem starts: there is no way to accumulate and reinvest capital (legally), without paying massive (70-80%) taxes.
Consumption yes. But how do you get to 70-80% for reinvesting? Corporate taxes are 20%, dividend taxes 30% on remaining 80? That gets you to 44% net tax. From gross to net. Income taxes are higher but still not 70-80%?
I agree income taxes are high throughout most of Western Europe, but the way to grow wealth is by acquiring assets that can grow without having to sell them and pay taxes.
An investment fund (or a property) can often grow for a long time and throw off cashflows that are taxed more efficiently. So can a business where you build up value in the equity. Cashflow keeps the lights on, but equity (even in a small business) builds wealth.
> Corporate taxes are 20%, dividend taxes 30% on remaining 80? That gets you to 44% net tax. From gross to net.
No, there are special tax rules for small companies (the so-called 3:12 rules). You can pay yourself a small dividend ($15k or so), but above that you’re taxed as if it was regular income.
> Income taxes are higher but still not 70-80%?
Payroll tax is 31% and then you pay around 55% marginal tax on what’s left.
It’s debatable how you should count VAT in this context. Your consultant invoices will have 25% VAT on them that you have to pay the government. Your customers can get that back from the government, but will have to pay VAT on any value your services create. Since the name of the tax is value added tax I think it’s fair to say you are adding the value with your labor and are in fact the one paying the tax, but others may disagree.
Move to Russia with its low tax of 13% (could go as low as 7.5% if you establish a company and enjoy some additional benefits) and work remotely. Or any other country with low taxes and low cost of living.
If I could give my younger self some advice it would probably be: slack off, or leave.
If you are talented and enjoy slacking off then you can have a pretty nice lifestyle in Sweden. Most of the exceptionally talented engineers I know work part time as consultants.
Just some anecdotal experience from talking to several French people that worked at the USA company I was at on visas, USA is pretty much the hardest (of the desirable places) in the world to emigrate to.
Several of them ended up going to Canada because it was significantly easier and had a reasonable tech scene in the Toronto area
I have no experience with trying to get into US but I know the situation of my friends who came to EU. Generally you can forget about it without a good degree (e.g. Eng, Msc or MD).
Of course you could also come as a student and finish your education within EU. In some countries you can even do it for free.
>In a similar vein as above, I hear that it is almost impossible for talented software developers to earn similar amounts in any country besides USA. If early financial independence is a priority for you, strongly consider moving here. The easiest way to do this is probably to take a 1-year hiatus from work, and enroll in a Master’s degree in USA. Though I have also met others who moved here on a work-visa
> There are no stories like this one where I live (in Sweden). Absolutely none.
Swedish tax rates on income makes this two to three times as difficult (approaches 60% plus 30% social paid by the employer this includes RSUs as well, plus 25% VAT) but it’s nonsense to claim this doesn’t happen. I am Swedish and have made significantly more in tech than the author. So has many of my friends.
With that said, the only reason I’m still in Sweden is family. The public sentiment about the future is uncomfortably racist and increasingly hostile about fortune making. If you have the mobility my advice is to move. Good luck.
> I am Swedish and have made significantly more in tech than the author. So has many of my friends.
I’m not saying there is no path to financial independence in Sweden, I’m just saying that the path the author has taken / is advocating is not one.
I too know people who’ve made significantly more than the author. I’ve come close myself. But that generally involves starting a company and having other people work for you.
Absolute majority through RSUs, which is why I’m objecting the GP’s claims. The vested stock I’ve reinvested through an ISK in a somewhat broader portfolio over time.
If you’ve made over a million dollars in RSUs after taxes then I must admit… I’ve never heard of anything like that. Are you sure you’re not talking about stock options in a quickly growing company/ startup?
No, I’ve had stock options too but they’ve turned out worthless.
I don’t know what your seniority is and what you’ve seen but I can assure you it exists, and it’s not unique exceptions. Maybe a good opportunity to interview if you’re feels it’s unattainable where you are now. Plenty of US companies hiring remotely too…
I just moved back to Sweden from the US, and at least for my part of industry there seems to have been a notable shift (covid?), where roles/salaries that previously required moving to SF are available remote in CET hours.
You pay hella more tax on them though, but I mean the reason I left the US was also like.. related to all this. I want the things those taxes pay for, it feels incredible to be back somewhere with functioning healthcare, functioning child care systems.
How did you make mor? i worked in Sweden and my compensation was 4x less than it is in America. Unless you got extremely lucky or were much more senior it’s impossible, case in which you would have made far far more in the us anyhow
It's a bit of a myth that it's easy for people from European countries to emigrate to the US. Generally speaking there are no special visas available. You would either have to look into getting an H1B or one of the O1 visas. The O1 route is difficult, and the H1B route, while attainable, is a big PITA, and leaves you in a rather insecure position (especially if you have a spouse).
The US doesn't have explicitly racist immigration laws. Being white might give you some kind of an advantage (even though it obviously shouldn't), but you'll still have to go through the same process as anyone else.
Not explicitly; I agree. I meant that while it is a myth, it is a myth perpetuated by elected officials in the US and what they say when they hold power and especially the campaign promises they make to win power.
Not directly racist, but there's a huge difference in effective waiting times for employment based green cards by country, mainly due to the per-country cap.
Roughly speaking, for similarly qualified folks applying in the EB2 category in 2021, Indian immigrants (worst case), approval can take 15+ years, while immigrants from Sweden will take 2-3 years at most (was less than a year pre-COVID).
That's true. However, even getting to the point where you can apply for a green card is not a straightforward process. And if you are on an H1B it is still the case that your spouse cannot work in the US until you are (at least) in the process of getting your green card. So I would say that few people in Sweden would have a "fairly easy" time of immigrating to the US (though it is certainly possible).
While I completely agree the H1B is a PITA, it has been and continues to be the primary vehicle for the huge % of tech-employed immigrants to attain the sort of independence referred to in the OP.
The opportunity described is only common in a handful of companies in handful of cities. Outside of this it is going to be rare even in the US. Since Sweden doesn't have a large presence of these companies you are going to have to move to for example Zurich or London for it to be common. It isn't a Sweden versus US thing, it's a "achieving a high level in a major company that gives you stock" versus not. The opportunity still exists in Stockholm but requires more achievement, effort and luck because it is less common in absolute terms.
That said it sucks to work in Sweden because it's all about making money through inheritance, housing, stocks or contacts. But I guess that is how it is in many places these days.
GP poster is also incorrect. Prior to his passing, famous DJ Avicii is estimated to have an estate of 50 million USD; well-off enough to never work again if he didn't want to. There's also, y'know, the Royal Family. GPs post would lead you to believe that Swedish society is flat, but there are absolutely bank managers (or something, I never got a chance to ask) running around driving Porsches while the rich plebs own thirty year-old cars, or don't own cars and take public transit. There are people who can skip the line to getting housing in Stockholm by buying a flat instead of waiting in line for years for a rental property. 20-year olds in the technology field are still much better off, economically, than someone who's chosen to be circus performer or artist.
However, a world-class DJ and the fact that some people are richer than others doesn't really contradict the claim that Sweden is much more egalitarian, and my previous points need to be examined within the broader culture of Sweden and Scandinavia in general. (Many Swedes commute daily into Denmark.) Having a car is convenient, but thanks to a world-class public transportation network in Stockholm, rather unnecessary. Car ownership is thus less of a deal compared to much of the US. While the privileged in Silicon Valley are trying to get "fuck you" money (more eloquently expressed as Financial Indpendence / Retiring Early - FIRE), the older Swedes I met still work, and are most proud of the days or week off their job affords and middle-class people are able to travel more than I see Americans (though a lot of that is cultural, but time off work and plane tickets+hotel is expensive).
Oh boy that is true. Honestly, everyone who is born in the US is kind of privileged compared to 99% of the world. Especially if you are willing to work hard.
The parent post to yours is actually true, being born in US indeed does wonders to ones access to opportunities, infrastructure, culture, soceity etc.
The USA really makes it easy for people to win. It can be hard to notice it if you've been there all life(or at least most of it), but people like me who have spent our whole lives outside USA(Indian Citizen) and then stayed in the USA for a couple of years(for work) and returned to our home countries can absolutely relate to this.
The difference is like night and day, and it's not even like remotely comparable, being born in the USA even in under privileged conditions gives you lots of edge compared to your peer group.
I'd argue that the US awards its less priviliged citizens much less oportunity than most other industrialized countries. There's a lot of poverty in the US, and huge differences between rich, middle class, the poor and the really poor. Most are in denial about these problems, and think this situation is fine because they like to compare to developing countries with even bigger poverty issues (in this case India), forgetting that most industrialized countries actually treat their poor people better.
Downvoted because, if there are many stories like this in "poorer" Spain (my home country), I'm sure there's a non-trivial amount of stories like this in any other richer European country:
Sure, there are paths to financial independence in Sweden too, just not this one. I’d say most such stories probably involve starting a company and having others work for you. Some probably “succeed” by being extremely frugal. But nobody negotiates and job hops themselves to $600k a year.
Just to add an additional avenue for any people earlier in their career, starting salaries for research associates (bench-based wet lab work) in the Boston area right now, fresh out of undergrad with a 4-year degree, is $100k.
If we are comparing this to the article you'd need a starting salary of ~$128,000 in 2021 dollars to have a comparable salary of $100,000 in 2009 dollars, fwiw.
Totally. With a masters, starting salary is $120k, so much more in line with OP. Also, OP is total comp, which a BS hits with equity and bonus targets.
My SO just started a PHD in chem eng, before she decided we looked for some open positions and found nothing/low paying (40-50K a year) jobs for grads.
Your flip comment seems to belie the fact that he's only earned at least a half a million dollars for one year. Most of his years he earned substantially less than that.
The majority of his NW comes from investment and savings, not income.
The point of the article is that cutting expenses, saving, investing wisely, and aggressively pursuing pay raises can yield a few million well before retirement age.
These sort of casual dismissals negate the educational value of the post.
> The point of the article is that cutting expenses, saving, investing wisely, and aggressively pursuing pay raises can yield a few million well before retirement age
Most people will have nowhere near the same results as the author by implementing these things.
The biggest factors here are:
1) Earn a lot of money
2) Don't spend it all
I don't think this post has much educational value at all because I think most people already understand those points, they just can't execute on them in a meaningful way.
So you have to not enjoy the best years of your life and spend time and energy keeping track of investments to... get bored as hell later because your brain is so used to just work and save and nlt enjoying life that you will feel guilty spending that money?
I want to retire at 55 but I'm really skeptical about the FIRE community, especially by the ones in their 20's
> Your flip comment seems to belie the fact that he's only earned at least a half a million dollars for one year.
I would say $475k is close enough, in all honesty.
> The majority of his NW comes from investment and savings, not income.
Sum of (earnings - spent) over the career is $2,611,000. Net worth by the end is $2,400,000. In order for investment returns to be above savings on income, taxes would have to be 42.3% of lifetime earnings, which would be a bit surprising.
Tech stock is taxed at around 50% when you get it and then 20% of the upswing. So $475k total comp is more like $250k in your bank account in practice.
If you are going to include the tax rate on the capital gains, then you should include the capital gains in the amount in your bank account.
You should also hire a CPA or at least spend some time reading about strategies to minimize taxes if you are paying close to an effective 50% income tax on $500k of income.
Bogleheads forums or whitecoatinvestor. Even just 401k, HSA, 529, and megabackdoor roth should help bring down effective tax rate (for the $500k income being discussed).
You will not get as low as someone with their own business or S corp, but the tax advantaged savings account should help.
If you earn more than $523,600 and are single, then your tax rate is not 50% but 37%, which is still meaningful amount that is often not considered when looking at those big numbers.
https://www.manafld.com/blog/2021/2/26/rsus-no-sell-tax
If you are in California, then your employer will not give you all your RSU but sell 40% and give you 60%. So you don’t have a big scary surprise when it’s tax season. https://blog.myrawealth.com/insights/rsu-tax-rate
> If you earn more than $523,600 and are single, then your tax rate is not 50% but 37%
The federal income tax rate only for income above $523k is 37%. Only for income above $523k.
> If you are in California, then your employer will not give you all your RSU but sell 40% and give you 60%. So you don’t have a big scary surprise when it’s tax season.
Withholding amounts seem irrelevant when discussing effective tax rates.
I calculated 42% effective on lifetime income, and I suppose the writer was not taxed at 42% on their 100k income from the first years, so the tax rate for later years must have been higher.
This doesn't line up with my experience. I have the option of having anywhere from 22-37% of my RSUs withheld to pay taxes. The IRS only forces you into the 37% supplemental withholding rate if you make more than $1,000,000/year which alas is a problem I've never had.
> If you are in California, then your employer will not give you all your RSU but sell 40% and give you 60%.
That is entirely irrelevant. You will get taxed the same no matter what they sell and give you. If your tax rate should be less than 40% (true for me, and probably most people here), you'll get the money back as a refund.
You do miss out on any appreciation, but if you know your marginal tax rate is < 40% (just look at your previous tax returns to figure it out), you can simply spend the delta to buy the stocks you should have gotten and you'll still get the appreciation (and the cash in the tax refund to compensate you for doing this).
Your flip comment seems to belie fact that he's only earned at least a half a million dollars for one year.
475k == 500k for all practical purposes. The guy averaged 525k for 3 solid years (not "one year") -- which makes the parent comment rather less flip.
These sort of casual dismissals negate the educational value of the post.
The bottom line is that while saving and investing is certainly smart -- you better damn sure be earning 98 percentile income as well if you want to get as far ahead of the game as this guy has.
The article gives some general advice on how to manage your personal wealth. Probably the exact figures could have been expressed as percentage increases to give the article more appeal.
However, for budding engineers in the early stage of their career it gives some idea of what is potentially achievable (in US).
Like what? That you can save ton when you earn 500-600k to have few millions in your net worth? Okay, but where is anything new in the article.
If anything, some of the advice doesn't make any sense. Like, saving extremely on the low income. Whatever he has saved in the first six years of his career would be offset by just working one year more.
So the "path" to financial independance mainly involves getting a 100k/year from day one.
I hope it will inspire and convince all these people who earn below the US median salary range of 47k/year. (and they range in all age categories, not 20 years old engineers).
It would have been more interesting that he writes on how it was complicated for him to reach financial independence even when he earned 100k/year from day one and more than 600k/year 12 years later.
Just imagine how it's impossible for someone with 47k/year!
And that's the MEDIAN salary range in the US!
But apparently that thought escaped him, whatever.
The point is that it's not much of a path when you start at $100k. If you're earning $100k with zero experience, your salary cap is likely to be pretty high.
With a starting salary that high I think you're very likely to easily achieve financial independence, barring a catastrophic fuck up.
“How I bought a house: first I cut out my $5 Starbucks habit. That gave me the money, and more importantly the courage I needed to ask my parents to pay for my house. Which they did. Never underestimate what you can achieve!”
> Ultimately for me, that’s what financial independence is all about, and why it is all worth it. It’s not about sitting on a beach and drinking your life away. It’s about having the freedom to pursue your life purpose, whatever it may be, and however impractical it may be.
This is just my personal opinion, but this is an ass backwards way of doing things and it gets me frothing at the mouth.
If it's your life purpose, DO it already. Live lean if you have to, become a cockroach if you must, but let that purpose ROAR out of you. Don't sit around accruing meaningless tokens, becoming an old fuck with all of the juice of life wrung out of you like some decrepit mop.
I think it’s difficult to discover your “life purpose” while still working full time. Unless you’re anomalously lucky to be exposed to various subfields at your job, it requires a fair amount of leisure and self-directed tinkering (months to years). Quitting your job and living like a cockroach to find yourself or whatever is a pretty big sell. I also suspect this process requires a baseline level of comfort and freedom from stress but can’t say authoritatively.
The beauty of high tech is that you can achieve financially independent within your mid-to-late 30s depending on how well you do.
Conversely, I've seen those that "pursue their passion" end up being bitter and cynical when they don't make it. They end up working one dead-end job after another, hoping to one day become a famous writer/actor/singer/etc.
Eventually they realize they don't have what it takes and are now stuck working into their 50s/60s.
Sure some small pct end up being successful but the majority end up being in the same corporate trap that they originally eschewed, albeit with more debt and a more precarious financial situation.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadMany junior developer roles in London will pay 50k. Some finance ones will pay 75k or more.
600k USD / 450k GBP is also definitely reachable for a senior developer at team leader level or comparable.
Also at this level you enter into a negotiation with the business stakeholders, compensation package is tailored to each profile and opportunity.
Let’s forget that salaries in Europe are ridiculously low to focus on the handful of people who might get an extraordinary position - still paid less than an equivalent one in North America nevertheless - and pretends its doable and everything is fine.
And that's not even the top salaries, there are also jobs that pay in millions.
You'll also find similar salaries in Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich...
I'm just stating that jobs that pay the same as in the article do exist in Europe, and I don't believe they're as exceptional as you suggest.
There just is a large spectrum of salaries for software engineering, and as we all know, 90% of everything is crud, so of course the median will be much lower.
Back to tech though, there are probably 100 100k roles for every 400k role. So if you start out making 100k in tech, you have to be 1 in 100 to move up to a 400k role.
2009 was also a recession year where it was difficult to find an entry level job at all, at any salary. I went without (software) work for half a year when I was laid off at the end of 2008 and ended up having to relocate for employment.
I'm in my late 30s now and I'm well off by almost every measure (I max out all retirement accounts, I have a six figure brokerage account) - but I'm nowhere near a millionaire or financially independent. I'll need to work another decade best case scenario.
The biggest boost to my savings rate/financial position came from getting married and sharing income/bills with my husband.
If I did it over again I'd pay off my loans slower and put more in my retirement accounts earlier.
$100k should be enough to live comfortably off of in the Midwest.
The Trinity study that the 4% rule comes from is based on having some assets left after 30 years, not the original principle being intact.
Trinity study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study
The most expensive early retirement tax in the us is health insurance.
Similarly saving 15% for retirement is critical, but saving enough to cover inflation is just as important with an early retirement.
I'm attempting a much slower version of this. But hope to retire well off by following the Dave Ramsey method.
I would love for this to continue forever but can it really? For example the author (and my friends) are in similar situation where their compensation are now in the ~500k range but that number is based on the stock value at the time of offer. It is now essentially double that. So we're in a situation where your everyday senior FAANG engineers are locked in a golden handcuff unless they are offered million dollar packages to jump ship.
We're in weird times.
well, we've pretty much got the world chained down it's essentially unlimited money for us forever
if things go downhill we will still be on top anyway so who cares
Some people don’t have the strength to walk away and instead will obsess over money for anything. It’s funny how I’m sure people would require much bigger numbers if they were given an offering where they’d have to go to a terrible prison for 2-3 years in their prime years.
- The world is becoming increasingly computerized. The demand for software is skyrocketing.
- Software engineering is extremely economically efficient. You can produce infinite quantities of a piece of software with no marginal cost.
- Outside of the HN / CS bubble, most regular people still think coding is either boring, stupid, or too hard.
I really think it would be tough to do this job without some major interest in computers that most people simply don't have. And you can't really fake this. This puts a cap on the supply of engineers.
Not to disrespect the effort that went into this, but let's make this very clear: this type of trajectory is only possible for a very limited few, in a particular moment in history.
Everything seems to indicate that, save for a few samurai, the tech overlords are a powerful force driving inequality today.
For example, it's hard to argue that software made journalism better. Sure, there is some efficiency in using a phone to record interviews and sending the results of your work on seconds on the other side of the world - as opposed to things like notepads and telexes.
On the other hand, Google and Facebook almost completely eviscerated the revenue streams that fed traditional journalists, without putting anything in it's place.
Instead of a large number of local papers and ad agencies earning local revenue and funding journalists, you have a massive revenue stream going into Google's offshore tax shells, of which a part is used to fund their software mercenary army, and the bulk is reimvested into further tech monopolies.
The corrupt and the despots surely welcome the tech overlords.
They're vampires centralizing local revenues worldwide and for what?!? That money gets reinvested or offshored so that about 100 billionaires live like kings with about 2 million millionaire flunkies working for them.
> this type of trajectory is only possible for a very limited few
We are talking 0.1% of human population if not less.
I would truly disagree; tech is transforming lives across the class spectrum, globally.
In fact, what you should be concerned about is how other industries think it’s acceptable to significantly underpay their average employee. And the ironic part is that tech companies still pay managers and executives way more than the average SWE - at FAANG, often directors make more than their entire reporting chain.
And regarding the authors' experience: Yeah, if you happen to be employed in the area that ranks in the top 0.05 % quantile for engineering salaries worldwide you will easily become wealthy, especially if you're lucky enough to be paid in company stock during a stock market bubble.
Poor people tend to hide or downplay their poverty online in an environment like this one.
Maybe HN is more likely to be in that quantile than the general population of developers; “more likely than not” implies that most people on HN are in that quantile which I kind of doubt but I don’t have data to support either way.
Basically road to financial independence seems to be get paid half a million a year and live in a country with relatively low tax rate…
So I think getting a house gifted by your parents is also a requirement for their path.
My personal expenses are a tad lower than theirs, and I rent an apartment in San Francisco that I live in alone.
I'm living without a car in a shitty apartment, no family, I even rarely vacation, but I didn't save half as much as you did.
Think about that for a second.
We are continuously flabbergasted how much we are paid, and it’s not even FAANG levels; still, it’s more than many other skilled and important roles in the workforce.
Part of me understands that there’s still a lot of money to be made and thus, salaries should continue to be high but other parts of me wonder (especially with increased ability to work anywhere) when/if we’ll see salaries normalize.
I spend 40k per year on housing alone, and my apartment isn't particularly luxurious.
$100K first job which is around £74K in the UK… you aren’t likely to get anywhere near that as a grad masters or not here but after taxes and student loan payments (which are deducted from your income in the UK) and all other deductions you’ll end up with £42,908.26 per year, that’s $56K.
And this is where this breaks down for people in tech outside of the US at least.
In the UK the path was at least until IR35 kicked in was to slave for about 10 years and become a contractor at which point you’ll charge per day nearly as much as you used to get per week if not per month…
Saying that, I'd rather live in NY than London.
I started out 6-7 years ago at £30k and am now at £100k + options (worthless). Have only ever worked at startups. You can 1.5x that easily at a big tech (some FAANG jobs exist in London).
You are probably better off making £80K in Manchester as a senior dev than £100-110K in London. Newcastle has also a decent tech ecosystem tho it is very much focused around Sage.
(Not denying it, genuinely curious which sector/companies etc)
Also, my experience with London companies + recruiters in the last 3 months has been that permanant remote roles have been cropping up. I would say its about 50/50 of whether a job requires any on prem time, and about 90/10 that the job requires 1-2 days a week on prem.
The 2 bed flat I’m renting got recently evaluated at 1.7M it’s very nice and very large (for London)but the lease remaining on it is 68 years and the Victorian building it sits in would need a lot of work very very soon so the buyers are looking at 350-400K bill within a few years of buying the flat (leasehold renewal and building repairs) on top of that which also is why the current landlord is looking to sell.
As it stands now if you want to buy a property for £600K you are looking at £60K deposit, £20K stamp duty and probably another £20K for misc costs.
£600K is a below what an average new build in a Zone 3 would cost you these days outside of the few units they reserve for HTB. If you can save £3K a month you’re looking at 3 years of saving. Since most people / couples would struggle to save even £1K a month especially in their early careers they are probably looking at a decade of saving for a property or even more if the house prices keep on rising as fast as they are now.
Edit: Reader, he looked at the prices
Found almost identical flat at 499,999K, so coming in at less than Millbank flats were going for in 2016. Those flats are only £25K more now. This seems perfectly doable for software engineers who have a good permanent job or are contracting.
The only flats in my area around 600K all have a huge asterisk the leasehold on them is about to expire so you can only buy them in cash.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/114810275
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/109851434
Five years later I think it's more feasible to stay in Zone 1 or 2 with kids as the air becomes cleaner and you should have saved up enough to find a bigger place. A friend travels from Zone 1 to 4 every on the train for the school run, so it's perfectly doable given flexible working.
The $$$ is the problem. 3 bedroom in Zone 1 is 1.5-2m
Whilst it’s true that I probably won’t find a pay like this outside of London it’s also quite hard to get it within London if I lose my job it’s more likely that I’ll have to take a pay cut than not.
In fact once you get to 6 figures in the UK outside of contracting it’s not uncommon to essentially bounce up and down by as much as 30% between jobs.
Looking at the more median salaries especially post COVID the pay gap has shrunk considerably.
Finance/Fintech is still very much London centric and those places pay the most in uk tech outside some senior FAANG roles but not everyone is lucky enough to land those.
It’s even not about being good or asking for more it’s really about just landing a job with an employer that is able and willing to pay that much and being able to justify that to them and it’s not as easy as it seems to be in SV.
In fact just before the pandemic I was looking to make a move and I went to a few recruiters and their honest advice was pretty much stay where I was (less than what I get now but 20% (5/15 split) pension and very very good benefits).
I did managed to move in early 2020 to my current role but that was through my network.
Overall considering it the loss of pension I probably came out even it was more of wanting to do something new in a different setting than the pay.
Do you mind me asking what industry you're in?
Not to mention the salary ceiling is so huge in London it's easy to be saving more than someone else is earning in another city.
A friend of mine has a son that just got a job offer right out of a medium tier computer science school with total compensations more than $200k per year.
In fact, if you earn 50k as a single without dependants (or if you are a couple with 2x50k income) you're definitely richer than the majority of folks.
Also, the UK tax system is incredibly generous to high income folks: 40k+ tax exempt pension contributions, 20k ISA allowance, 12k cgt allowance. It means that you can accumulate a good chunk of capital before you'll even have to start paying taxes
Childcare is expensive as fuck and you lose your childcare allowance at £50K in fact if you share a household with anyone who claims it and you earn more than £50K they’ll deduct that from you…
Living on wealth in the UK is as easy as in the US I would agree to that perhaps even easier since there are no property taxes and probably even more tax schemes to leverage than in the US but getting to that point under PAYE even whilst earning well above the median wage isn’t easy especially if you want to have children and have to live in London for that pay.
The main issue is just how depressed many of the wages in the UK are and thus just how narrow the tax base is.
I should have specified that the problem is the taxation of work-related income (the main source of income of the poor) compared to the taxation of wealth. On this respect I find particularly egregious the NI hike (an increase of the income tax or the introduction of a property tax would have been more appropriate).
I think a lot of Americans envision finding a European style social safety net by only taxing billionaires.
All this while everybody with a professional job faces a 40% marginal tax rate (plus NI).
99% of the people can't do anything with this advice because they don't have any savings to begin with.
I wonder if the author even understands how lucky he is.
Congrats to OP for having a lot of money in the bank, but there is nothing special or unique about their advice. It's the usual invest your money, don't spend too much, try to get into a top company, etc.
Even for someone in a similar situation, there is very little here that I haven't seen repeated elsewhere countless times.
Remove a zero from his salaries, and the response would have been very different.
Also you really don't know what you're actually applying for when you're a graduate. You think you know but only those who are fortunate are able to get it right. Plenty of people get a job thinking it leads somewhere. For instance, I've interviewed a lot of financial ops people who think they're on the ladder to becoming a trader. It does happen, but not that often.
But good on him, it still takes work and dedication to do something like this.
I think it is definitely possible to know. My college friends with parents in tech certainly knew.
When I was in college, I looked over H1B data to get a sense of what was really going on. The conclusion: finance, consulting, law, all vastly overrated in compensation unless you are doing quantitative finance or have a very rare job.
Medicine and tech, appropriately rated for comp.
I’ve been trying for years to jump to a FAANG and correct my initial career mistake, but it’s extremely difficult and I’ve only seen the top 10% of my company, in the right positions (not QA), do it. I need to do two jumps: QA to design, then tier 2 to tier 1. As a result, I’ve actually decided to throw in the towel and “reroll” as a software dev.
* For the purposes of retirement we track our net worths separately
[Edit] I also would like to mention that the article says as much
Each hop up takes a good mix of hard work and luck but it always results in a massive jump in pay
He's not earning "huge" amounts of money for jobs in that field. (Additionally, it's a field that most intelligent people can enter with 1-3 years of study.)
https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447997574556880902
I love my five weeks of paid holiday, 14 weeks of paid paternity leave, and free healthcare. but I would still prefer early retirement instead of working till 65.
Basically, build a network of tech monopolies which engage in unethical, if not criminal practices, then build a VC ecosystem that is ready to spend king's ransoms to get startups to join that club. Wait as these companies compete to buy your soul.
Kill particular countries languages, cultures and laws to create real single market. At least US Congress has sole authority to regulate interstate commerce, compared to EU.
FIREPorn?
SecurityPorn?
All these dreams of safety make me feel sorry for people. To need so much money just not to be afraid.
Most of what he said doesn't apply outside of that specific bubble
It goes up quickly!
Solution: don’t have kids.
The financial, emotional, and time costs of kids are well-known beforehand.
Earn over $1/2 million a year.
Work for 2+ years.
The only lesson seems to be don't spend your money.
Of course, without networking with other millionaires, becoming a millionaire is a bit harder...
On yet another hand, a millionaire living in the well-to-do coastal communities of California might actually still be financially insecure, while a not-yet-quite millionaire living in rural Montana may be secure for life.
I am instinctively drawn towards the rural Montana thing, but mainly because I am introverted anyway.
This might sound reasonable from a US-centric perspective, but to me it reads like utter nonsense. The main privilege here is access to the US labor market and tax policy. There are no stories like this one where I live (in Sweden). Absolutely none.
Edit: I guess the down voters here hate facts. The US scores lower on social mobility than the majority of European countries https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/1-5%20generations.png
1. My intuition is wrong
2. There are lots of people in low income groups where there is little i regeneration along mobility for structural reasons, or maybe immigrants children who often see the biggest improvements are excluded for some reason.
3. The chart talks about reaching mean income. Particularly in the US, mean income is higher than median income so even if achieving the latter is easier, achieving the former could be harder. To some extent the metric may disadvantage countries where the highest-earning few percent of the population earn a lot more than the median person.
Let's take a typical profile that HN users would be interested in, a top10% engineer working for a big company. This person would never become rich in NL, but almost always become rich in the US.
Same in Germany why I assumed the diagram would be appropriate. But you are 100% correct and I agree with
> This person would never become rich in NL, but almost always become rich in the US.
Sure, moving from lower working class to upper middle class is probably easier in Sweden than in many other countries. But the thing is: it doesn’t make much of a difference.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Nordic welfare state kind of games the social mobility score in this way, by having such a compressed income distribution. If you go from $20k after taxes to $35k after taxes you’ve moved through more or less the whole income distribution, but your life is pretty much the same.
100% agreed - my sibling comment about NL also implies the same.
So any country that optimizes for improving that, kind of by definition, improves the average happiness of its citizens.
> "Despite scoring high on the Work Opportunities (83.0) pillar—because of its low unemployment rate—as well as on the Technology Access pillar (90.2), it has the lowest score in the region on the Fair Wages pillar (43.8 against an average of 64.6 for the region). With an incidence of low pay (less than two-thirds of median wages) at 24.9, it has one of the shares of low-paid workers among OECD countries. The lack of effective social protection in the United States also translates into a low score on the Social Protection pillar (61.7). The minimum guaranteed income benefits for a family with two children (where one partner is out of work) is only 20% of median income. The United States could also improve on the Health pillar, where it performs quite poorly compared to peers in its region (75.8) due to a low healthy life expectancy at birth (66.6 years)."
When you average things down to a single number, you lose a lot of nuance.
For the US, the data the report collected generally supports something like 'You have the opportunity to succeed greatly, and be rewarded extremely well, but this requires financial resources at birth.' While also being true that 'If you are less successful, there are few and poor support nets for you, and serious pitfalls to avoid (f.ex. health care costs).'
[0] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
This is the opposite of financial mobility.
Which wasn't what I (or the report) said: the idea is that it takes some level of financial resources as a prerequisite for a chance at top-level success.
Most of the population spend the majority of their income on rent, commuting, and essentials. Students also have lots of debt over the past decade (15k on average). Owning a car is expensive, but so is public transport (esp. for a family). Renting is expensive, but so is buying a house.
Income tax brackets range from ~40-50%, while corporate and dividend taxes are minimal - 15-20%. VAT is regressive and applies on almost all goods incl. groceries, ranging from 5-21%. There is no capital gains taxes, so this obviously benefits the economically active upper/elite classes who have assets/savings to invest - while middle class families do not own much at all.
Since the Mobility Index rankings focus on lower -> middle class mobility, it shows the Netherlands in a positive light. However, the income divide between the two classes is actually not as pronounced as the USA, while the gap between middle to upper is incredibly massive (like most of the world).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that despite the expected policy differences and rankings, NL is quite strongly divided economically. In my experience, the average Dutch don't mix with the poor, nor show off their riches, nor think too deeply about the elite classes. This mindset is essentially ignorance - neglecting poorness, brushing off government corruption, and assisting the funneling of taxes & wealth.
However, it’s equally ineffective - there are multitudes of ways to avoid paying it, as the wealthy here continuously do. Further, the percentage itself is quite small:
- 0.58% for 30k-100k
- 1.34% till ~1MM
- 1.68% afterwards.
It is hilarious to me, that 30k is considered “wealth”. This means saving for your children’s studying expenses (rent, food, etc), would require exceeding 30k and paying taxes.
The wealthy are wealthy. It doesn’t seem to affect them at all. Instead, people like you and I have to think about the arbitrary amount of money the gov wants to extricate from our small savings.
Those are amateur numbers. -USA
I think the worst part is that most of the loan is used to pay rent - so it’s essentially tax-payer funded wealth transfer to real estate.
> Income tax brackets range from ~40-50%, while corporate and dividend taxes are minimal - 15-20%. VAT is regressive and applies on almost all goods incl. groceries, ranging from 5-21%. There is no capital gains taxes, so this obviously benefits the economically active upper/elite classes who have assets/savings to invest - while middle class families do not own much at all.
I hate to tell you, but the US practically invented all those issues. Average Americans pay a far larger percentage of their income in taxes than the wealthiest Americans or corporations do. You say VAT, we say "sales tax," and, yes, it's still just as regressive. Rent, student loans, etc.... yeah, that's all bad here, too.
https://smartasset.com/data-studies/income-needed-to-pay-ren...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/09/us-student-l...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/23/americas-richest-400-familie...
I don’t believe that the Netherlands has inherited these ideas from the USA. In fact, NL invented capitalism and stock markets.
Every Dutchie I speak to about the inequality here, loves comparing themselves to the USA memes. It’s that whataboutism and the ignorance that bothers me.
Of course, I'm aware that NL invented stock markets and pioneered a lot of ideas behind modern capitalism. That wasn't where I was going with it.
Not to turn this into some weird anti-pissing contest of "my country is worse than yours," but, if you look at the numbers, the US fares worse than NL on:
Gini coefficient [0]: US 41.4 vs NL 28.1
Global social mobility index [1]: US 70.4 vs NL 82.4
Human development index [2]: US 0.92 vs NL 0.944
Now, I don't think capitalism is the best system for maximizing any of the above, but, if you look at the tables, it's pretty clear that the Nordic model of capitalism is basically as good as capitalism gets. When you look at some of the things that go into these indices, other than stuff like "GDP per capita," it's pretty clear why: having a strong safety net and other social programs for workers makes people better off.
If nothing else, reducing the consequences of failure from "total personal and financial ruin" to something more manageable is more likely to encourage people to take chances that may or may not pay off. That's what economic freedom really is. That's also the part of capitalism the US didn't pick up, so, that's what I was getting at when I was saying that the US invented those issues. Again, not to get into an anti-pissing contest, but, that's why the US recently got compared to Jurassic Park [3] on here. I don't see anybody comparing NL to a land where dinosaurs will eat you if you're not always vigilant.
> Every Dutchie I speak to about the inequality here, loves comparing themselves to the USA memes. It’s that whataboutism and the ignorance that bothers me.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but I'd like to know. Are you just saying that people you talk to are saying what I said, but without the facts and figures?
---
[0]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coef...
[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/social-mo...
[2]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hdi-by-co...
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29656668
Fair enough, though I wasn’t trying to imply that either.
> it's pretty clear that the Nordic model of capitalism is basically as good as capitalism gets
I can agree from the data and personal experience, that the QoL for the lower/middle classes in the EU is better than most of the world.
However, I don’t think that it’s as pronounced as the local EU politicians would have you believe, when they advocate for higher taxes every year.
That’s essentially the divide I’m talking about in my comments - the broken capitalist dystopia of it all. They set the benchmark somewhere in between the USA and the post-colonial world, and act like they’ve solved everything.
> reducing the consequences of failure from "total personal and financial ruin" to something more manageable is more likely to encourage people to take chances that may or may not pay off. That's what economic freedom really is.
Yes, I agree that this sounds intuitive. Unfortunately, the EU has one of the least risk-taking people I’ve ever seen. People don’t startup nor attempt businesses.
> Are you just saying that people you talk to are saying what I said, but without the facts and figures?
Not exactly, but rather, they are unaware of the situation outside their social bubble in NL. And see memes about the USA and think they’re doing great.
Found it really hard to explain to my wife that:
Salary will decrease, cost of living will go up, income taxes will go up, VAT will also go up, QOL will stay roughly the same.
The only thing that I think is significantly better (and cheaper!) is the education.
Edit: And the beer.
Out of curiosity, how many millions of dollars-equivalent does it cost to buy heath insurance in retirement?
Isn’t that more attractive than what you need in the states?
I can’t speak for the OP, but usually QoL refers to essential things like housing, food, education, etc. Outside of that, the average Dutchie has very little disposable income.
This means that the extra money they make in the USA, is still quite useful since you can spend it on all the other stuff that gives you joy in life.
I have friends who started out in middle-class families and sunk lower. I also have friends who started out middle-class and rose.
IMHO, the biggest factors seem to be raw intellingence, willingness to move & chase money, and some 'luck' factors. But I can't imagine a world where nobody could change fortunes given reasonably common circumstances.
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-social-mobility-among-poorest...
>In Germany, it would take a child whose parents' earnings are in the bottom 10 percent of the population six generations or 180 years to reach the average national income.
>The average across the entire OECD, a group of 37 industrialized countries, is five generations. Children in low-income families in Denmark would need two generations, while children in the United States would need five generations.
And people in the middle are squeezed from the both sides.
I don't personally believe in reparations as commonly framed, but saying that reparations ought to be paid is also not the same thing as saying people should feel guilty for actions they didn't take.
> It’s important for progressives to acknowledge and counter the people who wave the progressive flag but espouse the opposite of progressive ideals.
I think this can be taken too far. Disavowal can be important at times, but I find there is often a trend among the Right to highlight random views held by an extremely small minority of people (ie. a single tweeting American among 315 million Americans) and demand a disavowal of that rhetoric. I think this is in bad faith.
This comment thread, in my view, is emblematic of this in that simply by using the word "privilege" we are now being asked to disavow something that some nebulous "lots of people" attach to that word, even though the word was clearly not being used in that context here.
> but I find there is often a trend among the Right to highlight random views held by an extremely small minority of people (ie. a single tweeting American among 315 million Americans) and demand a disavowal of that rhetoric. I think this is in bad faith.
Agreed. Where I disagree is that the left doesn’t do this exact same thing, or that these views are held by “a single tweet” and not, say, entire online communities.
For the record, I generally agree with you, but to the same extent that avowal can go too far, it is very easy to go too far in assuming all ridiculous positions on our side are strawmen. A lot of people do think that way. Nothing wrong with acknowledging privilege — but you don’t need to feel personally guilty over things out of your control like your inherited wealth or your skin color. I think we can all agree on that.
Except I don't see anyone in this comment thread actully expousing that belief. I _do_ however see a lot of people strawmanning it.
I think the point of privilege discourse is to undermine the notion of moral "desert," not to encourage guilt over something beyond your control.
Or we could notice that merit is still a useful concept, that good decisionmaking is a skill regardless of whether everyone is in a position to use it, and that the previous poster's parents made decisions that were highly beneficial to their child, above and beyond what other parents in comparable situations might have, and that the poster is quite right to be thankful for that. Which funnily enough is the only opinion they voiced, so it's rather a mystery what your needlessly nasty comment is replying to.
I feel guilty for neither, and acknowledging that particular privilege takes nothing away from how hard I worked anyway. The son of two very poor Russian Jewish immigrants, I worked extremely hard to get to where I am. I also feel privileged for growing up in a loving and non-abusive family.
Lots of people don’t have those things, and I’m thankful I did. That’s not guilt.
This is one of those fundamental misunderstandings I see when discussing things with folks of a particular political persuasion. It's the same folks that belueve we shouldn't consider outcomes when evaluating processes. There's just something different about the way they think, I guess.
When someone says "check your privilege", they're saying that you've done something wrong and should feel guilty.
It has nothing at all to do with guilt.
It is rare, extremely rare, to meet someone with absolutely no privilege, and that isn’t a place to aspire to.
Yes, they are. "Check your privilege" is often used to say "you didn't do that."
Even if you assume that "privilege" is a big reason why you had an opportunity, there are almost always many people with the same "privilege" who didn't do said thing.
Moreover, it's almost always some skin color argument. There are many "don't look white" people who had privileges that I didn't have but I'm supposed to "check my privilege."
The trope of “he’s black and rich, and I’m white and poor” is irrelevant, as there are different kinds of privilege. In rural Alabama, being white and poor is going to lend you a much closer set of relationships than being black and rich. In SF, it may be the other way around - the point is everyone should simply be aware of how various privilege has helped them.
And again: this takes nothing away from hard work. It simply acknowledges that another person who worked just as hard but had a different set of lived experiences and privileges may not have the same result. That’s not bad; just fact.
And again: it has nothing to do with guilt. You shouldn’t feel guilty about it; ~everyone has some kind of privilege. But ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist is the exact opposite of the point, which is, at the end of the day, an exercise in empathy.
It's telling that you really want to say that no black person has privilege. You'd certainly never tell one to "check your privilege."
How much time have you actually spent in rural Alabama?
I say that because the most racist places in the US are urban, the NE and the coasts, not the south. Yes, there are racists everywhere, but the only places where blacks and whites interact productively at scale are in the south.
Firstly, I never implied or said that no black person has privilege.
Second, my entire point that you seem to be missing is that everyone should recognize what privilege they do have and have benefited from.
I’ve spent plenty of time in the South; I am not implying there is no way for a black person to interact productively with white people in the South. I am suggesting that, generally, in a lot of rural areas of the South, being white lends you more “immediate credit” than being black.
And, to your point, that was but one example. I could have said “inner cities,” and made the same point. That does not, in any way, change the point; it only serves to reinforce it.
And, you've yet to explain what good comes from said "recognition". What, exactly, do you want me to do differently because I benefitted from succeeding in a situation that actually was available to many? (I'm pretty sure that you won't be satisfied with me just saying "hey, I built on stuff that had happened before.")
Yes, there are lots of places where being white lends you more credit than being black. Similarly, there are lots of places where being black lends you more credit. So what?
My point is that the south tends has more successful interaction than the north. That's actually more true in the rural areas.
But, for what it’s worth, I’m certainly not trying to be any kind of “knight.” I’m just trying to have a calm and open discussion.
You've repeatedly said that "check your privilege" is used in ways that it isn't used and denied that it is used the way it is used. My "ground" is reality.
> The good that comes from recognition is being able to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and empathize better with their lived experiences, thus enabling you to better understand their situation.
That's all well and good. The reality is that it has nothing to do with how "check your privilege" actually works.
I note that you didn't both to come up with anything other than your opinion to support your interpretation. Meanwhile, I've provided cites showing that you're wrong, by proponents of "check your privilege".
There's also the Atlantic article.
Can you point to ANYONE who interprets "check your privilege" the way that you do? (In fact, even you don't, as your refusal to use it with POC demonstrates.)
Guilt is too strong of term. But it is very much used as a kind of penalty box, or way of distancing the receiver from the speaker. And as far as enlightening those who supposedly need uplifting to the higher, more evolved plane that the speaker inhabits -- it just doesn't do much.
But it’s misuse shouldn’t change the meaning of its intent. At least I hope it doesn’t, because I believe there is still value in empathy.
The use is the intent. And it's used as a weapon.
Notice when it's used, and when it isn't. (You'd never say it to a black or brown person. Did I have "privilege" when I lived in a labor camp?)
> At least I hope it doesn’t, because I believe there is still value in empathy.
There is value in empathy, but "check your privilege" isn't empathy.
You know nothing about my "privilege". You have no basis for telling me to "check my privilege" and saying that only proves that you not only have no empathy for me, you have no interest in me except to accomplish your political goals.
I didn’t say anything about your privilege. Were I to, I would be asking. There is nothing here to be defensive about.
I have no political goals here. We’re having a non-political discussion.
"This is not a political discussion" when in fact it's about one of the most hot-button political topics ever devised?
I'm lost.
Use whatever phrasing you want, and it doesn’t have to be politicized. But when describing an experience, and particularly when trying to provide advice to others to do similarly, or when trying to glean information from your experiences that might be applicable to others… yes, check your privilege to see how said privilege may not apply to others’ lives.
That is all. What we’re discussing isn’t, at its core, a “hot-button political topic.” You are making it that.
The phrase was invented as a political tool. Disagree? Provide cites.
I'll start - https://checkyourprivilege.co/ , https://www.amazon.com/Check-Your-Privilege-Live-into/dp/099... , and https://www.amazon.com/Check-Your-Privilege-Lean-discomfort/... .
I teach people how to do things and "privilege" doesn't come into it. It is neither necessary nor sufficient.
There are always lots of folks with "privilege" yet the only thing that actually matters is whether you can do the work and actually do.
Actually we were specifically discussing the "check your ..." phrase in current usage, expressed as an imperative. Not privilege as a general concept.
And yes, the "phrasing of phrase" is the whole point of the phrase. Along with of course, who is saying it and to whom. Especially when the recipient most likely wasn't asking you to "provide advice" to them in the first place, now were they.
BTW here's what seems to be the definitive article on its origin:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/what-th...
You are making it that.
It wouldn't hurt you to check the button-pushy, "you're the problem" vibe on that statement. If you don't mind a bit of advice.
This shouldn't be downvoted. It's become a socially acceptable insult, in some circles (which basically means the receiver is less empathic / socially aware than thou) -- or at the very least, a thought-terminating cliché.
I know there's a bunch of nice and wholesome stuff it's supposed to mean (like the sibling commenter points out); but the way it's typically bandied about in modern discourse (as an STFU signal, more or less) -- it isn't what it really means.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché
The immediate leap to discredit the success of others through assertion of privilege seems like it would discourage doing well.
A better solution imho would be to celebrate success but to also encourage the successful to share their insights with others so as to spread the fortune - much as the author of this post has done.
You even see in this thread how people within tech but unable to pull FAANG salaries see this story as impossible. It's one viewpoint to think that it's possible for everyone to become skilled enough to work at a FAANG-like job (including passing the interview); probably correct so some degree. It's another (less rational) to think that every software engineer can work at FAANG-like jobs simultaneously; there just aren't enough positions.
This gets even more dire outside of tech. What job are you going to switch to every 3 years that nets you a 30% salary increase? If that kind of opportunity was wide-spread, there would be a lot less income inequality (or at least more social mobility).
Ideally yes. Though IME often the advice isn't applicable, so beyond a few fundamentals they break down. For example I cannot un-have kids, and getting a master's or doing a startup on the side would basically require neglecting them for too long. (Or quiting my day job and burning through our savings.) Lifestyle advice like modest living or moving far away also requires buy in from an SO or a painful break up/divorce. It's also a risk since they may change their mind early in the plan. Or they may decide the outcome wasn't worth the sacrifice and want to (or you to) return to the grind.
laughing my ass off ... I expect the successful first and formost to share their success through actually paying taxes - then we can talk about their advice which won't be useful for the majority anyway b/c success in monetary terms is always defined by being focused on a minority.
Also LOL @ "insights"
"Good" education alone is not a meaningful predictor of anything, in Europe at least.
So the guilt is about receiving the correct credentials to be granted further access to jobs and opportunities. It seems in UK/USA, "good education" is used as a euphemism for "received privilege".
It's the pretense of the credentialing organizations to have a monopoly on education.
The only difference between myself and my other friends (who also have advanced degrees from top universities in the bay area) is that I abandoned my field of study and jumped into tech.
After 10 years, we have vastly different financial outcomes now.
A lot of hard working, well educated, dedicated people struggle financially around here, because they happened to not choose tech.
Add in the teachers and other under-appreciated careers, I do feel guilty that I should have so much, and they so little.
It took me a long time to accept this as I was wedded to the idea that hard work and skill alone should be well compensated. But that hard work and skill needs to be pointed in a good direction in the first place.
If you had an advanced degree in math or physics, hedge funds in NYC was always an option to maximize your talent in exchange for money. But one also had an option to choose something different and still make an upper middle class living.
It seems these days, only the finance/tech offer such living. NOT choosing tech is choosing barely middle class living, and everyone else is delegated to hand-to-mouth living.
Besides Fed Gov, Tech/finance are the probably the only sectors left with large work forces, great margins, a culture of rewarding talent (vs health care for example), AND rooted in the USA (vs manufacturing and heavy industry). These factors combine to create a super class of tech/finance labor.
The job market is not an efficient market. It doesn’t respond to offer and demand signals.
Nurses have been in short supply in most of the developed world for the past three decades yet are still paid peanuts. It’s all about your proximity to the handling of money and historical trend. That’s why even people doing menial jobs in banking are well compensated while people working in heavy industries are paid relatively little compared to the complexity of their jobs.
I got a fantastic education at two of the best public universities in the US, mostly funded by public money. Do I feel guilty about it? No. But I acknowledge that it was only possible because of policy choices made by Americans who came before me.
This is what happens when there is a lack of religion and belief in God. In Islam, we know we're going to be asked about the blessings that were bestowed on us, no matter how small, so it's always in the back of our mind that we should be grateful to God, and to use those blessings in the ways of good, not evil.
* https://quran.com/102/8 (the worldly pleasures include: health, wealth, free time, food and drink, safety, housing, etc.)
* https://quran.com/90/8-18
* https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:407
I bring this up because I don't think taxation has much to do with this. In NYC I was paying around 50% of my income towards taxes (federal, state, and local); when you factor in what I was paying towards things that the Swedish social system provides, I'm sure it amounted to very close to 60% (maybe even more!). But NYC is full of plenty of engineers or similarly well-paid professionals who've achieved financial independence. And, well, at least per Glassdoor (caveat emptor), the average software engineer gets paid literally twice as much in NYC than in Stockholm. IMO that probably has more to do with it.
What is important to the remember which most Swedes tend to forget is the payroll tax at 31.42% on the employer side.
To see how it evolves across incomes see this page (in Swedish)
https://www.ekonomifakta.se/fakta/skatter/skatt-pa-arbete/ma...
I live in Belgium with similar high income tax rates to Sweden, but I know quite a few people that I grew up with who have done very well. Better than his story. All mid 30s and all came from nothing. Even as an employee. No excuses, man.
These stories might not be listed in the newspapers, but that does not mean there are none.
In Sweden you can incorporate and work as a consultant. That lets you accumulate capital on the corporate side of the tax barrier so to speak. But the tax authorities can show up at any time, claim that your one man company is “overcapitalized” and force you to pay income taxes on your earnings.
That said, I know self employed developers making 150-200k (EUR) gross per year as contractors. But I also know employees that get allocated a few 100k/year in stock options as part of their compensation.
Yes, you do need to be exceptional. And you need to be smart in the choices you make. I thought that was a given, since millions of dollars don't just come falling from the sky.
There’s nothing unusual about that. I was making that kind of money 15 years ago.
But one problem is, that’s about what I can make today as well. There is no upward mobility in pay. And it has nothing to do with ability. It’s a cultural thing.
(Also, the deal is typically that you sell your social career progression. So you’ll be doing the same kind of job endlessly.)
> You can't just work your way to wealth. You need to reinvest what you make into other assets and let them compound...
This however is where the real problem starts: there is no way to accumulate and reinvest capital (legally), without paying massive (70-80%) taxes.
I agree income taxes are high throughout most of Western Europe, but the way to grow wealth is by acquiring assets that can grow without having to sell them and pay taxes.
An investment fund (or a property) can often grow for a long time and throw off cashflows that are taxed more efficiently. So can a business where you build up value in the equity. Cashflow keeps the lights on, but equity (even in a small business) builds wealth.
No, there are special tax rules for small companies (the so-called 3:12 rules). You can pay yourself a small dividend ($15k or so), but above that you’re taxed as if it was regular income.
> Income taxes are higher but still not 70-80%?
Payroll tax is 31% and then you pay around 55% marginal tax on what’s left.
It’s debatable how you should count VAT in this context. Your consultant invoices will have 25% VAT on them that you have to pay the government. Your customers can get that back from the government, but will have to pay VAT on any value your services create. Since the name of the tax is value added tax I think it’s fair to say you are adding the value with your labor and are in fact the one paying the tax, but others may disagree.
If you are talented and enjoy slacking off then you can have a pretty nice lifestyle in Sweden. Most of the exceptionally talented engineers I know work part time as consultants.
Several of them ended up going to Canada because it was significantly easier and had a reasonable tech scene in the Toronto area
Of course you could also come as a student and finish your education within EU. In some countries you can even do it for free.
>In a similar vein as above, I hear that it is almost impossible for talented software developers to earn similar amounts in any country besides USA. If early financial independence is a priority for you, strongly consider moving here. The easiest way to do this is probably to take a 1-year hiatus from work, and enroll in a Master’s degree in USA. Though I have also met others who moved here on a work-visa
Swedish tax rates on income makes this two to three times as difficult (approaches 60% plus 30% social paid by the employer this includes RSUs as well, plus 25% VAT) but it’s nonsense to claim this doesn’t happen. I am Swedish and have made significantly more in tech than the author. So has many of my friends.
With that said, the only reason I’m still in Sweden is family. The public sentiment about the future is uncomfortably racist and increasingly hostile about fortune making. If you have the mobility my advice is to move. Good luck.
I’m not saying there is no path to financial independence in Sweden, I’m just saying that the path the author has taken / is advocating is not one.
I too know people who’ve made significantly more than the author. I’ve come close myself. But that generally involves starting a company and having other people work for you.
If you're comfortable with sharing, was it through a company exit or IPO?
I don’t know what your seniority is and what you’ve seen but I can assure you it exists, and it’s not unique exceptions. Maybe a good opportunity to interview if you’re feels it’s unattainable where you are now. Plenty of US companies hiring remotely too…
You pay hella more tax on them though, but I mean the reason I left the US was also like.. related to all this. I want the things those taxes pay for, it feels incredible to be back somewhere with functioning healthcare, functioning child care systems.
You state further down that you made this money from RSUs.
I’m not sure which bubble you/friends live in, but the absolute majority of tech workers do NOT get RSUs, even less often in the EU.
Roughly speaking, for similarly qualified folks applying in the EB2 category in 2021, Indian immigrants (worst case), approval can take 15+ years, while immigrants from Sweden will take 2-3 years at most (was less than a year pre-COVID).
That said it sucks to work in Sweden because it's all about making money through inheritance, housing, stocks or contacts. But I guess that is how it is in many places these days.
However, a world-class DJ and the fact that some people are richer than others doesn't really contradict the claim that Sweden is much more egalitarian, and my previous points need to be examined within the broader culture of Sweden and Scandinavia in general. (Many Swedes commute daily into Denmark.) Having a car is convenient, but thanks to a world-class public transportation network in Stockholm, rather unnecessary. Car ownership is thus less of a deal compared to much of the US. While the privileged in Silicon Valley are trying to get "fuck you" money (more eloquently expressed as Financial Indpendence / Retiring Early - FIRE), the older Swedes I met still work, and are most proud of the days or week off their job affords and middle-class people are able to travel more than I see Americans (though a lot of that is cultural, but time off work and plane tickets+hotel is expensive).
The USA really makes it easy for people to win. It can be hard to notice it if you've been there all life(or at least most of it), but people like me who have spent our whole lives outside USA(Indian Citizen) and then stayed in the USA for a couple of years(for work) and returned to our home countries can absolutely relate to this.
The difference is like night and day, and it's not even like remotely comparable, being born in the USA even in under privileged conditions gives you lots of edge compared to your peer group.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpainFIRE/
It's all very equal, just don't look behind the curtain. We all earn our 50000SEK here.
The CEO? Oh, just ignore him
I guess everything IS bigger in the USA
The majority of his NW comes from investment and savings, not income.
The point of the article is that cutting expenses, saving, investing wisely, and aggressively pursuing pay raises can yield a few million well before retirement age.
These sort of casual dismissals negate the educational value of the post.
Most people will have nowhere near the same results as the author by implementing these things.
The biggest factors here are:
1) Earn a lot of money
2) Don't spend it all
I don't think this post has much educational value at all because I think most people already understand those points, they just can't execute on them in a meaningful way.
Living expenses tend to grow slower than incomes, as incomes go up.
You don't pay 200% rent for 2 people, but for sure you can earn 200% with 2 people.
I would say $475k is close enough, in all honesty.
> The majority of his NW comes from investment and savings, not income.
Sum of (earnings - spent) over the career is $2,611,000. Net worth by the end is $2,400,000. In order for investment returns to be above savings on income, taxes would have to be 42.3% of lifetime earnings, which would be a bit surprising.
You should also hire a CPA or at least spend some time reading about strategies to minimize taxes if you are paying close to an effective 50% income tax on $500k of income.
You will not get as low as someone with their own business or S corp, but the tax advantaged savings account should help.
If you earn more than $523,600 and are single, then your tax rate is not 50% but 37%, which is still meaningful amount that is often not considered when looking at those big numbers. https://www.manafld.com/blog/2021/2/26/rsus-no-sell-tax
If you are in California, then your employer will not give you all your RSU but sell 40% and give you 60%. So you don’t have a big scary surprise when it’s tax season. https://blog.myrawealth.com/insights/rsu-tax-rate
The federal income tax rate only for income above $523k is 37%. Only for income above $523k.
> If you are in California, then your employer will not give you all your RSU but sell 40% and give you 60%. So you don’t have a big scary surprise when it’s tax season.
Withholding amounts seem irrelevant when discussing effective tax rates.
https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#gJwOxy2ei7
But that is without 401k/HSA/etc.
I calculated 42% effective on lifetime income, and I suppose the writer was not taxed at 42% on their 100k income from the first years, so the tax rate for later years must have been higher.
That is entirely irrelevant. You will get taxed the same no matter what they sell and give you. If your tax rate should be less than 40% (true for me, and probably most people here), you'll get the money back as a refund.
You do miss out on any appreciation, but if you know your marginal tax rate is < 40% (just look at your previous tax returns to figure it out), you can simply spend the delta to buy the stocks you should have gotten and you'll still get the appreciation (and the cash in the tax refund to compensate you for doing this).
475k == 500k for all practical purposes. The guy averaged 525k for 3 solid years (not "one year") -- which makes the parent comment rather less flip.
These sort of casual dismissals negate the educational value of the post.
The bottom line is that while saving and investing is certainly smart -- you better damn sure be earning 98 percentile income as well if you want to get as far ahead of the game as this guy has.
Sees last salary was $625,000
Chuckles and closes the article about achieving financial independence
If anything, some of the advice doesn't make any sense. Like, saving extremely on the low income. Whatever he has saved in the first six years of his career would be offset by just working one year more.
So the "path" to financial independance mainly involves getting a 100k/year from day one.
I hope it will inspire and convince all these people who earn below the US median salary range of 47k/year. (and they range in all age categories, not 20 years old engineers).
That guy is seriously delusional.
Just imagine how it's impossible for someone with 47k/year!
And that's the MEDIAN salary range in the US!
But apparently that thought escaped him, whatever.
With a starting salary that high I think you're very likely to easily achieve financial independence, barring a catastrophic fuck up.
This is just my personal opinion, but this is an ass backwards way of doing things and it gets me frothing at the mouth.
If it's your life purpose, DO it already. Live lean if you have to, become a cockroach if you must, but let that purpose ROAR out of you. Don't sit around accruing meaningless tokens, becoming an old fuck with all of the juice of life wrung out of you like some decrepit mop.
Sincerely, a decrepit mop.
Conversely, I've seen those that "pursue their passion" end up being bitter and cynical when they don't make it. They end up working one dead-end job after another, hoping to one day become a famous writer/actor/singer/etc.
Eventually they realize they don't have what it takes and are now stuck working into their 50s/60s.
Sure some small pct end up being successful but the majority end up being in the same corporate trap that they originally eschewed, albeit with more debt and a more precarious financial situation.