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I retired from my job managing a group of software engineers in Silicon Valley a few years ago. I'd been quite frugal, mostly driving old beaters I bought outr

I retired from my job managing a group of software engineers in Silicon Valley a few years ago. I'd been quite frugal, mostly driving old beaters I bought outright. I owned a condo outright. I ate the free and discounted food at work. I was making $300K+ a year in base salary and equity compensation, and my expenses were only about $20K a year. (My biggest bill was my monthly homeowners’ association fee of about $400.) So, I was able to save a metric ton of money and invested it all in the stock market. As a child, I loved computers. I taught myself 6502 and x86 assembly languages, as well as some other languages. When I got to the university and actually understood how digital circuits worked, I was so fascinated. When I finally landed in Silicon Valley, I felt like I was in a dream. I was good at what I did and I met awesome people who were good at what they did. Actually, the greatest pleasure was meeting and working with people who were much smarter than I was. Eventually, the thrill wore off. I’d seen so many bugs and new projects that they started all feel the same, kind of like my personal version of the film Goundhog Day. I didn’t love it anymore. And then later, I didn’t even like it anymore. At one point, I calculated my net worth at a few million dollars and realized that I could just quit my job and live off the investment interest. So I just did it. I’ve been retired for four years now. I travel a lot, which was something I couldn’t do much when I had a job that only gave me three weeks of vacation. I can also travel in a different way: taking the time in a new place to see un-touristy things, meet locals and study the language a bit. I read a lot of books, none of which are about computers. I haven’t been back to the United States in over a year. Thanks to my frugal habits and the runup in the stock market, my net worth is higher. My “burn” rate is under 2%, which means that I can do this indefinitely. I don’t miss Silicon Valley and will never live there again. In fact, I probably won’t ever live in the United States again. And I don’t miss my cubicle one bit. What I did is unusual. But the thing I don’t understand is why it is unusual: most of the professionals I worked with could have made the same choices and had the same result. I guess they found more enjoyment in the cycle of work and consumption than I did. And like most people who lived in the Valley, I knew and had friendships with people who were far richer than I was: whose net worth was $10M or $30M or more, who could retire today and have a very comfortable life anywhere in the world. But they continued to work. I can only guess that they found more enjoyment in work than I did.

mailshanx 10y ago
I would really, really love to hear some details of how you ended up in the very high paying jobs, and any advise you might have for how to manage one's career to maximise earning potential, assuming one starts off with a quant / ML / software eng background. Also, if you have any observations or advise for developers who are NOT based in the US, i'd love to hear that.
- siberianbear 10y ago
  I went to a “second-tier” school in the University of California. Having worked with engineers from better schools (e.g., Stanford), I would say I was as talented on average as they were, but I had terrible study habits in high school and so my grades weren’t that good. At the university I did a lot of stuff that wasn’t required for my degree, like doing a senior design project and leading the local chapter of IEEE. I hustled to get internships. I took an internship doing IT support at a civil engineering firm my first year, but later I got better internships at Apple and Intel. By the time I graduated, I was a far stronger candidate than my peers at my school. I had six job offers when I graduated. I job hopped a couple of times early in my career for better positions, but I eventually ended up at a company I really liked and stayed there for twelve years. You don’t say much about your background or where you are, so it’s hard to answer your question. I think there’s really two parts to your question: “1. How do I become a great software engineer?” and “2. How do I emigrate to a country with higher salaries for engineers?” To me, these are pretty basic questions. To be a great software engineer, teach yourself to solve difficult problems and then go do it. Always push the limit of your ability. Learn multiple languages. If you’re a system software person, go tinker with databases. If you’re a compiler guy, go tinker with neural networks. If you’re a C programmer, go learn Scheme or Haskell. Read books on lots of topics: microprocessor design, good software engineering practices, design patterns, etc. In your job, be indispensable. Be the guy who can solve any bug or solve any problem, even if it spans multiple areas of knowledge. Be indispensable. Don’t be the guy who holes himself up as a guru in a little obscure walled-off technical area and hides his knowledge as a form of power or job security. There is no job security. Even if you’re good, your company could go through a rough spot and lay you off. The only job security is to be known in a network of other people as a great engineer, and then if you don’t have work it’s no problem to find another job. If you go interviewing for any serious jobs, you’re going to get coding questions. Whether they are a great way of assessing a candidate is a topic of debate on HN, but that doesn’t matter. You’re going to get them. People have put together anthologies of these questions: be sure you can solve them. If you practice and are good at it, you will be able to solve similar problems that you haven’t seen before. If you’re in an “emerging economy” with low salaries for engineers, then figure out how to get to a different country. The demand for software engineers worldwide is huge right now, and so if you can figure out a way to legally work in a richer country and you have any talent at all, you can find a job. Visa programs put a high value on university degrees in technical fields, so if you don’t have one it’s likely you’ll need to get one. The United States has the best paying jobs for software engineers right now, but it is very hard to emigrate to right now because the H1-B visa category is oversubscribed. The best way to get in now is to go work for a big company that has a presence in both the USA and abroad (like, say, Google) and then after a year you can transfer to the USA on an L1 if your employer allows it. I’m no expert on moving to Europe, but I know that various countries have “blue card” programs for skilled technical people to move to Europe on. Anecdotally, I believe the best-paying jobs are in northern Europe, especially in Germany. But the pay will be less than in the USA. I transferred one engineer from Silicon Valley to Germany (his request) and I had to give him a 25% salary cut and he got a lot less equity compensation going forward. The good news is that there is a huge demand for skilled programmers everywhere. I’m so glad that my childhood passion was computers and not medieval French poetry, in which case I’d be serving lattes at a coffee shop and be living in fear that a robot is going to take my minimum-wage job.

mailshanx 10y ago

I would really, really love to hear some details of how you ended up in the very high paying jobs, and any advise you might have for how to manage one's career to maximise earning potential, assuming one starts off with a quant / ML / software eng background. Also, if you have any observations or advise for developers who are NOT based in the US, i'd love to hear that.

siberianbear 10y ago
I went to a “second-tier” school in the University of California. Having worked with engineers from better schools (e.g., Stanford), I would say I was as talented on average as they were, but I had terrible study habits in high school and so my grades weren’t that good. At the university I did a lot of stuff that wasn’t required for my degree, like doing a senior design project and leading the local chapter of IEEE. I hustled to get internships. I took an internship doing IT support at a civil engineering firm my first year, but later I got better internships at Apple and Intel. By the time I graduated, I was a far stronger candidate than my peers at my school. I had six job offers when I graduated. I job hopped a couple of times early in my career for better positions, but I eventually ended up at a company I really liked and stayed there for twelve years. You don’t say much about your background or where you are, so it’s hard to answer your question. I think there’s really two parts to your question: “1. How do I become a great software engineer?” and “2. How do I emigrate to a country with higher salaries for engineers?” To me, these are pretty basic questions. To be a great software engineer, teach yourself to solve difficult problems and then go do it. Always push the limit of your ability. Learn multiple languages. If you’re a system software person, go tinker with databases. If you’re a compiler guy, go tinker with neural networks. If you’re a C programmer, go learn Scheme or Haskell. Read books on lots of topics: microprocessor design, good software engineering practices, design patterns, etc. In your job, be indispensable. Be the guy who can solve any bug or solve any problem, even if it spans multiple areas of knowledge. Be indispensable. Don’t be the guy who holes himself up as a guru in a little obscure walled-off technical area and hides his knowledge as a form of power or job security. There is no job security. Even if you’re good, your company could go through a rough spot and lay you off. The only job security is to be known in a network of other people as a great engineer, and then if you don’t have work it’s no problem to find another job. If you go interviewing for any serious jobs, you’re going to get coding questions. Whether they are a great way of assessing a candidate is a topic of debate on HN, but that doesn’t matter. You’re going to get them. People have put together anthologies of these questions: be sure you can solve them. If you practice and are good at it, you will be able to solve similar problems that you haven’t seen before. If you’re in an “emerging economy” with low salaries for engineers, then figure out how to get to a different country. The demand for software engineers worldwide is huge right now, and so if you can figure out a way to legally work in a richer country and you have any talent at all, you can find a job. Visa programs put a high value on university degrees in technical fields, so if you don’t have one it’s likely you’ll need to get one. The United States has the best paying jobs for software engineers right now, but it is very hard to emigrate to right now because the H1-B visa category is oversubscribed. The best way to get in now is to go work for a big company that has a presence in both the USA and abroad (like, say, Google) and then after a year you can transfer to the USA on an L1 if your employer allows it. I’m no expert on moving to Europe, but I know that various countries have “blue card” programs for skilled technical people to move to Europe on. Anecdotally, I believe the best-paying jobs are in northern Europe, especially in Germany. But the pay will be less than in the USA. I transferred one engineer from Silicon Valley to Germany (his request) and I had to give him a 25% salary cut and he got a lot less equity compensation going forward. The good news is that there is a huge demand for skilled programmers everywhere. I’m so glad that my childhood passion was computers and not medieval French poetry, in which case I’d be serving lattes at a coffee shop and be living in fear that a robot is going to take my minimum-wage job.