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Of course it's not ok. At some level getting rich is a life-or-death issue. How do I get enough money to retire? How can I possibly afford health-care? What if

• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• erikstarck 16y ago
  Yeah, but you don't have to be a super rich billionaire for that.
• HockeyPlayer 16y ago
  Don't be silly. She wrote that her friend, "could easily bring in a low six-figure income" If you save wisely, you can retire just fine after a career at a tech company making 2-3x the US median salary. And most companies have good health coverage for the cancer. She is talking about the pressure to make $10M or more through a startup, not getting the money to retire comfortably.
  • kscaldef 16y ago
    > And most companies have good health coverage for the cancer. Well... kinda. One of the dirty little secrets of employer-provided group health care is that when you have one person whose health care costs vastly exceed the average, there's enormous pressure to get that person out of the "group". I've know companies where someone got cancer and the premiums for the whole company doubled the next year.
    • orangecat 16y ago
      Geez. I never thought about that scenario, but it makes perfect sense. So much for the one possible advantage of employer-based health insurance.
      • nerfhammer 16y ago
        Here's a disturbing tale of this scenario playing out: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/7/751100/-How-I-lost-my-health-insurance-at-the-hairstylists http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/7/751100/-How-I-los...
    • jimbokun 16y ago
      This is a good economic explanation for why national health care systems should outperform employer based (or any other) systems. You can't get a larger pool of people to spread risk around, under a single legal framework, than an entire nation state.
      • yummyfajitas 16y ago
        Once you look at the numbers, you realize that beyond a certain size it doesn't matter much. The standard deviation of health care costs for a company scales like 1/sqrt(# employees). Once (sigma cost) / sqrt(# of employees) << (mean cost), there is little advantage to having a bigger pool.
      • kscaldef 16y ago
        It's not really about the overall performance or cost of coverage. The advantage, in this case, of national health care is that you can't be kicked out of the "group" (i.e. fired because you're raising the insurance premiums for the whole company), and there's no concept of "uninsurable".
  • timr 16y ago
    "If you save wisely, you can retire just fine after a career at a tech company making 2-3x the US median salary." This is a theory at this point...and it's not a well-tested theory. I don't know many people who have actually retired from a lifetime (i.e. 30+ year) career in tech. Considering that the software industry (as we know it) is only about 30 years old, it's hard to draw long-term conclusions.
    • boucher 16y ago
      The specific career is not relevant. Any person who has retired after making 3x the median US salary is evidence in this scenario.
      • timr 16y ago
        If the median programmer leaves the industry after 10 years, career choice matters a great deal; making 3 times as much for 1/4th the time isn't a net win.
    • btilly 16y ago
      ...the software industry (as we know it) is only about 30 years old... Uh, what? The software industry is a lot older than that. The largest companies today by revenue are listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_global_software_companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_global_soft... and it is instructive to go down the list. Of the 10 listed, 2 have been selling software since the 50s (in the case of Accenture admittedly as part of another company), 1 in the 60s, and 3 in the 70s. So over half are over 30 years old. Wikipedia claims that the first company founded to provide software products and services was Computer Usage Company in 1955. The software industry expanded in the 1960s. Since then it seems to me to have been growing exponentially since. By the early 70s there was already enough accumulated experience for veterans to write classics like The Mythical Man-Month and The Psychology of Computer Programming. Incidentally I know multiple people who have retired from a lifetime career in tech. They seem to be in a similar position to other retired professionals.
      • 16y ago
  • iron_ball 16y ago
    You're still going to be hired for tech jobs at 50? Not from what I hear.
  • pvdm 16y ago
    Wait. What tech company would hire you if you already have cancer ? Just ask Brian Reid. http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/08/google_age_discrimination_case.php http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/08/google_age_discr...
• othello 16y ago
  I feel the author really meant that it's ok not to be obscenely rich. Of course having a sizeable amount of savings is important for all the things you described. Yet the "low six-figures" income of her first example is probably largely sufficient to handle these.
  • sosuke 16y ago
    I wish she had said that explicitly at the beginning, a low six-figures income is rich enough for me but making that money is almost as hard as becoming obscenely rich. After you reach 80-100k a year working for someone else it's a very large and all consuming step to make it to the next rung of the ladder.
    • chc 16y ago
      In California, a family making low six-figures is upper-middle-class (my parents made ~$80k and we were generally considered lower-middle-class). So it makes sense to me not to call that "rich," though of course the value of money is a personal thing.
      • sosuke 16y ago
        You're right that location changes the income levels quite a bit. I would need much more in California or New York to live as though I felt rich enough.
• GavinB 16y ago
  There's a difference between "getting rich" enough to be able to retire and handle health issues and building an empire. All of the possibilities you mention are much more likely to be handled by a) Good budgeting b) A solid career as an employee or an independent contractor The reason to start your own business is because you want the challenge, and the satisfaction of building something important. If you have a desperate need to have a few million in the bank, your best shot is to to get a good job, learn about investment, and start living cheaply.
• deleted 16y ago
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• notahacker 16y ago
  Being rich is a sufficient, but not necessary condition for relative economic security in a developed country. It's perfectly OK to pay for your retirement and provide for your lovely wife by taking a standard career path from one salaried job to another. You don't need to start a company to have enough money to retire. And of course if you choose to start a company you're trading increased likelihood of being severely short of funds at some stage in the short term for the possibility of being rich later in life. How many founders on here can honestly say their main motivation is maximising their chances of survival in old age?
• iamwil 16y ago
  And that's the attitude that she's pointing out. Just as women are constantly told and whispered (directly and indirectly) they're not pretty enough, men are constantly told and whispered (directly and indirectly) they're not rich enough. So much so that a bunch of people agree with you and it's a defining norm. Note that the article is talking about the obscenely rich, like the Facebooks and the Googles. There's no need to be obscenely rich to retire, afford healthcare, treat your lovely soon-to-be-cancerous wife. Above a certain point, having more money gives diminishing returns on quality of life. After that, it's just a scorecard as someone will almost always be more rich than you. But we think we do need to be obscenely rich, and that it's our role, nay our purpose to do so. It's a story that's exulted, whispered, and told in our ear so often, we don't realize it anymore. In the end, you should know yourself. The old masters weren't kidding when they said that the hardest thing to do is not mastery over others, but over yourself. You should know what you value in life and what you want out of it, and that the source of that inspiration comes from within. Because when you buy into other people's values that aren't your own, you may find that when you finally get to the top of the hill at the expense of everything else, what you really wanted wasn't there at all. And that's what she's warning her friend about.
  • Tichy 16y ago
    "Just as women are constantly told and whispered (directly and indirectly) they're not pretty enough, men are constantly told and whispered (directly and indirectly) they're not rich enough." She seems to think people have these thoughts only because the media whispers it to them. Unfortunately, there is also a degree of truth to them, and the media merely exploits this truth. It does matter how pretty you are (especially as a woman), and it does matter how rich you are.
    • iamwil 16y ago
      Yes, it does matter. But once again, it's a matter of degree. She's talking about low six-figures vs empire rich billions. She makes no claims if one makes below that.
• grellas 16y ago
  Yes, but the obsession with accumulating money can lead to problems. Setting a high target for success and working hard to get there are worthy goals for men and women alike but going through life with a perpetually-agitated constitution because you don't attain a result that puts you in the top-1% wealth bracket (for example) is an almost certain way to find yourself unhappy and discontented as you strive to meet your main life goals. In the midst of the tech bubble, a prominent Valley newspaper ran a feature story in which it interviewed five couples who were each at varying degrees of financial success, from modest to rich. Ironically, it was the rich couple (net worth of approximately $200 million) that was quoted as saying, in response to a question about what they most wanted, "we want to know what it would be like to be worth a billion dollars." To me, this sort of mindset can be problematic, and the problem becomes one of loss of perspective. When the accumulation of money becomes in itself an obsessive goal, it comes back to bite because, no matter how much one has, it will never be enough. I don't think this is really an issue about the money itself, either - it involves instead the idea that your very perception of your value as a human being somehow becomes defined by how the ciphers add up, and that ultimately represents a sad loss of perspective because you wind up forever measuring your wealth (and what it brings) with what everybody else has. Money is great when rightly gained and used. So too is ambition and a desire to achieve the ultimate success. It is good to set your goals high. But it is never good to become obsessed about the accumulation of money as an end in itself. Such a goal, even if attained, will sap the life out of anyone who allows money to become his master. This piece was thought-provoking along these lines, though I think flawed in tying to tie all this to feminist themes. The issue of avarice as a problem is a transcending one that is hardly shaped by gender.
  • winterlightning 16y ago
    There is a thin line between motivation and obsession. Both are representations of passion. While the above comment might portray getting a billion dollars as an out of perspective goal. I feel admiration for people that does not quit just because they have been successful in some stage in their life. If the topic was about knowledge, can you ever become satisfied with your knowledge and cease to learn more?
• pvdm 16y ago
  Morphine is not that expensive.
• ruang 16y ago
  Rich,middle,and poor is a false trichotomy. Once you hit late 40s to 50s, people won't pay you a high salary for a typical line position. So at that point, you either continue to work for low wages, possibly being shifted within the company to doing sales on commission, being a trainer, or moved to a low-wage country. Or you are independently wealthy by then.