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"My mom had multiple patents" At my company we get paid cash for patent filings and paid another cash sum if the patent is accepted. A little less than 5k tota
by jshen 16y ago
"My mom had multiple patents"
At my company we get paid cash for patent filings and paid another cash sum if the patent is accepted. A little less than 5k total, but it's not hard to do 1 a year. It's not getting rich, but there is no risk either. I get paid, period. I get over 5k a year matching in my 401k, and I get a bonus every year over 10k. This is all on top of a large salary by most peoples standards.
If I live like I only make 80k (not hard) I will easily have a house paid off and a fair amount of money in the back after 20 years. And it's low stress and fun work.
What I'd really like to know is what percentage of engineers that try to succeed at a startup actually end up wealthy. Does anyone have stats on this? Most of the people I've worked with that ended up wealthy weren't engineers. they got good at SEO at the right time and sold some wordpress site or something like that. I used to work with a few people that were at youbet.com and I wouldn't say they got rich. The average engineer seemed to have gotten a payout in the 6 figures range. This is me guessing based on the info they told me in conversations. So they basically get to buy a house in cash in the L.A. area.
I feel like my chances of paying off a house in 20ish years is just as good at a big company as it would be trying my hand at a few start ups. Maybe I'm wrong, and clearly I'm not a big risk taker.
- harryh 16y agoAs long as you realize that every time you take that ~5k for a patent you're selling a piece of your soul. Software patents are evil taking money from your employer when they file for one makes you complicit in the process.
- jshen 16y agoI agree that our system is broken, and I don't do the patents myself. I was just pointing out that at some big companies you get paid real money for patents.
- GrooveStomp 16y agoWow. Sign me up. I make around 55k-65k and live like I earn about 20k. The biggest bonus I've ever received was about 10% of my yearly income. That happened once. I went 8 months without work last year. I'm living a completely comfortable lifestyle. I'm not needing of anything. I want lots of things, but it takes just a tiny modicum of restraint to avoid monstrous debt snowballs. The work I've done has only ever been high stress, and very rarely fun. Is it purely a matter of experience to get to the point where you earn greater than 80k and only do fun, low stress work? I haven't seen anything like that around here. Oh, and this city is expensive too. For a base salary of 62k/year, the average home costs 9.5 years of pre-tax income.
- jshen 16y agoWe're in Los Angeles and we're hiring. http://tbe.taleo.net/NA3/ats/careers/jobSearch.jsp?org=YELLOWPAGES&cws=1 http://tbe.taleo.net/NA3/ats/careers/jobSearch.jsp?org=YELLO... I should clarify "low stress" and "fun". It's a big company so I have to do a lot of silly things. Quarterly reviews which no one reads, yearly training courses that are a waste of time, the usual big company politics, etc. These are not fun, but I spend most of my day hacking on challenging problems and learning from people that are smarter than me which is my idea of fun. Yes product people unrealistically want everything to have been done yesterday, but I have no problem letting that go in one ear and out the other except when they are right ;) By low stress I mean that I don't have to work much overtime and no one calls me in the middle of the night or on the weekends to fix something. When I go home I can leave work at work unless I want to keep thinking about it. I enlisted in the army when I was 17 and spent a year deployed so my idea of low stress might be different than others.