> What about retirement savings? If you had funded your 401(k) and IRAs with an engineer's salary for this many years you should have many millions to live off

> What about retirement savings? If you had funded your 401(k) and IRAs with an engineer's salary for this many years you should have many millions to live off of. Retiring to millions may be true in theory for certain programmers, but certainly not true for all programmers. Reality is often different for everyone. As the African proverb says: “all fingers are not equal” meaning the outcome of a specific situation can differ across people. For instance, what if s/he had a financially draining medical emergency, forcing them to rejoin the workforce?