8 ms·

The Secret Lives of Millionaire Tech Engineers Who 'Rest and Vest'

29 points by ca98am79 4y ago

ryanwaggoner 4y ago
This is from 2017, and if anything I think this has become more prevalent now with remote work, post-COVID burnout, and a white-hot job market. It’ll be interesting to see if it changes now that the tech labor market is finally slowing down.
- mac3n 4y ago
  It seems like your value as a "rest-and-vest" is to a specific company From the discussion of layoffs, this could be dangerous. Perhaps the best thing to do if you find yourself in this situation is to work on your marketable skills, and learn (or invent) something new.
agentwiggles 4y ago
I have a job that I like. I work about 40 hours a week and enjoy the company of my teammates. I even like the work we do. And still, this makes me livid with jealousy. To get paid 500k - 1m a year to basically just fuck around with side projects and stuff you like to do is the dream of dreams. I don't even know how to think about this. I can't decide whether I have some moral superiority to make me feel better or if I'm just a pure sap for trying to do the right thing and work hard. It would take me around 8 years to net a million dollars. My mortgage is a chunk of change that hurts to pay every month. Saving is challenging and I just can't help but feel like I'm a sucker when I see these folks who do fun stuff all day and get paid 5-10x what I make. Someone, please: make me feel better!
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  > And still, this makes me livid with jealousy. To get paid 500k - 1m a year to basically just fuck around with side projects and stuff you like to do is the dream of dreams. Like, let's be clear. The vast majority of this money was in stock, which was pushed upwards by the incredibly low interest rates we've had since the GFC. Those days are gone (for a while at least), and the likelihood is that most of these people have taken 50% pay cuts this year due to this. And it's also worth noting that these people are a very very small proportion of the total workforce at tech companies, and many of them are kept on hand because they are really good at things that are difficult to hire for (how much is someone who deeply understands a GBM implementation used in the ads system worth to FB/GOOG)?
  - TechnicolorByte 4y ago
    That these types of engineers make up a tiny fraction of the overall tech field should really be emphasized, especially to those who browse HN, Blind, etc.
    - twiddling 4y ago
      HN is a bit like Lake Woebegone where every child is above average
- ryanwaggoner 4y ago
  Wait until you find out that there are millions out there who have inherited wealth and don’t even have to bother with the pretense of working! For me, it helps to remember that just by virtue of making six figures working in tech, I’m easily one of the richest 1% of humans who have ever lived (probably more like 0.01%), and practice gratitude for that. Who cares if a handful of people out there have it “better”? My life is awesome, and I’m happy for them.
  - stackbutterflow 4y ago
    I think the difference is that it feels almost attainable, although for most of us it isn't. I'm a software developer, I can write code and build systems. In theory I could get these compensations if I worked harder. What's keeping me from making that much is 1) I'm not in the US 2) I can't pass faang interviews. Nonetheless it feels within reach. Unlike being the child of a billionaire. Hence the disconnect.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Presuming you’ve tried more than once, if you can’t pass faang interviews, why do you still think it’s attainable?
      - filoleg 4y ago
        Because they might have missed it by a tiny margin and were borderline. The feeling of totally bombing an interview and being within an inch of passing are enterily different. I wouldn't be upset by the former, but the latter would grind on me for a bit. To the grandparent poster: if you actually have the goal of passing that faang interview, just keep trying. Taking multiple tries to succeed doesn't make you a subpar engineer. I worked for one of those FAANGs for a while, but there was another one i wanted to work at, and I kept coming short every single time during onsites for that one specifically. Like, it would always be good enough to go to the hiring committee, but it would inevitably end up with "you were so borderline, only if that one interviewer out of 5 gave you a slightly higher score, you would have been hired." Turns out, 4th time was the charm, and I got hired. And now, I am not noticing being "subpar" to any other engineers i work with who got in on the first try, my perf review was quite good, and I like the job I do, so trying all that time ended up being worth for me. So if you have that as your goal, don't get discouraged by failing, just give it another try later.
- rufius 4y ago
  My only consolation for you is the phenomenon is largely concentrated at companies that profit on selling user’s information. Also - I question their characterization of how carefree these folks were. Of the few folks in my network that we knew rested and vested, many were so burnt out they eventually left the industry all together. Edit: I wonder if they were smart and got out of their equity and into something better diversified. At least for a couple, my gut says no.
- rcarr 4y ago
  If you get paid $125,000 a year then I can guarantee that there are a ton of devs in Europe that look on you with envy the same way you’re looking at these guys. Senior wage over here most places is between 50,000 - 80,000. And they in turn probably have a ton of guys from India and other lower income countries looking at their wages with envy. I left my last dev job because they wanted to pay me £30,000. Such shit salaries are pretty common in the North of England. The average wage across the UK is £39,000 so you get paid 2.5x the average in another 1st world country. I know everything is relative but it seems you’ve got a good thing going to me.
  - throw_this_one 4y ago
    How do people live on 30k gbp? I was just in London and stuff is expensive, eating out and drinks etc. And programmers that are like 30 years old are getting 30k gbp?
    - twelve40 4y ago
      aren't London and North of England, like... different places? Like SF and Sac, maybe?
    - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
      London is south
    - rcarr 4y ago
      Yeah the divide between the North and the South in this country is really fucking stark and getting ever wider. The North hasn’t been as expensive as the South although house prices have been rising to silly levels round here as well recently. They’re building new bungalows near where I grew up and they’re trying to sell them for half a million just because they’re in the suburbs and near a school, it’s absolutely ridiculous. 30k would have been enough for me to buy a small terraced house or an apartment round here but not much else. I pointed out that the wage wasn’t even the national average salary and they tried to claim that it was good for the area but I’m pretty sure it’s still below the regional average too. They were a billion pound international private company and could absolutely have afforded to pay me a decent wage. Sales staff up and down the company were regularly taking home six figures in commission bonuses. I was offered a max bonus of £3k. Absolute joke company.
- francisofascii 4y ago
  Yes. Feel the same. There is a story in the bible where workers are perfectly content working a full day at a vineyard until they find out other guys got the same wage for only a few hours a day. So it is an ancient problem of the human condition. My only consolation is there are many more people who DON'T like the work they do, and get paid a lot less.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
awkward 4y ago
> A former Google manager who recently left the company agreed. "There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted. If their department doesn’t like them, after a year or two they move somewhere else," she said. The article opens with an extreme corner case, then just has a bunch of these. It's just a rehash of the "quiet quitting" BS from earlier this year. It's got a mention of 10x engineers though, so bottoms up if you're playing the bad work culture drinking game.
- akerl_ 4y ago
  Yea… “just do[ing] a 9-5 job” is what they’re being paid for.

29 points by ca98am79 4y ago

This is from 2017, and if anything I think this has become more prevalent now with remote work, post-COVID burnout, and a white-hot job market. It’ll be interesting to see if it changes now that the tech labor market is finally slowing down.

mac3n 4y ago
It seems like your value as a "rest-and-vest" is to a specific company From the discussion of layoffs, this could be dangerous. Perhaps the best thing to do if you find yourself in this situation is to work on your marketable skills, and learn (or invent) something new.

agentwiggles 4y ago

I have a job that I like. I work about 40 hours a week and enjoy the company of my teammates. I even like the work we do. And still, this makes me livid with jealousy. To get paid 500k - 1m a year to basically just fuck around with side projects and stuff you like to do is the dream of dreams. I don't even know how to think about this. I can't decide whether I have some moral superiority to make me feel better or if I'm just a pure sap for trying to do the right thing and work hard. It would take me around 8 years to net a million dollars. My mortgage is a chunk of change that hurts to pay every month. Saving is challenging and I just can't help but feel like I'm a sucker when I see these folks who do fun stuff all day and get paid 5-10x what I make. Someone, please: make me feel better!

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
> And still, this makes me livid with jealousy. To get paid 500k - 1m a year to basically just fuck around with side projects and stuff you like to do is the dream of dreams. Like, let's be clear. The vast majority of this money was in stock, which was pushed upwards by the incredibly low interest rates we've had since the GFC. Those days are gone (for a while at least), and the likelihood is that most of these people have taken 50% pay cuts this year due to this. And it's also worth noting that these people are a very very small proportion of the total workforce at tech companies, and many of them are kept on hand because they are really good at things that are difficult to hire for (how much is someone who deeply understands a GBM implementation used in the ads system worth to FB/GOOG)?
- TechnicolorByte 4y ago
  That these types of engineers make up a tiny fraction of the overall tech field should really be emphasized, especially to those who browse HN, Blind, etc.
  - twiddling 4y ago
    HN is a bit like Lake Woebegone where every child is above average
ryanwaggoner 4y ago
Wait until you find out that there are millions out there who have inherited wealth and don’t even have to bother with the pretense of working! For me, it helps to remember that just by virtue of making six figures working in tech, I’m easily one of the richest 1% of humans who have ever lived (probably more like 0.01%), and practice gratitude for that. Who cares if a handful of people out there have it “better”? My life is awesome, and I’m happy for them.
- stackbutterflow 4y ago
  I think the difference is that it feels almost attainable, although for most of us it isn't. I'm a software developer, I can write code and build systems. In theory I could get these compensations if I worked harder. What's keeping me from making that much is 1) I'm not in the US 2) I can't pass faang interviews. Nonetheless it feels within reach. Unlike being the child of a billionaire. Hence the disconnect.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Presuming you’ve tried more than once, if you can’t pass faang interviews, why do you still think it’s attainable?
    - filoleg 4y ago
      Because they might have missed it by a tiny margin and were borderline. The feeling of totally bombing an interview and being within an inch of passing are enterily different. I wouldn't be upset by the former, but the latter would grind on me for a bit. To the grandparent poster: if you actually have the goal of passing that faang interview, just keep trying. Taking multiple tries to succeed doesn't make you a subpar engineer. I worked for one of those FAANGs for a while, but there was another one i wanted to work at, and I kept coming short every single time during onsites for that one specifically. Like, it would always be good enough to go to the hiring committee, but it would inevitably end up with "you were so borderline, only if that one interviewer out of 5 gave you a slightly higher score, you would have been hired." Turns out, 4th time was the charm, and I got hired. And now, I am not noticing being "subpar" to any other engineers i work with who got in on the first try, my perf review was quite good, and I like the job I do, so trying all that time ended up being worth for me. So if you have that as your goal, don't get discouraged by failing, just give it another try later.
rufius 4y ago
My only consolation for you is the phenomenon is largely concentrated at companies that profit on selling user’s information. Also - I question their characterization of how carefree these folks were. Of the few folks in my network that we knew rested and vested, many were so burnt out they eventually left the industry all together. Edit: I wonder if they were smart and got out of their equity and into something better diversified. At least for a couple, my gut says no.
rcarr 4y ago
If you get paid $125,000 a year then I can guarantee that there are a ton of devs in Europe that look on you with envy the same way you’re looking at these guys. Senior wage over here most places is between 50,000 - 80,000. And they in turn probably have a ton of guys from India and other lower income countries looking at their wages with envy. I left my last dev job because they wanted to pay me £30,000. Such shit salaries are pretty common in the North of England. The average wage across the UK is £39,000 so you get paid 2.5x the average in another 1st world country. I know everything is relative but it seems you’ve got a good thing going to me.
- throw_this_one 4y ago
  How do people live on 30k gbp? I was just in London and stuff is expensive, eating out and drinks etc. And programmers that are like 30 years old are getting 30k gbp?
  - twelve40 4y ago
    aren't London and North of England, like... different places? Like SF and Sac, maybe?
  - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
    London is south
  - rcarr 4y ago
    Yeah the divide between the North and the South in this country is really fucking stark and getting ever wider. The North hasn’t been as expensive as the South although house prices have been rising to silly levels round here as well recently. They’re building new bungalows near where I grew up and they’re trying to sell them for half a million just because they’re in the suburbs and near a school, it’s absolutely ridiculous. 30k would have been enough for me to buy a small terraced house or an apartment round here but not much else. I pointed out that the wage wasn’t even the national average salary and they tried to claim that it was good for the area but I’m pretty sure it’s still below the regional average too. They were a billion pound international private company and could absolutely have afforded to pay me a decent wage. Sales staff up and down the company were regularly taking home six figures in commission bonuses. I was offered a max bonus of £3k. Absolute joke company.
francisofascii 4y ago
Yes. Feel the same. There is a story in the bible where workers are perfectly content working a full day at a vineyard until they find out other guys got the same wage for only a few hours a day. So it is an ancient problem of the human condition. My only consolation is there are many more people who DON'T like the work they do, and get paid a lot less.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

awkward 4y ago

> A former Google manager who recently left the company agreed. "There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted. If their department doesn’t like them, after a year or two they move somewhere else," she said. The article opens with an extreme corner case, then just has a bunch of these. It's just a rehash of the "quiet quitting" BS from earlier this year. It's got a mention of 10x engineers though, so bottoms up if you're playing the bad work culture drinking game.

akerl_ 4y ago
Yea… “just do[ing] a 9-5 job” is what they’re being paid for.