8 ms·

Sacrifice the first 13 years of your life to Google for 2M

44 points by gigatexal 3y ago

gigatexal 3y ago
Or, how if you spend a ton of time living as a stoic, and focus everything on that next promotion you could have nearly 2M saved by your early 30s.
- gigatexal 3y ago
  I got the calculation wrong. The take home is double since the pay is twice a month. I’ve been in Europe too long. We get paid once a month.
mikercampbell 3y ago
Wait, was this an ad for Mormonism? I say this in jest as a Mormon of sorts.
- gigatexal 3y ago
  No ;-)
glitchcrab 3y ago
Maybe it's a mindset thing, but I can't think of anything worse than wasting ~16% of my life like this (average male lifespan in the US is around 79 years). You're sacrificing a fair chunk of your prime years in the hope that it pays off long term; imagine if you followed this and died at 40? What a waste of a life. Or what if you make some bad investment calls and it doesn't pan out? What a waste of your time. I made some good judgement calls and I've worked for decent companies where I'm not on a treadmill chasing every dollar; I'm still well paid to the point where I go on multiple holidays per year, own a majority of my own home, paid cash for our decent cars, and my wife has taken extended maternity leave because we can cope fine without her salary. AND I got to enjoy the shit out of those years. No way in hell I'd trade that for the two million.
- gigatexal 3y ago
  You’re far less hedonistic than the target for this article I think. I’m sure there’s a balance, a sweet spot between investment returns and quality of life. Maybe you’ve stumbled upon it. But for me growing up working class poor this, if I could do it over again, I’d do this. I didn’t get married until 29 anyway so I’m not too far off from the timeline I proposed.
  - glitchcrab 3y ago
    Maybe you're right and I'm just not the right sort of person for this in many ways. However, I would question how living in such a way that you're literally counting every penny for so long would affect your relationship with money. It would be a crying shame to have worked so hard for so long to earn it and then not be able to bring yourself to enjoy it.
- gigatexal 3y ago
  Paying cash for cars though? Everything I’ve read says that’s not a wise use of cash. The asset loses a ton of value and by paying cash you’ve used it all chasing something that will never appreciate. That being said if you can get value from something for 10+ years that only needs upkeep and insurance maybe the savings pays for that? I dunno.
  - glitchcrab 3y ago
    For starters I don't buy brand new, the family car was a low mileage, well specced 18 month old car. I'm not concerned if we lose a bit more money on it than we would have spent on finance; we can afford it. I worked for a bank for some time and it left me very much averse to using credit if I don't need to - I saw some horror stories there of people who ended up with so much debt that they would never clear it. Here in the UK it's ludicrously easy to get crazy amounts of credit. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I like to own things outright. The other car is my fun car (2018 BMW M3), I don't see myself selling anytime soon.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    You pay cash for it and then run it into the ground. Cars will never be an investment (they're a depreciating asset, except in 2021), but this way you can keep your consumption to a minimum. I've got a 14-year-old Honda that I paid $14K for. That amortizes out to about $1K/year. Annual repair bills and smog checks are still way less than $1K/year (I think I spend amortized $200-300/year, plus vehicle registration renewal, which is less on super old cars than new). I hear there are people out there now who spend $1K/month on their car payment. It's pretty nice to not have to deal with that. It's got plenty of life left too - I'm hoping to keep it until EV technology stabilizes a bit and then just upgrade straight to whatever EV gets it right.
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sashank_1509 3y ago
Ok this is extremely wrong on so many accounts. 1. Firstly how is it 4.6k / month, it should be more like 8-9k per month. I work in Seattle which is lower tax but also lower base and I get 8k per month as a new grad. So no you can easily save 4K a month, not 1.2k. The authors numbers are closer to that of a grad student that I also was. 2. Next, the main thing this article gets wrong, no you’re not going to become a principal engineer in Google in 16 years. L5 is terminal in Google, though with recent level inflation, a smart ambitious grad can reach L6 in 6-8 years (though much longer is common). Anything beyond that is not guaranteed, even if you spend long hours working very hard. Google is annoying in the sense that the promotion is far more political than it needs to be with a committee and whatnot that I often find it to be a shitshow but even if you take a much more results oriented company like say Apple, going beyond ICT5 is not easy. As an engineer the main thing that gets you promoted, is either solving a really hard technical challenge that the rest of the organization was struggling with. By definition these problems are hard, long hours won’t solve them. You also need to have an intuition of what’s solvable and what’s not, there are a class of technical problems in the organization which might essentially be impossible to solve with the current knowledge we possess and you can easily waste years of your life with nothing to show. I see few people who rise up like this and they are all exceptionally brilliant. The second way, more doable for the average engineer is to bring a product to the masses that’s moderately to highly successful. This requires luck, timing the market and good management skills to get something out there, you need to be the reason Google chrome exists etc. Both these pathways require more than just hard work, they require you to pick up a lot of skills and most importantly they also require luck. Sometimes you can be brilliant, use the right strategy etc and still have your product fail/ not solve the problem. TLDR; going beyond L6 is not easy and most won’t reach there in their career
- bluedevilzn 3y ago
  L4 is terminal at Google since 2019.
- elchief 3y ago
  the paycheck calculator site he uses reports semi-monthly amount, so it should be double
- deleted 3y ago
syntaxing 3y ago
One thing to note is that levels are triangle shaped. Not many break the L6 barrier. I know people who have been L5 for over a decade.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  Nah. You just get a promotion every two years, and boom, CEO at 35. Simple!
prepend 3y ago
Most people sacrifice the first 13 years for way less than $2M. This seems like a funny complaint.
- syntaxing 3y ago
  I didn’t find the tone of the article as a negative thing. Contrary, sounds more how to make the most of your “youth” to gain financial independence.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- scarface_74 3y ago
  I spent the first 13 years of my adult life drinking too much, dating the wrong women, hanging out with friends and getting married (to a former stripper) and divorced once (since remarried), I had a house built in the burbs of Atlanta at 28, and was a part time fitness instructor, bought too much investment property before 2008 and by the end of those 13 years, I was only making $90K I would not give up those years for anything - especially not an adTech company. I stumbled into my first BigTech job at 46 and did this in 2022. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 I have no regrets.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Your small town in SW Georgia wouldn’t be Buena Vista by any chance? Would be a small world.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Albany, GA
      - prepend 3y ago
        Luxury. Y’all had a mall and a comic book store. That’s the big city. Funny how Atlanta vacuums up everyone in the south and good to hear there’s life after Atlanta.
JohnFen 3y ago
13 years and you only get $2M? No thanks, that's far too little for such a large ask.
- syntaxing 3y ago
  Both my parents worked since their teens and hasn’t reached 2M combined GROSS. Let alone net. 2M in 13 years is a dream for most.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Sure, in general, and I'm not saying that this is a bad deal for everyone. But I bet your parents managed to have a real life in that time. There's something to be said for that. I wouldn't do it for two reasons. First, it would be working at Google (which is a work environment I would very much dislike). And second, I have a temperament that allows me to start businesses. My first profitable business was five years of working (admittedly) more than 80 hours a week. I personally made a little more than $2M from it. That return wasn't monetarily worth my sacrifices, but if we're talking about giving up my life for money, I'd do that instead of doing it for someone else's company. All of which is to say that everyone is different! Just, to me, the question was "am I willing to not have a happy life for 13 years in exchange for $2M". No, I'm not. If the alternative is a life of making minimum wage, but living, I'd do that.
    - syntaxing 3y ago
      Yeah, it’s a tough balance for sure. I think the biggest difference is that we have options and greener pastures that have high risk and high reward. My parents were always there for me my whole life so I can’t complain. Would they trade all of that for more money? Depends how much probably. But they never even had the choice to begin with. I often reflect on that now that I’m older with kids. Is a job worth it regardless of money? What can I do so that when they are my age, I can support them to make risky decisions but have a fallback?
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      I wasn’t willing to be unhappy for one day to make more money. When a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me at 46 about a software engineering job, I wasn’t willing to relocate from my in house in the burbs of Atlanta (built in 2016 for less than $350K), and I never wanted to be a software developer for any large company nor did I want to be on call - even it did mean making $100K + more per year. My bullshit tolerance is extremely low. The only reason I work at BigTech now (at 49) was because the recruiter suggested a remote position in cloud consulting with no on call. When I do leave here, it will probably be for a smaller company. I didn’t have millions in the bank to make that decision. I was working for a small startup that offered 5 weeks PTO.
nostrademons 3y ago
I did basically this except that I already had ~4 years of work experience (all in startups) when joining Google, I "retired" at 33, and then un-retired at 39 to have kids and buy a house in the Bay Area. I wouldn't recommend doing it now, simply because "past performance does not equal future results". Joining Google in 2009 was an awesome move; the stock has roughly 15x'd since then. Joining Google in 2023 will probably not result in the same performance. Tech companies have this pattern of growing and growing and growing and then...dying. Just ask anyone that worked at Silicon Graphics in the 80s, Apple or Sun Microsystems in the 90s, or Yahoo in the 2000s. It's unlikely that Google will have the same growth or compensation in the 2020s that it did in the 2000s and 2010s.
- fragmede 3y ago
  It's funny you would bring up Apple. Accounting for stock splits, it was at $0.37 in 1995 and now it's at $184! I think the lesson is, if you can, work at Apple instead of Google. Also have a time machine and buy AAPL in 1990. Or NVDA a couple months ago.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Except nobody in their right mind wanted to work for Apple in 1995 - it was a broken, dysfunctional company hemorrhaging a couple billion dollars a year because nobody was excited about their products. And if you had gone to work for them, you would've watched your stock grant go from $0.37 in 1995 to $0.13 in 1997. I was a die-hard Mac fan - first computer was a Mac LC - through the early 90s, and even I gave up on them when they took the MSFT investment in 1997 because I felt like they'd sold out to the evil empire. Working for Apple in 1995 was sorta like working for Twitter in 2022. (Hmmm...)
    - fragmede 3y ago
      I mean, I certainly didn't want to work for Apple in 1995. And Google didn't exist until 1999, so there's that. Back in 1995 there was Sun, Oracle, HP, and IBM, among others. Working at OpenAI would be cool now, but three years ago? It's hard not knowing the future. AMD would be a cool place to work if they turned things around, but you don't get the same upside if you join after they've managed to turn things around.
NumeroUnoUno 3y ago
I mean hindsight... why not just say buy a house when he was 20 and then you'd be a multi-millionaire after 13-years.
deleted 3y ago
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xiphias2 3y ago
I did something similar, but with the current low rate climate I believe using Google salary to buy an apartment / house and max out a 30 year fixed house loan is a much better investment, as it's a safe leverage and it will always be easier for the government to print money than building houses.
- fragmede 3y ago
  the low rate climate went away with the interest rate hikes.
  - xiphias2 3y ago
    Sure, you're right, probably waiting a few years until rates go down again and then buying an apartment with 30 year fixed rate is a better strategy.
jononomo 3y ago
My first thought is that you're going to sacrifice the first 13 years of your life to some nonsense anyway, so there's no getting around that.
elzbardico 3y ago
Average life expectancy is around 80, I think. Health insurance is really expensive, and it gets more expensive as you get old. 2M is a lot of money, but almost 50 years to spend it is also a lot of time. So, in the end you'll trade 13 of your prime years, will party like crazy for 2 or 3 years, then you'll realize that is time to get back to work.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  You don’t blow the $2M. You invest it in relatively safe funds and live on the returns.
  - criley2 3y ago
    This only works if you move out of the expensive areas and live a more simple life in probably a rural area. $2M invested at 4% a year is $80k a year. $2M invested at 7% a year is $120k a year. That's already outside the realm of possible in most top cities. And if you're taking all of your interest each year, it's not growing. $2M and $80k/yr might sound OK in 2023, but by 2040... it won't be.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      I never knew that metro Atlanta was “rural”. The median household income in the US is $80K. Yet, people aren’t all living on the street or living in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska
      - criley2 3y ago
        Lol, I actually live in Atlanta (are we a "top" city? we're like #10 largest metro in the US), and while our house prices are not as insane as SF or NYC, they're still astronomically high. Houses in Cartersville and Adairsville an hour north of GA go for $400-600k all day long. Yes, the median salary in 2023 is 80k, and if you spend 100% of your interest, you'll average that. Now how does that $80k look in 20 years? Is it still the median? Or is it approaching bottom quintile?
midasuni 3y ago
This is all based on the unprecedented growth of the S&P from 2008 up to about 2021. Might as well say invest in bitcoin. Or GameStop. There is no evidence we’ll see the same stock market growth over the next 15 years that we did over the last 15 years. Same with land inflation.
- deleted 3y ago
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andrewstuart 3y ago
Alternatively, don't sell your youth to Google, facebook, Microsoft or Netflix. Travel the world. Party with friends, within safe limits do sex, drugs and rock and roll. Get a job at a company you like, learn stuff, educate yourself, better yourself, become an awesome software developer. Buy a car that's too expensive, crash it, be stuck with the loan for six years. Try to start your own startup, fail, go back to zero. Have 20 girlfriends/boyfriends. Have fun, live life, and at 35 don't sit around regretting that you gave the only youth you'll ever have to online advertising and increasing the ridiculous wealth of Larry and Sergey. If you do that, you'll have an empty heart where your soul was meant to have been forged.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  You can also work for Microsoft in a different country like China, do that for 9 years, in exchange for the lower pay check (but really still quite generous salary), you can have the time of your life, and vacation in Thailand/Bali on holidays. Then afterwards, you come back to the states because you are expecting a kid, and the air pollution is a bit too much in Beijing, and then you get the job at Google because, why not?
- deleted 3y ago
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- jojobas 3y ago
  Poe's law is strong with this one.
- natnatenathan 3y ago
  This is a popular narrative, that you make money or live, but you can’t do both. That is complete BS - it is equally dumb to be on either extreme, but it is very possible to do both. I have several friends who took the ‘live’ route, only to wake up in their 30s realizing they have an equally empty soul as the guys who worked too hard, and feel boxed out of the future they want with not much nest egg to start a family, or the experiences to have the career they want. Here is to taking the reasonable middle road, the one no one writes songs about, but (I think) the one that most often leads to happiness for the average person.
johnea 3y ago
> the wise old age of 36 Ha Ha! That really is pretty funny, and extremely telling of who actually is reading this stuff. Thrust me millenials, you still have a long way to go... What you're calling "all grown up" is still not even into middle age. But, the gist of the article does survive a forensic analysis even decades after the age of this author: discovering compound interest at a young age is indeed a major source of accruing financial success. Of course, for most people this can't really be taught. I've been trying to tell my mid-20s son to invest 20% of his take home into a ROTH for years. Trust me, there is no satisfaction in being told "yes, you were right" once it's too late...
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > discovering compound interest at a young age is indeed a major source of accruing financial success. THIS! I didn't listen to my parents when they tried to teach this to me, and I wish I had. If I had, I would not only be wealthier, but would have lived a happier life too. I picked up on it in my late 30s, and while it still served me well, it would have served me exponentially better if I'd listened to my parents in my teens.
brailsafe 3y ago
"It's simple math my dear boy" In retrospect, maybe I also should have chosen to make $200k USD a year for my entire working life. The choices we make, huh
clnq 3y ago
It feels like in the US, selling your body to anyone but corporations is seen as taboo. But selling your physical health, your sanity (good luck staying sane with 13 years of grinding and ramen), your young years, and so on to a corp is all above board.
jsdwarf 3y ago
Past performance is a poor indicator for the future performance of a company - just look at the Top Nasdaq 100 constituents for '00s,'10s and 20s. Google is in maintenance mode and not necessarily the best company for rapid promotions. Even worse, there might be a decade without a rising superstar corporation that could provide such an environment. Also don't forget the side effects of early retirement: you "age" faster as most of your companions during the day will be actually retired people. You will loose the connection to your working friends etc...
asjfka 3y ago
Makes me think about this song by The Offspring: I'm always feeling steered away By someone trying to tell me What to say and do, I don't want it I gotta go find my own way I gotta go make my own mistakes Sorry man for feeling Feeling the way I do
RomanPushkin 3y ago
I am happy I traveled a lot in my 20-ies. Goa, India, Thailand. I haven't gotten into FAANG, moreover I rejected Facebook offer 1.5 years ago. I have 9 year old kiddo, and I'm 40. I don't believe it's worth it - working your ass off for 1-2M, especially when real money is evaporating from your accounts: chicken I was buying a couple of years ago for $8-9 today costs $17-19. My plan is to make a successful business. I have a couple of ideas, and one of my patents is in progress at the time of writing. A good friend of mine managed to get millions (air conditioners alone at the top of his roof cost 1M), so I believe it's possible when you think outside the box. Working for FAANG is inside the box. I don't believe being engineer working for someone is a way to go, especially when companies like Google lay you off at the time when you're most vulnerable. Good luck paying off your mortgage on time when you're in 50-60-ies.
- flaviut 3y ago
  You can buy a small fraction of a chicken farm, so that when chicken prices go up, so does the value of the chicken farm. Then you simply sell a tiny fraction of your chicken farm, and use that money to buy a chicken. That way you can preserve your chicken buying power through the years, rather than having a guaranteed -2% return on your money.
JieJie 3y ago
I'm fifty-seven. Is it too late to sign up?
it_citizen 3y ago
The truth is that those 13 years with a stupid high salary will change your relation to money. You will live in a HCOL area, be around people with much more money, start thinking it is normal to spend 3M on a house, buy stupid things because it doesn't really impact your savings, making so much money will become a source of pride and make you feel good about yourself, and suddenly 2M will seem barely enough to keep up with the social circle you are now part of. You won't quit and keep chasing the next dollar.
0xjmp 3y ago
I mean no disrespect, but this is incredibly depressing, and the result is a few million dollars? I didn't see any mention about doing what you are passionate about. Maybe it was implied by the result: save 2 million dollars, startup with no prior experience of doing so, instant success because $$$, then die of cancer because you ate nothing but ramen for 15 years? You do you, but there is so much more to life - so many mistakes to be made - than living like Gladiator so you can be "retired", whatever that's supposed to mean. If you want to make software, do it because you love it. If you want to make coffee, do it because you love it. Love your family. Love your neighbor. Love yourself. You may die poor (maybe not!), but you will surely die very happy.
- foogazi 3y ago
  > I didn't see any mention about doing what you are passionate about. Maybe they are passionate about eating ramen and making bank
trimbo 3y ago
> get promoted roughly every 2 years, and then take about 3 to get to Principal Engineer at the 1.1M mark Soon, everyone will be a Principal Engineer, like everyone is a VP at a bank.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
No one's getting promoted every 2 years from L3 to L8. Even going from L3 to L5 in 4 years is rare. Plus, most people who try to walk this path will plateau at L5 anyway. That's still not bad, though. Graduate at 22, having banked a decent bit of savings already from 2 or 3 Big Tech internships. Make L5 by 26, coast for 5-10 years, and then call it a wrap. Invest in real estate as soon as humanly possible during that time, and scale out the real estate portfolio at the same time as the brokerage account and the 401k. If I were to do it again, that'd surely be the fastest way to go. Then again, if I were to actually do it all again, I'd love to do it all entirely differently. Maybe become a carpenter or something.
- gigatexal 3y ago
  Thank you for the feedback I was leery of my assumption of the rate of promotions. I like your summary though that's more or less what I was thinking when I decided to write teh post.
amluto 3y ago
$193000/year is not $4600/mo take-home, even by the calculator the author linked. It’s off by more than a factor of two. If you get $193k/year, you don’t actually have to live like a grad student to save money :)
- slyall 3y ago
  I saw the same. Assume this is why he didn't pass the Google interview :) The calculator he is using defaults to "semi-monthly" which I guess is twice a month. So you can double the money available before expenses which means a lot more after expenses.
  - amluto 3y ago
    The weird thing is that the semi-monthly number comes out to $5160. I have no idea where $4600 came from. $10320/mo lets you have slightly more than $400/mo of fun while still saving quite a bit of money. (I also take exception to $300/mo for utilities and $200/mo misc for someone trying to run their way up the Google ladder. We’re talking about people who are pretty serious about technology and who live in California where utility prices are nuts.)
  - gigatexal 3y ago
    There are many reasons I didn't pass the Google interview but every time I did interview I had the most pleasant experiences. The engineers were really, really nice.
WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
What a waste. The goal is important but so is the journey. Sacrificing your youth for money by living at the edge of poverty is not worth it to me. But to each their own. Society is what it is. Most of us will need to earn a living at a company and have a life in addition. Our goal should be to make the best of every day. Believe it or not having a job is a actually a plus but you have to balance it along with the other parts of your life. Too much of anything is a problem. We need balance in our lives.
foogazi 3y ago
Why change the title?
jhanschoo 3y ago
It would kinda suck if you lived years hating your life for the future and then some stuff happened that would thwart those plans. Life is risky and nobody is guaranteed a death in old age, and no insurance can give your younger self a happier life, so consider living for the moment from time to time.
gigatexal 3y ago
updated to fix the calculation bug, sorry!
gigatexal 3y ago
Curious, how many read the whole post? Any comments on the style? Did you get bored at any point? How many saw my snarky initial comment or just the title and began commenting here about that instead?

44 points by gigatexal 3y ago

Or, how if you spend a ton of time living as a stoic, and focus everything on that next promotion you could have nearly 2M saved by your early 30s.

gigatexal 3y ago
I got the calculation wrong. The take home is double since the pay is twice a month. I’ve been in Europe too long. We get paid once a month.

mikercampbell 3y ago

Wait, was this an ad for Mormonism? I say this in jest as a Mormon of sorts.

gigatexal 3y ago
No ;-)

glitchcrab 3y ago

Maybe it's a mindset thing, but I can't think of anything worse than wasting ~16% of my life like this (average male lifespan in the US is around 79 years). You're sacrificing a fair chunk of your prime years in the hope that it pays off long term; imagine if you followed this and died at 40? What a waste of a life. Or what if you make some bad investment calls and it doesn't pan out? What a waste of your time. I made some good judgement calls and I've worked for decent companies where I'm not on a treadmill chasing every dollar; I'm still well paid to the point where I go on multiple holidays per year, own a majority of my own home, paid cash for our decent cars, and my wife has taken extended maternity leave because we can cope fine without her salary. AND I got to enjoy the shit out of those years. No way in hell I'd trade that for the two million.

gigatexal 3y ago
You’re far less hedonistic than the target for this article I think. I’m sure there’s a balance, a sweet spot between investment returns and quality of life. Maybe you’ve stumbled upon it. But for me growing up working class poor this, if I could do it over again, I’d do this. I didn’t get married until 29 anyway so I’m not too far off from the timeline I proposed.
- glitchcrab 3y ago
  Maybe you're right and I'm just not the right sort of person for this in many ways. However, I would question how living in such a way that you're literally counting every penny for so long would affect your relationship with money. It would be a crying shame to have worked so hard for so long to earn it and then not be able to bring yourself to enjoy it.
gigatexal 3y ago
Paying cash for cars though? Everything I’ve read says that’s not a wise use of cash. The asset loses a ton of value and by paying cash you’ve used it all chasing something that will never appreciate. That being said if you can get value from something for 10+ years that only needs upkeep and insurance maybe the savings pays for that? I dunno.
- glitchcrab 3y ago
  For starters I don't buy brand new, the family car was a low mileage, well specced 18 month old car. I'm not concerned if we lose a bit more money on it than we would have spent on finance; we can afford it. I worked for a bank for some time and it left me very much averse to using credit if I don't need to - I saw some horror stories there of people who ended up with so much debt that they would never clear it. Here in the UK it's ludicrously easy to get crazy amounts of credit. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I like to own things outright. The other car is my fun car (2018 BMW M3), I don't see myself selling anytime soon.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  You pay cash for it and then run it into the ground. Cars will never be an investment (they're a depreciating asset, except in 2021), but this way you can keep your consumption to a minimum. I've got a 14-year-old Honda that I paid $14K for. That amortizes out to about $1K/year. Annual repair bills and smog checks are still way less than $1K/year (I think I spend amortized $200-300/year, plus vehicle registration renewal, which is less on super old cars than new). I hear there are people out there now who spend $1K/month on their car payment. It's pretty nice to not have to deal with that. It's got plenty of life left too - I'm hoping to keep it until EV technology stabilizes a bit and then just upgrade straight to whatever EV gets it right.

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sashank_1509 3y ago

Ok this is extremely wrong on so many accounts. 1. Firstly how is it 4.6k / month, it should be more like 8-9k per month. I work in Seattle which is lower tax but also lower base and I get 8k per month as a new grad. So no you can easily save 4K a month, not 1.2k. The authors numbers are closer to that of a grad student that I also was. 2. Next, the main thing this article gets wrong, no you’re not going to become a principal engineer in Google in 16 years. L5 is terminal in Google, though with recent level inflation, a smart ambitious grad can reach L6 in 6-8 years (though much longer is common). Anything beyond that is not guaranteed, even if you spend long hours working very hard. Google is annoying in the sense that the promotion is far more political than it needs to be with a committee and whatnot that I often find it to be a shitshow but even if you take a much more results oriented company like say Apple, going beyond ICT5 is not easy. As an engineer the main thing that gets you promoted, is either solving a really hard technical challenge that the rest of the organization was struggling with. By definition these problems are hard, long hours won’t solve them. You also need to have an intuition of what’s solvable and what’s not, there are a class of technical problems in the organization which might essentially be impossible to solve with the current knowledge we possess and you can easily waste years of your life with nothing to show. I see few people who rise up like this and they are all exceptionally brilliant. The second way, more doable for the average engineer is to bring a product to the masses that’s moderately to highly successful. This requires luck, timing the market and good management skills to get something out there, you need to be the reason Google chrome exists etc. Both these pathways require more than just hard work, they require you to pick up a lot of skills and most importantly they also require luck. Sometimes you can be brilliant, use the right strategy etc and still have your product fail/ not solve the problem. TLDR; going beyond L6 is not easy and most won’t reach there in their career

bluedevilzn 3y ago
L4 is terminal at Google since 2019.
elchief 3y ago
the paycheck calculator site he uses reports semi-monthly amount, so it should be double
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syntaxing 3y ago

One thing to note is that levels are triangle shaped. Not many break the L6 barrier. I know people who have been L5 for over a decade.

TX81Z 3y ago
Nah. You just get a promotion every two years, and boom, CEO at 35. Simple!

prepend 3y ago

Most people sacrifice the first 13 years for way less than $2M. This seems like a funny complaint.

syntaxing 3y ago
I didn’t find the tone of the article as a negative thing. Contrary, sounds more how to make the most of your “youth” to gain financial independence.
- deleted 3y ago
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scarface_74 3y ago
I spent the first 13 years of my adult life drinking too much, dating the wrong women, hanging out with friends and getting married (to a former stripper) and divorced once (since remarried), I had a house built in the burbs of Atlanta at 28, and was a part time fitness instructor, bought too much investment property before 2008 and by the end of those 13 years, I was only making $90K I would not give up those years for anything - especially not an adTech company. I stumbled into my first BigTech job at 46 and did this in 2022. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 I have no regrets.
- prepend 3y ago
  Your small town in SW Georgia wouldn’t be Buena Vista by any chance? Would be a small world.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Albany, GA
    - prepend 3y ago
      Luxury. Y’all had a mall and a comic book store. That’s the big city. Funny how Atlanta vacuums up everyone in the south and good to hear there’s life after Atlanta.

JohnFen 3y ago

13 years and you only get $2M? No thanks, that's far too little for such a large ask.

syntaxing 3y ago
Both my parents worked since their teens and hasn’t reached 2M combined GROSS. Let alone net. 2M in 13 years is a dream for most.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Sure, in general, and I'm not saying that this is a bad deal for everyone. But I bet your parents managed to have a real life in that time. There's something to be said for that. I wouldn't do it for two reasons. First, it would be working at Google (which is a work environment I would very much dislike). And second, I have a temperament that allows me to start businesses. My first profitable business was five years of working (admittedly) more than 80 hours a week. I personally made a little more than $2M from it. That return wasn't monetarily worth my sacrifices, but if we're talking about giving up my life for money, I'd do that instead of doing it for someone else's company. All of which is to say that everyone is different! Just, to me, the question was "am I willing to not have a happy life for 13 years in exchange for $2M". No, I'm not. If the alternative is a life of making minimum wage, but living, I'd do that.
  - syntaxing 3y ago
    Yeah, it’s a tough balance for sure. I think the biggest difference is that we have options and greener pastures that have high risk and high reward. My parents were always there for me my whole life so I can’t complain. Would they trade all of that for more money? Depends how much probably. But they never even had the choice to begin with. I often reflect on that now that I’m older with kids. Is a job worth it regardless of money? What can I do so that when they are my age, I can support them to make risky decisions but have a fallback?
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    I wasn’t willing to be unhappy for one day to make more money. When a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me at 46 about a software engineering job, I wasn’t willing to relocate from my in house in the burbs of Atlanta (built in 2016 for less than $350K), and I never wanted to be a software developer for any large company nor did I want to be on call - even it did mean making $100K + more per year. My bullshit tolerance is extremely low. The only reason I work at BigTech now (at 49) was because the recruiter suggested a remote position in cloud consulting with no on call. When I do leave here, it will probably be for a smaller company. I didn’t have millions in the bank to make that decision. I was working for a small startup that offered 5 weeks PTO.

nostrademons 3y ago

I did basically this except that I already had ~4 years of work experience (all in startups) when joining Google, I "retired" at 33, and then un-retired at 39 to have kids and buy a house in the Bay Area. I wouldn't recommend doing it now, simply because "past performance does not equal future results". Joining Google in 2009 was an awesome move; the stock has roughly 15x'd since then. Joining Google in 2023 will probably not result in the same performance. Tech companies have this pattern of growing and growing and growing and then...dying. Just ask anyone that worked at Silicon Graphics in the 80s, Apple or Sun Microsystems in the 90s, or Yahoo in the 2000s. It's unlikely that Google will have the same growth or compensation in the 2020s that it did in the 2000s and 2010s.

fragmede 3y ago
It's funny you would bring up Apple. Accounting for stock splits, it was at $0.37 in 1995 and now it's at $184! I think the lesson is, if you can, work at Apple instead of Google. Also have a time machine and buy AAPL in 1990. Or NVDA a couple months ago.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Except nobody in their right mind wanted to work for Apple in 1995 - it was a broken, dysfunctional company hemorrhaging a couple billion dollars a year because nobody was excited about their products. And if you had gone to work for them, you would've watched your stock grant go from $0.37 in 1995 to $0.13 in 1997. I was a die-hard Mac fan - first computer was a Mac LC - through the early 90s, and even I gave up on them when they took the MSFT investment in 1997 because I felt like they'd sold out to the evil empire. Working for Apple in 1995 was sorta like working for Twitter in 2022. (Hmmm...)
  - fragmede 3y ago
    I mean, I certainly didn't want to work for Apple in 1995. And Google didn't exist until 1999, so there's that. Back in 1995 there was Sun, Oracle, HP, and IBM, among others. Working at OpenAI would be cool now, but three years ago? It's hard not knowing the future. AMD would be a cool place to work if they turned things around, but you don't get the same upside if you join after they've managed to turn things around.

NumeroUnoUno 3y ago

I mean hindsight... why not just say buy a house when he was 20 and then you'd be a multi-millionaire after 13-years.

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xiphias2 3y ago

I did something similar, but with the current low rate climate I believe using Google salary to buy an apartment / house and max out a 30 year fixed house loan is a much better investment, as it's a safe leverage and it will always be easier for the government to print money than building houses.

fragmede 3y ago
the low rate climate went away with the interest rate hikes.
- xiphias2 3y ago
  Sure, you're right, probably waiting a few years until rates go down again and then buying an apartment with 30 year fixed rate is a better strategy.

jononomo 3y ago

My first thought is that you're going to sacrifice the first 13 years of your life to some nonsense anyway, so there's no getting around that.

elzbardico 3y ago

Average life expectancy is around 80, I think. Health insurance is really expensive, and it gets more expensive as you get old. 2M is a lot of money, but almost 50 years to spend it is also a lot of time. So, in the end you'll trade 13 of your prime years, will party like crazy for 2 or 3 years, then you'll realize that is time to get back to work.

ceejayoz 3y ago
You don’t blow the $2M. You invest it in relatively safe funds and live on the returns.
- criley2 3y ago
  This only works if you move out of the expensive areas and live a more simple life in probably a rural area. $2M invested at 4% a year is $80k a year. $2M invested at 7% a year is $120k a year. That's already outside the realm of possible in most top cities. And if you're taking all of your interest each year, it's not growing. $2M and $80k/yr might sound OK in 2023, but by 2040... it won't be.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    I never knew that metro Atlanta was “rural”. The median household income in the US is $80K. Yet, people aren’t all living on the street or living in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska
    - criley2 3y ago
      Lol, I actually live in Atlanta (are we a "top" city? we're like #10 largest metro in the US), and while our house prices are not as insane as SF or NYC, they're still astronomically high. Houses in Cartersville and Adairsville an hour north of GA go for $400-600k all day long. Yes, the median salary in 2023 is 80k, and if you spend 100% of your interest, you'll average that. Now how does that $80k look in 20 years? Is it still the median? Or is it approaching bottom quintile?

midasuni 3y ago

This is all based on the unprecedented growth of the S&P from 2008 up to about 2021. Might as well say invest in bitcoin. Or GameStop. There is no evidence we’ll see the same stock market growth over the next 15 years that we did over the last 15 years. Same with land inflation.

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andrewstuart 3y ago

Alternatively, don't sell your youth to Google, facebook, Microsoft or Netflix. Travel the world. Party with friends, within safe limits do sex, drugs and rock and roll. Get a job at a company you like, learn stuff, educate yourself, better yourself, become an awesome software developer. Buy a car that's too expensive, crash it, be stuck with the loan for six years. Try to start your own startup, fail, go back to zero. Have 20 girlfriends/boyfriends. Have fun, live life, and at 35 don't sit around regretting that you gave the only youth you'll ever have to online advertising and increasing the ridiculous wealth of Larry and Sergey. If you do that, you'll have an empty heart where your soul was meant to have been forged.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
You can also work for Microsoft in a different country like China, do that for 9 years, in exchange for the lower pay check (but really still quite generous salary), you can have the time of your life, and vacation in Thailand/Bali on holidays. Then afterwards, you come back to the states because you are expecting a kid, and the air pollution is a bit too much in Beijing, and then you get the job at Google because, why not?
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jojobas 3y ago
Poe's law is strong with this one.
natnatenathan 3y ago
This is a popular narrative, that you make money or live, but you can’t do both. That is complete BS - it is equally dumb to be on either extreme, but it is very possible to do both. I have several friends who took the ‘live’ route, only to wake up in their 30s realizing they have an equally empty soul as the guys who worked too hard, and feel boxed out of the future they want with not much nest egg to start a family, or the experiences to have the career they want. Here is to taking the reasonable middle road, the one no one writes songs about, but (I think) the one that most often leads to happiness for the average person.

johnea 3y ago

> the wise old age of 36 Ha Ha! That really is pretty funny, and extremely telling of who actually is reading this stuff. Thrust me millenials, you still have a long way to go... What you're calling "all grown up" is still not even into middle age. But, the gist of the article does survive a forensic analysis even decades after the age of this author: discovering compound interest at a young age is indeed a major source of accruing financial success. Of course, for most people this can't really be taught. I've been trying to tell my mid-20s son to invest 20% of his take home into a ROTH for years. Trust me, there is no satisfaction in being told "yes, you were right" once it's too late...

JohnFen 3y ago
> discovering compound interest at a young age is indeed a major source of accruing financial success. THIS! I didn't listen to my parents when they tried to teach this to me, and I wish I had. If I had, I would not only be wealthier, but would have lived a happier life too. I picked up on it in my late 30s, and while it still served me well, it would have served me exponentially better if I'd listened to my parents in my teens.

brailsafe 3y ago

"It's simple math my dear boy" In retrospect, maybe I also should have chosen to make $200k USD a year for my entire working life. The choices we make, huh

clnq 3y ago

It feels like in the US, selling your body to anyone but corporations is seen as taboo. But selling your physical health, your sanity (good luck staying sane with 13 years of grinding and ramen), your young years, and so on to a corp is all above board.

jsdwarf 3y ago

Past performance is a poor indicator for the future performance of a company - just look at the Top Nasdaq 100 constituents for '00s,'10s and 20s. Google is in maintenance mode and not necessarily the best company for rapid promotions. Even worse, there might be a decade without a rising superstar corporation that could provide such an environment. Also don't forget the side effects of early retirement: you "age" faster as most of your companions during the day will be actually retired people. You will loose the connection to your working friends etc...

asjfka 3y ago

Makes me think about this song by The Offspring: I'm always feeling steered away By someone trying to tell me What to say and do, I don't want it I gotta go find my own way I gotta go make my own mistakes Sorry man for feeling Feeling the way I do

RomanPushkin 3y ago

I am happy I traveled a lot in my 20-ies. Goa, India, Thailand. I haven't gotten into FAANG, moreover I rejected Facebook offer 1.5 years ago. I have 9 year old kiddo, and I'm 40. I don't believe it's worth it - working your ass off for 1-2M, especially when real money is evaporating from your accounts: chicken I was buying a couple of years ago for $8-9 today costs $17-19. My plan is to make a successful business. I have a couple of ideas, and one of my patents is in progress at the time of writing. A good friend of mine managed to get millions (air conditioners alone at the top of his roof cost 1M), so I believe it's possible when you think outside the box. Working for FAANG is inside the box. I don't believe being engineer working for someone is a way to go, especially when companies like Google lay you off at the time when you're most vulnerable. Good luck paying off your mortgage on time when you're in 50-60-ies.

flaviut 3y ago
You can buy a small fraction of a chicken farm, so that when chicken prices go up, so does the value of the chicken farm. Then you simply sell a tiny fraction of your chicken farm, and use that money to buy a chicken. That way you can preserve your chicken buying power through the years, rather than having a guaranteed -2% return on your money.

JieJie 3y ago

I'm fifty-seven. Is it too late to sign up?

it_citizen 3y ago

The truth is that those 13 years with a stupid high salary will change your relation to money. You will live in a HCOL area, be around people with much more money, start thinking it is normal to spend 3M on a house, buy stupid things because it doesn't really impact your savings, making so much money will become a source of pride and make you feel good about yourself, and suddenly 2M will seem barely enough to keep up with the social circle you are now part of. You won't quit and keep chasing the next dollar.

0xjmp 3y ago

I mean no disrespect, but this is incredibly depressing, and the result is a few million dollars? I didn't see any mention about doing what you are passionate about. Maybe it was implied by the result: save 2 million dollars, startup with no prior experience of doing so, instant success because $$$, then die of cancer because you ate nothing but ramen for 15 years? You do you, but there is so much more to life - so many mistakes to be made - than living like Gladiator so you can be "retired", whatever that's supposed to mean. If you want to make software, do it because you love it. If you want to make coffee, do it because you love it. Love your family. Love your neighbor. Love yourself. You may die poor (maybe not!), but you will surely die very happy.

foogazi 3y ago
> I didn't see any mention about doing what you are passionate about. Maybe they are passionate about eating ramen and making bank

trimbo 3y ago

> get promoted roughly every 2 years, and then take about 3 to get to Principal Engineer at the 1.1M mark Soon, everyone will be a Principal Engineer, like everyone is a VP at a bank.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago

No one's getting promoted every 2 years from L3 to L8. Even going from L3 to L5 in 4 years is rare. Plus, most people who try to walk this path will plateau at L5 anyway. That's still not bad, though. Graduate at 22, having banked a decent bit of savings already from 2 or 3 Big Tech internships. Make L5 by 26, coast for 5-10 years, and then call it a wrap. Invest in real estate as soon as humanly possible during that time, and scale out the real estate portfolio at the same time as the brokerage account and the 401k. If I were to do it again, that'd surely be the fastest way to go. Then again, if I were to actually do it all again, I'd love to do it all entirely differently. Maybe become a carpenter or something.

gigatexal 3y ago
Thank you for the feedback I was leery of my assumption of the rate of promotions. I like your summary though that's more or less what I was thinking when I decided to write teh post.

amluto 3y ago

$193000/year is not $4600/mo take-home, even by the calculator the author linked. It’s off by more than a factor of two. If you get $193k/year, you don’t actually have to live like a grad student to save money :)

slyall 3y ago
I saw the same. Assume this is why he didn't pass the Google interview :) The calculator he is using defaults to "semi-monthly" which I guess is twice a month. So you can double the money available before expenses which means a lot more after expenses.
- amluto 3y ago
  The weird thing is that the semi-monthly number comes out to $5160. I have no idea where $4600 came from. $10320/mo lets you have slightly more than $400/mo of fun while still saving quite a bit of money. (I also take exception to $300/mo for utilities and $200/mo misc for someone trying to run their way up the Google ladder. We’re talking about people who are pretty serious about technology and who live in California where utility prices are nuts.)
- gigatexal 3y ago
  There are many reasons I didn't pass the Google interview but every time I did interview I had the most pleasant experiences. The engineers were really, really nice.

WheelsAtLarge 3y ago

What a waste. The goal is important but so is the journey. Sacrificing your youth for money by living at the edge of poverty is not worth it to me. But to each their own. Society is what it is. Most of us will need to earn a living at a company and have a life in addition. Our goal should be to make the best of every day. Believe it or not having a job is a actually a plus but you have to balance it along with the other parts of your life. Too much of anything is a problem. We need balance in our lives.

foogazi 3y ago

Why change the title?

jhanschoo 3y ago

It would kinda suck if you lived years hating your life for the future and then some stuff happened that would thwart those plans. Life is risky and nobody is guaranteed a death in old age, and no insurance can give your younger self a happier life, so consider living for the moment from time to time.

gigatexal 3y ago

updated to fix the calculation bug, sorry!

gigatexal 3y ago

Curious, how many read the whole post? Any comments on the style? Did you get bored at any point? How many saw my snarky initial comment or just the title and began commenting here about that instead?