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

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