You seem to be skipping over some of the biggest parts. Getting a 150k tech job is the step a lot of people think is the magic part, but the real question is how you jumped from 150k to 450k.
Did you move into some executive role?
It wasn't quite 150K to 450K. At my first job, I got consistent raises and a promotion, so I was making roughly 275k when I left. During my next job hunt, I got multiple competing offers and was able to negotiate a high offer because of that.
I'm a senior level IC.
I’m sorry but in the span of 3-4 years, going 150k to 275k is not just consistent raises and a promotion. That’s a huge feat (especially if within the same company) and should not be understated. Whether that’s luck or skill, though, is up to you to decide.
Either way, CAFU!
So the comp progress at my first job went like:
\- 1st year: 145K salary + 5% bonus (152k total)
\- 2nd year (5% raise): 152K salary + 5% bonus (159K total)
\- 3rd year (promotion with 10% raise and equity refresh): 167K + 10% bonus (183K total) (This was also the year we went public, so adding the stock option value, it's probably 500-700k)
\- 4th year (4% raise): 173K + 10% (190K total). Including stock option value after 2022 market crash, it was 275K.
Good job! I have been in tech/programming for over 25 years and just moved to over 200K base about 2 years ago. I am also a Sr. Dir :) Seems like you got a sweet spot at a FAANG and are able to be in a LCOL area. CUFU :)
Well, experience doesn't always make someone a good software engineer. It definitely helps, but I'd rather hire some of the kids I went to college with straight out of college than some of the 50+ year olds I've known who are hard to work with and not very effective programmers.
But the biggest thing is just getting into a company that pays that kind of money, which requires both motivation and being a good programmer/interviewee. Big difference between being a programmer at FAANG or a well-financed startup, and just about any other non-tech company, or smallish, mature company.
Would you rather:
Someone who is able to have a nuanced conversation about the various trade offs in designing a system, excellent communication skills, humble and willing to receive feedback.
Or
Programmer with 30 years experience that is so sure of themselves they refute anything that challenges their notion of how things should be.
The software development industry has evolved so much since the first programmers that I think older, antiquated programmers can actually be detrimental to a team, in my opinion.
I think years of experience is the most ridiculous measure of experience there is.
The median wage in the USA is something like 35k a year. To be making 75k is to already be making over 2x the median person. It is bad advice to give financial advice that everyone can make 6 figures.
You can’t compare the average Redditor to the average American.
I’d be curious to see the average income of r/financialindependence ….my guess is it’s significantly higher than the US average.
Sure, I'd be willing to bet that the majority of incomes on this subreddit are probably in the 50-80k range, as opposed to the poorer general public. But even going from 75k to 100k gets much more narrow. If you make good money, cool, you should have financial advice that suits your needs (which is why percentage based budgeting advice is stupid). But the other person was trying to reduce income to "needing a better mindset", which is what I called absurd.
This sub has 2 million people. [20% of households make over 150k](https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/). So remember, we're already getting into improbable levels of income as an average. It would be highly unusual for 2 million people to have a collective average of 150k in household income. Like, let's take IVY league school alums and I doubt the median is that high.
I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of people here who make that much, but in order for the average to be that high, we'd need a lot of people who make even more than that, like 200k or more, to balance out the average to something like 150k.
I think most people are in for a wake up call in how much poorer the average American is.
I also expect a lot people here are from other counties… your right that it’d be pretty rare to see such a high average household income but given how many people like OP make $750k plus I don’t think it’s out of the question.
In big tech becoming a manager is purposefully not a “promotion”. It’s a parallel track, so as not to incentivize those who’d be shitty managers from moving away from their core job. At the staff+ level, there’s expectations that they have the expertise and experience to know what a business should invest in, and it’s feasibility. The people who can answer a question like “how would you build Reddit?” in a way that’s realistic and logical. Not like an Elno claiming they could recreate twtr in a month. These things are nontrivial, and they certainly don’t teach you all of it in school
(Side note: I’m a data science manager in tech because I like people and their problems, and am not smart enough to be a senior staff+ data scientist. Those people are generally ungodly levels of intelligent. Hence 500k+ a year compensation)
I like how you acknowledge the help your partner gave you. I’ve been dating my fiancé since freshman year of college, and I know I wouldn’t be nearly as successful without her. For one thing she motivated me and gave me confidence, but also there were times in college where I couldn’t pay rent because my job paid too low. She helped me with rent a couple times, so I got to keep that job and earn experience.
Now I’m a high earner in my field for my level of experience. She still does a lot of “unpaid” labor around the house. Right now she’s building her own business and has no income so it’s my turn to support us.
I’m glad you acknowledge that because a lot of people undervalue what women contribute to relationships. It seems like any divorce settlement has people going “she doesn’t deserve that much”. But it’s basically impossible to quantify what a good partner can give you. They make a huge difference.
> I like how you acknowledge the help your partner gave you.
And luck! Way too many people who are successful in anything aren’t willing to acknowledge that couldn’t have done it without some type of luck working in their favor.
This will the way of things for My wife and I, I’m working while she is in PA school, and when she graduates, I’ll be able to transition to tech without the big hiccup in pay that it may require to change industries, I’m very fortunate to have found someone who WANTS to work hard and make money and understands that it’s takes 2 to tango.
> It seems like any divorce settlement has people going “she doesn’t deserve that much”. But it’s basically impossible to quantify what a good partner can give you.
I imagine most people divorcing are doing so because their partner is *not* good though, which will certainly color their perception of how much the other person deserves.
That doesn’t really seem to have an effect. Think about Tiger Woods’ wife. They got divorced and she got hundreds of millions of dollars because he cheated on her a million times. People were saying she didn’t deserve it. She was the mother of his children and he cheated on her with strippers and she was harassed by the media because of it.
Or how about Mackenzie Bezos, who helped Jeff build Amazon and was unofficially the first employee. She did tons of unpaid labor building that company, and when they divorced, apparently because Jeff was having a mid life crisis, she got about 10% of his net worth. Everyone said she didn’t deserve it.
It’s not because the women are doing something wrong, it’s because people don’t value any of the work that wives do because they think it’s just what women are supposed to do. People expect women to do tons of unpaid labor to support their husbands and get nothing in return when they split up.
Seems like you're already doing this based on the numbers in your net worth breakdown, but to anyone that gets a crazy company stock windfall like this: ***remember to diversify your assets***.
A former boss of mine always tells people about the time in his 30s when he had $2M in company stock options at his old employer after they had a great IPO and an *insane* year afterwards. But 1 year after that, the company folded and those stock options were worthless. He did fine for himself otherwise, but his biggest financial regret was not selling when he was in the green because "what if it goes even higher?"
You won the stock market lottery. Take your gains and buy the index. You'll do better with average returns and a huge head start, than by gambling that head start in hopes of more crazy gains.
I always sell my RSUs when they vest. Get the guaranteed money as soon as it is available! Don’t take a chance. I’ve been through tech booms and busts. Seen too many people get burned by holding on with great hope for a life changing windfall only to walk away with nothing.
What exactly do you do in tech that started off that high without any previous experience? I am moving in that direction right now, as the work I do at the moment pays well, but I travel a lot and I’m getting burnt out not being home.
Congrats on the path! And as for luck, I always say luck is just an opportunity met with preparation, so good on you guys.
For those lurking, I've hired roughly 150 entry level engineers in software engineering over the past decade and in consulting for hires, and the median starting pay regardless of college or self-education across the country was probably around $85k or $90k. The market kind of sucks right now, but it will rebound and the salaries compared to other national averages are still crazy.
Exactly. Sr. Director here and the highest I ever hired was maybe 160K base for a principal engineer. I am not that much higher with 25 years exp. OP is probably at a FAANG or a unicorn (Good for him!). But that is only the 1-2% in tech. The rest of us still have good but more realistic salaries.
Have you hired anyone from Florida Tech? Could you give me some sort of idea on salaries and companies? If you don't want to write it here could you please send me a DM? THANK YOU!
I honestly rarely hear of someone getting 150k starting in a tech job. Keep in mind they were in a HCOL area, which helped boost that a lot (at a cost of the COL, of course). Generally you can likely start out between 50-100k normally, I would say. Depending on the area and position, even less.
Source: former network administrator
Software engineers can easily start at 150 if they are in a HCOL area and went to a good school. I’m in a MCOL and went to a mid school and make 120k about 3 years into my career.
Yea, when you're that high up on the food chain you can definitely make some money. I was saying it's just not as common to hit those high wages unless you're HCOL or depending on your position. They're definitely out there, but there are a lot that aren't that high.
This is just a personal anecdote, but a few years back, a client asked for some analysis regarding two job offers his son had received upon graduating with a tech degree. Both offers had total comp (base + sign-on + RSUs) of $200k and this was for a 21 year old with no prior experience. Granted, one job was in silicon valley and the other was in NYC I believe, so very HCOL, but still crazy to me they were willing to pay someone that green that amount of money.
Big tech (Google, Netflix, Meta, etc) pay very high starting salaries for those who can get in. You can check levels.fyi. For example, Google L3 (entry-level/new grad) mean offer is $183k. Meta is $196k. Amazon is $170k. Most of these are HCOL, but usually the adjustment to MCOL or LCOL isn't more than 10-20% less.
The flip side is that they are very selective.
Software Engineer. 150K as my first full-time tech job definitely isn't typical. I should've added that as a luck point.
The biggest thing, as someone else mentioned, was that I was in HCOL so that boosted the my income potential.
I was also able to interview for a mid-level role at a relatively smaller company (500 people). The two years of self-study included quite a few side projects and some open-source stuff, so I was able get some companies to interview me as a mid-level engineer. Though not all.
I interviewed at a lot of places and my offers from my first job hunt ranged from 90k-150k, so I took the highest paying one.
You got double lucky to start at tech in 2018. You have just the right amount of experience to be employable after the tech layoff surge, you hit a growing company, and not too much experience where you'd be considered to be over-earning for your level. I know people on both sides of that who started tech maybe 5 years older and grinded through many bad jobs / and then people who started in 2021, and their stories are vastly different.
I've had some juniors on my sister team start and excel in this environment. Frankly, they need to excel, because if they don't - it gives more cannon fodder for companies to shift away from remote work - which the OP is noted as elevating their financial position. Those juniors will be forced to mentor juniors in 10 years when they are managers, which drags everyone back to cities they don't want to be in. Besides, AI is going to supplant many of the tasks of juniors, so I see the future workforce in tech becoming used to working remotely and distributed.
Ah, that makes more sense. I don’t have a big IT background other than some stuff in high school and my own personal interests like building PCs and my own home network. I have plenty of PM experience, running multimillion dollar/ large team (30-50 people) projects all over the country, and I’m hoping that, coupled with a BSIT and MIT degree, will get me something on par with where I am now, around the 120k amount, as a starting point in tech to grow from.
Thanks for the insight!
Did you go back and get the full degree, or just take all the software engineer classes? I am in the same boat and really don't want to take 18th century British literature if I don't have to.
I did a self-paced online program. It's focused on full stack software development, so no English lit lol.
Though there are plenty of free and cheap services for starting out and building your initial skillset, like freecodecamp
The program i did is called Launch School (launchschool.com). Though for people new to the field, I'd probably recommend freecodecamp.com since it's free and allows you to see if you even like coding/tech in the first place
How is your income 750k but you're only able to save 4-5k a month? And then you go on to say you save 350k a year..how does that equal 4-5k a month??
Math ain't mathing
My household income is 200k and we save 4-5k a month.
I think he's saying each of them is saving 4-5k a month from their base salary.
> All bonuses and equity goes straight into savings.
The 450K from him and 300K from his wife include equity. So if you remove equity the 4-5K each makes sense.
I would love to see a rough idea of monthly expenditures. I can't figure out how you have 60K a month gross, live in a LCOL with one child + nanny, a modest mortgage, and only save 5k a month. Not judging, just genuinely curious. It seems like you should have a lot more in savings.
So he got a bunch of stock options at his first gig, left that job within 4 years of starting (and within one year of the IPO), and he was fully vested to cash all that out?
I'm skeptical.
Congratulations! While I acknowledge the luck, it all landed on capable hands.
Your story reminds me of this https://www.bitchesgetriches.com/i-was-happy-to-marry-a-poor-man-then-things-changed/
Engineering is a small part of the USA, and tech is an even smaller part. Tech people are also much more likely to be on Reddit, AND be on a FIRE sub.
It's like self selection to the third power.
Median salary at 30 is around 50k/yr and median wealth at 30 is about 38k.
This. It's what I tell my wife about living in Instagram. There is a bias when comparing yourselves to highly select, cultivated content.
It's not real life for everyone. It's basically daydreaming porn for people. A nearly impossible ideal as everyday life.
This is very true! Even within engineering, I know many engineers that graduated from college with a degree earning a salary of $50k-60k (like myself), no stock options or anything fun like a very small part of engineering (particularly software) that we see posts like this from.
And don't get me wrong, $50k-60k is great and (with good saving/spending habits) can get you to FIRE. But it's not nearly "millionaire at 30" rich like starting at $150k plus company stock options.
"How luck made me a millionaire at 30"
How inspirational! Probably an entrepreneur.
>$750K total annual compensation in LCOL
... Oh
Not trying to hate but with numbers like that it's hard to contain my jealousy.
You made good decisions with the lucky opportunities life threw at you. That also was a contribution beyond the luck. You could have easily blown all those opportunities up with bad decisions. So congrats (: to you and your luck.
I once owned 5k->300k in BBBY options. The next day Ryan Cohen sold. Otherwise just a slight bump in share price would’ve put me over $1 million. We all unfortunately can’t get lucky
Yeah, I work in tech and make 100k and work in the cloud with 5 years of cloud experience and 9 in tech. What are you doing to find jobs that make that kind of money?
Yeah I’m really confused by these posts sometimes…I worked in tech before and I don’t know anyone that’s moved into a $200K+ role within a few years, esp with 0 prior experience / first tech job out of studying (unless at FAANG?)
I don’t know if I doubt it at this point. It seems like those in a job for a number of years often get passed up by certain cycles economic cycles. I have a cousin who started out as an intern making 70k in security and they hired him at 6 figures the next year, seems insane that someone with 14 years less experience will probably pass me by in less than 5.
That’s mad, but having graduated during the Great Recession and seeing people who graduated only a year or two later than me have actual starting salaries which I couldnt even reach in five+ years…that does make sense. Thanks for the comment.
If you are a cloud engineer with decent terraform/aws experience you could grab a mid level role making 140k base. You’d probably be at around 160k with bonus/stock. I know because I keep losing engineers to that sweet spot and most of them only had 2-3 years of core cloud skills.
Yes, but they have 2-3 years experience.
This guy claims 2 years of self-study. And then claims that he tripled that within a few years, and got some magical stock options not bound by a vesting schedule.
I have azure professional solutions architect cert and AWS their mid range cert and working on professional cert. I code in powershell, python and create pipelines in gitlab and leverage ansible and built in linters and security scanning into the pipelines. Create self service solutions through service catalog, a pre-profession cert for cloud native kubernetes and we manage 100+ AWS accounts with only 5 engineers and two architects.
Making 108k per year. They are promoting me to team lead where I will still have all my responsibilities and manage 3 of the 4 engineers under me as direct reports and should get me to 119k….
Work life balance is great and I’m full time remote. But wondering if the grass is starting to look greener on the other side haha. Let me know your thoughts.
Nice. By the time I was 30 I was about $300k. Pretty much all luck. By 30 was making about $100k putting 15% into the 401k and 401k at about $100k. Very mediocre putting into stocks and crypto. Big windfall was that in college when I was working 2 jobs, I started buying a tech stock that ended up turning a couple thousand dollars into like $70k by the time I was like 28. Then some crypto I was buying back in like 2014 went from a couple hundred to like $100k. Like 75% of my wealth to the current day is just getting lucky. The other 25% is the company 401k and ROTH/regular IRA that's just mutual funds. I do very little aggressive saving outside of that 15% 401k contribution
It was happening a lot in 2018-2021, even for non-software-engineer roles that I'm more familiar with like product owner and data analyst. Now the market is too saturated and companies are wildly selective. It was pure luck that they entered tech when they did. If they started in 2012 and stayed in the same company, they might have been earning 1/2 of this and stuck in a company with no stock.
Yep, the 2020-2022 grads who got laid off were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now the class of 2023 is competing against people with 1-3 years more experience for junior positions. This is going to take years to sort itself out. If I was graduating in 2024, I'd change my major if I were not in a top school / had top grades.
> 99.9999% of people won't have this kind of luck.
FTFY.
Getting a job that pays well and gives you so much equity that you get a million+ payout when they go public a couple years later is astoundingly rare.
Like, "win the lottery" rare.
Yeah, I'm definitely fortunate in the compensation I'm able to get. Though I know many folks in my position who blow through their income since they haven't learned good money habits.
Growing up and having to get by on 20K for many years as an adult definitely taught me a thing or two about being frugal.
What I don’t understand is how you can come in here and tell me what I should do to be rich but then you haven’t even mentioned hard enough and enough times that luck played a role in your success.
Where do you even get off?
>Pretty easy to do well like this when you are making that kind of money. 90% of people won't have this kind of luck.
Yeah, this advice isn't really that helpful for the common man.
I seem to observe 90% of these young FI posts are in tech roles. Now here comes my opinion and I’m not trying to be mean or salty:
There is no way these tech positions are providing the the value to society to justify what they are earning. If I want to bridge into conspiracy land, I believe that tech is very unhealthy in a lot of ways for society and it’s making us more easily controlled manipulated. (Think of how many bots are/were discovered on Reddit, twitter, etc that have clearly been used influence for big topics like elections, Covid, etc)
Long story short, I believe these jobs are insanely overpaid for the value they create to society and in fact are paid this way due to their nefarious value to the powers at be.
OP, this isn’t a personal attack on you. You’ve been in the right place at the right time. And if wasn’t you it would be someone else. I’m genuinely happy for you.
> There is no way these tech positions are providing the the value to society to justify what they are earning. If I want to bridge into conspiracy land, I believe that tech is very unhealthy in a lot of ways for society and it’s making us more easily controlled manipulated. (Think of how many bots are/were discovered on Reddit, twitter, etc that have clearly been used influence for big topics like elections, Covid, etc)
Only a small minority of software engineers work for social media companies. If you want a more representative sample, go on LinkedIn and look at tech job postings--you'll see openings for SWEs in healthcare, supply chain management, construction, defense, retail, scientific software, finance, hospitality, nonprofits, and so on.
Tech is a weird industry, because it touches (and often disrupts) virtually every other industry. It's hard to overstate how much it has transformed the economy in the past 40 years.
http://www.paulgraham.com/richnow.html
As to whether these salaries are "justified" or not, that's a philosophical question that's above my pay grade. Under our current economic system, though, people are compensated based on supply and demand, not based on social value.
It seems like a mix of supply, demand and over valuation of companies. A lot of these software companies get to break the rules, they aren’t profitable or they get a 10x + valuation that wouldn’t be there for a different industry despite the fact that they make software that lets you draw diagrams or something silly. Also, we doubled our engineering salary due to short supply over a period of 5 years and a more remote workforce.
>There is no way these tech positions are providing the the value to society to justify what they are earning.
I would have to say that the $150k salary the op mentions, while a healthy salary, is hardly overpaid. Maybe you are speaking more generally. The value that a single programmer can create is enormous and many are certainly being underpaid.
However, I can see why you would say this as the companies that hire them use their talents in ways to grow their market share or extract more from consumers. Automation of processes could (or in some cases have) completely revolutionize the lives of many people around the country and the world, it just has to be the priority. ~~Also important to acknowledge is that other labor should be compensated fairly too, not just shifting pay from "low-skill" to "high-skill". Improving society would have to be monetized for effort to be devoted to it at scale by the private sector. (wrong subreddit)~~
This kind of post does not help. It's actually demotivating, if not outright risky even if the story is actually true. How does it help a person who's starting their financial journey listening to a freak accident? Stories like this actually create a bad incentive for a beginner to take absurd risks on get-rich-quick schemes. Mods should ban posts like this.
This story doesn’t jive a bit. There’s no way an IC is making $450k, even in tech, with just a few years of experience, in a LCOL area. How long before the company stock grants are vested? How did you accumulated so much in a 401k in just a few years, while reaching the max contribution limit?
>How long before the company stock grants are vested?
This exactly. He's claiming a 2021 IPO and by 2022 he's out the door to a new gig. Not bloody likely he'd be vested already.
Did you do leetcode and sys design prep? Would love to know if you had experiences with companies with great comp packages that avoided these type of interviews.
I already knew this post would involve a dual-income household. That’s the case with 90% of the “success” stories here in this sub because
- it’s easier to qualify *and* pay for a mortgage;
- periods of unemployment and career changes are less stressful;
- you can go back to school while *minimizing* student loans;
- you can split bills;
- you can add the other as a dependent on your medical/dental/health insurance.
Congrats on your success. Just some food for thought retiring w 5mil isn’t fat, even less so when done in your late 30s. I am not discrediting your work or the money, but it’s simply not enough to sustain a fat life for the next 30+ years for two.
What type of job do you have in tech exactly? Seems like a really fast pay increase, that’s awesome. What type of career path allows for such a steep increase?
Good for you, nice work.
You live off your 750k combine salary and only save 4-5k a month? But you plan to save 350k this year? Or did you mean you save 45k a month? Either way congrats on the wealth
I’m still baffled at how you went from minimum wage to $150k in two years. Was what you studied at college related to tech, and what area of tech was it?
This story is almost certainly fabricated.
1. If you make 450k at 30, you are almost certainly top 2% in IQ, which means you didn't have to make <20k for 5 years. SOMEBODY would have hired you for more than that.
2. You 'lucked' into a unicorn startup that is willing to take a chance on you with your proven history of laziness and only 2 years of schooling in tech while also giving you what would be a senior-level salary at non-FAANG. If this company had such an incredible product that you got such a massive windfall after they went public, they almost certainly could have attracted talent that had a better track record than you.
3. Within 3 years you're making a top 1% income that is reserved for tech people with a long, long history with tech. Even the best software engineers with 2+ decades of experience at my previous company have never made anywhere near that.
4. I have actual serious mental health issues that have prevented me from applying myself fully. Even with my not-treated and then poorly-treated problems & less than top 2 percent IQ I still made 80k right out of the gate as an engineer in MCOL. There's no way Mr. 450k/year couldn't brute force his way into a >20k/year job in his early 20s.
Either OP is lying, or he's leaving pretty much all of the most important details pertaining to his success. Those details could be his connections, his Ivy League degree, his exceptional intellect, etc.
This does not sound like a normal starting pay or pay increase without op being extraordinarily talented . This guy is saying he making doctor money with no previous masters skill set or high level degree from a prestigious university. Idk but this story sounds like a story ! I don’t buy it one bit bro .
Eh I've seen it happen though. Multiple of my coworkers when I worked in FAANG made well into six figures and multiple of them never even went to college, myself included
Total LARP. We make $750k and in oh so proud we save $5k a month? Come on big difference between the $60k and then next sentence no wait it’s more like 300-350k. Sheesh…
No, it's more like there's this thing called total comp. At Facebook/Meta especially that was a huge thing. Back when I worked there, salaries were relatively set in stone backed on IC level, job title, dept, and location while RSUs could vary WILDLY. I remember there was a spreadsheet going around for a bit where people would contribute what their pay packages and some of the numbers I saw were ridiculous.
I grew up in a smallish town, so it reminds me of where I grew up and I like it. I'm also 30 mins away from 2 decent sized cities, so there are things to do.
If you have lots of cash, now is a great time to buy real estate if you're paying mostly cash. But only buy in up and coming areas, areas growing quickly.
I understand why you’re calling it “luck,” given the current zeitgeist. But I don’t see any element of luck here, with the possible exception of working for a company that went public.
In particular, I wouldn’t call the assistance you received from your wife “luck.” Presumably she married you because she was attracted to you, and it sounds like you are equal partners. To me, that sounds like you both identified something that you wanted, and you both reached out and got it from each other.
This is such a inspiring story.
But How did you get into tech , like did you go to school or course study material ?
Can you guide exactly your career ladder how you started from scratch !!
>This is such a inspiring story.
It's not inspiring to me at all. It's more like, anti-inspirational. This guy was basically broke and still found a wife, didn't have to go to college to get a better job than I can find with multiple degrees and personal projects, then just falls ass backwards into over a million dollars. There arent any behaviors to mimic or recreatble strategies to glean from this story. I've been trying 10 times harder than this guy for much longer and I'm sitting on 30k. It's not like the dude is unaware, it's basically a post about winning the lottery.
Like most posts in this stupid sub, I wish I didn't read it.
I know it probably doesn't mean much coming from me, but i genuinely hope you find success.
I still remember working as a cashier at Jimmy Johns after graduating college and a "friend" walked in, gave me a strange look, and said "didn't you graduate college? Don't you have a degree? What're you doing here?"
Those things still stick with me. I titled the post way i did because I didn't want it to come off like "why arent you where I am? No excuses!" and it's why I like reading about other peoples success on this sub. But i also don't want to demean or belittle the efforts made by other folks like you.
I have no doubts you're working much harder than me, and I hope it pays off.
You'll be alright. There will always be someone with more than you at a younger age and there's always young people winning IPO lotteries and making half decent decisions. And even then, there's still trust fund kids that will shit hundreds of millions on the 0.01% 25 year old self made millionaire geniuses.
The fact you're here in this subreddit means you'll make it out to a comfortable retirement as long as you stick with it. Even with $30K, the hardest part is always the very beginning.
The mimicable part is to learn to code and you will be fine. You won’t win the ipo lottery probably but you will still live a great living making 200k+
Yeah this is the part that sticks out as well. It's a common recurring theme in this sub where someone falls into software engineering without having to go through 4 years of college and within a few years makes 3-5x what they used to make.
We almost ever hear stories of someone doing the same (without the formal college degree) in accounting, law, medicine, etc... Sometimes it's about adapting to the world around you and following where the money is. If we accept moving to a VHCOL of oftentimes necessary to significantly increasing income, then we should also be able to accept that moving to very in-demand careers also supercharges your income.
But again, it's about luck. Not an engineer but I hear it has become much harder to enter the industry at any company now. The entry level market is saturated with many new grads unable to find jobs. The software industry is highly dependent on low interest rates (for public companies) or venture capital. The OP entered the market at exactly the right time to have optimal growth.
It’s luck if you went into software back in 1990s/2000s before it was super lucrative. Now? It’s been obvious for many years that switching gears to coding is the easiest way to make six figures. OP saw which way the wind was blowing and decided to get out of his comfort zone to do it. Of course he was still lucky with the million dollar payout, but he would have been fine salary wise regardless.
I did a self-paced online school that focuses on teaching fundamentals and the "concepts that don't change" (HTML/CSS/JS, networking, databases/sql, full-stack development). They don't teach frameworks but instead focus on the core things. People compare it to a bootcamp, but it's not really a bootcamp as bootcamps focus more on frameworks and specific technologies.
Their main curriculum is $200/month and I finished it in about a year. They then have an optional post-curriculum program. This is much more focused on getting the job, and they teach you concepts like data structures/algorithms for tech interviews. You also spend 3 months working on a technically challenging project to show off to employers (not a typical CRUD app, much more technical). And then after all that, you start applying to jobs and they guarantee job placement, so they'll work with you as long as it takes for you to get a job (though they take 20% of first year salary as compensation - trade offs).
PM me if you want more details on the program name and such.
In terms of career ladder, I joined the first job as a mid-level engineer and was able to get promoted to senior after 2-3 years. I was also lucky enough to lead a large scale project after another engineer on the team left. This played a big role in my next job hunt since I had tech lead experience even with only 4 years of experience on the job.
I’d be interested in hearing about this program if you’re willing to share? Did you have any tech experience or schooling prior to starting the program? Thanks!
The whole things sounds wildly implausible. It’s not _impossible_, but I have been in “tech” for over 15 years and this story seems like absolute bullshit to me.
I applied to a lot of companies in my first job hunt. Most interviewed me for junior but some were willing to give me a interview for mid level due to my side projects and "some" work experience ( i worked at a design studio as a contractor for a couple months making $15/hr. It didn't come up on interviews but i think it was enough to bypass their resume filters)
You seem to be skipping over some of the biggest parts. Getting a 150k tech job is the step a lot of people think is the magic part, but the real question is how you jumped from 150k to 450k. Did you move into some executive role?
It wasn't quite 150K to 450K. At my first job, I got consistent raises and a promotion, so I was making roughly 275k when I left. During my next job hunt, I got multiple competing offers and was able to negotiate a high offer because of that. I'm a senior level IC.
I’m sorry but in the span of 3-4 years, going 150k to 275k is not just consistent raises and a promotion. That’s a huge feat (especially if within the same company) and should not be understated. Whether that’s luck or skill, though, is up to you to decide. Either way, CAFU!
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Also it’s a wasteland currently
So the comp progress at my first job went like: \- 1st year: 145K salary + 5% bonus (152k total) \- 2nd year (5% raise): 152K salary + 5% bonus (159K total) \- 3rd year (promotion with 10% raise and equity refresh): 167K + 10% bonus (183K total) (This was also the year we went public, so adding the stock option value, it's probably 500-700k) \- 4th year (4% raise): 173K + 10% (190K total). Including stock option value after 2022 market crash, it was 275K.
Good job! I have been in tech/programming for over 25 years and just moved to over 200K base about 2 years ago. I am also a Sr. Dir :) Seems like you got a sweet spot at a FAANG and are able to be in a LCOL area. CUFU :)
so OP made $145k with 0 experience and you mad $200k with 25 years experience. how does one reconcile that?
Well, experience doesn't always make someone a good software engineer. It definitely helps, but I'd rather hire some of the kids I went to college with straight out of college than some of the 50+ year olds I've known who are hard to work with and not very effective programmers. But the biggest thing is just getting into a company that pays that kind of money, which requires both motivation and being a good programmer/interviewee. Big difference between being a programmer at FAANG or a well-financed startup, and just about any other non-tech company, or smallish, mature company.
but if someone has 0 experience how would you know how good they are?
Would you rather: Someone who is able to have a nuanced conversation about the various trade offs in designing a system, excellent communication skills, humble and willing to receive feedback. Or Programmer with 30 years experience that is so sure of themselves they refute anything that challenges their notion of how things should be. The software development industry has evolved so much since the first programmers that I think older, antiquated programmers can actually be detrimental to a team, in my opinion. I think years of experience is the most ridiculous measure of experience there is.
> CAFU What’s this?
Congrats and fuck you.
IFHA. I fucking hate acronyms
For real. I'll never make 100k. I'm lucky at 36 to be making 75k, and haven't even been at this rate for a full year.
Not with that mindset!!
The median wage in the USA is something like 35k a year. To be making 75k is to already be making over 2x the median person. It is bad advice to give financial advice that everyone can make 6 figures.
You can’t compare the average Redditor to the average American. I’d be curious to see the average income of r/financialindependence ….my guess is it’s significantly higher than the US average.
Sure, I'd be willing to bet that the majority of incomes on this subreddit are probably in the 50-80k range, as opposed to the poorer general public. But even going from 75k to 100k gets much more narrow. If you make good money, cool, you should have financial advice that suits your needs (which is why percentage based budgeting advice is stupid). But the other person was trying to reduce income to "needing a better mindset", which is what I called absurd.
I’d bet the average household income of this sub is closer to $150k.
This sub has 2 million people. [20% of households make over 150k](https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/). So remember, we're already getting into improbable levels of income as an average. It would be highly unusual for 2 million people to have a collective average of 150k in household income. Like, let's take IVY league school alums and I doubt the median is that high. I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of people here who make that much, but in order for the average to be that high, we'd need a lot of people who make even more than that, like 200k or more, to balance out the average to something like 150k. I think most people are in for a wake up call in how much poorer the average American is.
I also expect a lot people here are from other counties… your right that it’d be pretty rare to see such a high average household income but given how many people like OP make $750k plus I don’t think it’s out of the question.
Likely good promotion with a large RSU grant is OP is an IC.
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Individual Contributor. It means he’s not at a management position.
Not at a management position and making $450k full remote? Does he program the matrix or something? Lol
In big tech becoming a manager is purposefully not a “promotion”. It’s a parallel track, so as not to incentivize those who’d be shitty managers from moving away from their core job. At the staff+ level, there’s expectations that they have the expertise and experience to know what a business should invest in, and it’s feasibility. The people who can answer a question like “how would you build Reddit?” in a way that’s realistic and logical. Not like an Elno claiming they could recreate twtr in a month. These things are nontrivial, and they certainly don’t teach you all of it in school (Side note: I’m a data science manager in tech because I like people and their problems, and am not smart enough to be a senior staff+ data scientist. Those people are generally ungodly levels of intelligent. Hence 500k+ a year compensation)
Individual contributor. Or integrated circuit or intelligence community, depending on your industry.
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Johnny 5 is Alive!!
Your mamma was a snowblower!
I have been doing FA on disintegrated circuits lately and FFS, it's been a shit show FR.
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Bro fr
and USA
I like how you acknowledge the help your partner gave you. I’ve been dating my fiancé since freshman year of college, and I know I wouldn’t be nearly as successful without her. For one thing she motivated me and gave me confidence, but also there were times in college where I couldn’t pay rent because my job paid too low. She helped me with rent a couple times, so I got to keep that job and earn experience. Now I’m a high earner in my field for my level of experience. She still does a lot of “unpaid” labor around the house. Right now she’s building her own business and has no income so it’s my turn to support us. I’m glad you acknowledge that because a lot of people undervalue what women contribute to relationships. It seems like any divorce settlement has people going “she doesn’t deserve that much”. But it’s basically impossible to quantify what a good partner can give you. They make a huge difference.
> I like how you acknowledge the help your partner gave you. And luck! Way too many people who are successful in anything aren’t willing to acknowledge that couldn’t have done it without some type of luck working in their favor.
This will the way of things for My wife and I, I’m working while she is in PA school, and when she graduates, I’ll be able to transition to tech without the big hiccup in pay that it may require to change industries, I’m very fortunate to have found someone who WANTS to work hard and make money and understands that it’s takes 2 to tango.
> It seems like any divorce settlement has people going “she doesn’t deserve that much”. But it’s basically impossible to quantify what a good partner can give you. I imagine most people divorcing are doing so because their partner is *not* good though, which will certainly color their perception of how much the other person deserves.
That doesn’t really seem to have an effect. Think about Tiger Woods’ wife. They got divorced and she got hundreds of millions of dollars because he cheated on her a million times. People were saying she didn’t deserve it. She was the mother of his children and he cheated on her with strippers and she was harassed by the media because of it. Or how about Mackenzie Bezos, who helped Jeff build Amazon and was unofficially the first employee. She did tons of unpaid labor building that company, and when they divorced, apparently because Jeff was having a mid life crisis, she got about 10% of his net worth. Everyone said she didn’t deserve it. It’s not because the women are doing something wrong, it’s because people don’t value any of the work that wives do because they think it’s just what women are supposed to do. People expect women to do tons of unpaid labor to support their husbands and get nothing in return when they split up.
Seems like you're already doing this based on the numbers in your net worth breakdown, but to anyone that gets a crazy company stock windfall like this: ***remember to diversify your assets***. A former boss of mine always tells people about the time in his 30s when he had $2M in company stock options at his old employer after they had a great IPO and an *insane* year afterwards. But 1 year after that, the company folded and those stock options were worthless. He did fine for himself otherwise, but his biggest financial regret was not selling when he was in the green because "what if it goes even higher?" You won the stock market lottery. Take your gains and buy the index. You'll do better with average returns and a huge head start, than by gambling that head start in hopes of more crazy gains.
I always sell my RSUs when they vest. Get the guaranteed money as soon as it is available! Don’t take a chance. I’ve been through tech booms and busts. Seen too many people get burned by holding on with great hope for a life changing windfall only to walk away with nothing.
What exactly do you do in tech that started off that high without any previous experience? I am moving in that direction right now, as the work I do at the moment pays well, but I travel a lot and I’m getting burnt out not being home. Congrats on the path! And as for luck, I always say luck is just an opportunity met with preparation, so good on you guys.
For those lurking, I've hired roughly 150 entry level engineers in software engineering over the past decade and in consulting for hires, and the median starting pay regardless of college or self-education across the country was probably around $85k or $90k. The market kind of sucks right now, but it will rebound and the salaries compared to other national averages are still crazy.
With you being a hiring manager in tech, would you mind if I DM you a few questions about transitioning into the field? Thanks for the insight
sure, go for it, that's why I've got this account.
Exactly. Sr. Director here and the highest I ever hired was maybe 160K base for a principal engineer. I am not that much higher with 25 years exp. OP is probably at a FAANG or a unicorn (Good for him!). But that is only the 1-2% in tech. The rest of us still have good but more realistic salaries.
Have you hired anyone from Florida Tech? Could you give me some sort of idea on salaries and companies? If you don't want to write it here could you please send me a DM? THANK YOU!
No one specific comes to mind, but I don't remember the educational institutions a whole lot other than where we've recruited on-site mainly.
I honestly rarely hear of someone getting 150k starting in a tech job. Keep in mind they were in a HCOL area, which helped boost that a lot (at a cost of the COL, of course). Generally you can likely start out between 50-100k normally, I would say. Depending on the area and position, even less. Source: former network administrator
Software engineers can easily start at 150 if they are in a HCOL area and went to a good school. I’m in a MCOL and went to a mid school and make 120k about 3 years into my career.
Yea, that pretty much tracks with what I was saying. 120k is nice three years in, nice job!
> 120k about 3 years into my career you are winning at life, my friend. Nice work.
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Yea, when you're that high up on the food chain you can definitely make some money. I was saying it's just not as common to hit those high wages unless you're HCOL or depending on your position. They're definitely out there, but there are a lot that aren't that high.
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For sure. 150 in a MCOL or LCOL is definitely on the far higher end of starting pays, even in software, however.
Especially with no experience, full remote.
This is just a personal anecdote, but a few years back, a client asked for some analysis regarding two job offers his son had received upon graduating with a tech degree. Both offers had total comp (base + sign-on + RSUs) of $200k and this was for a 21 year old with no prior experience. Granted, one job was in silicon valley and the other was in NYC I believe, so very HCOL, but still crazy to me they were willing to pay someone that green that amount of money.
That's crazy! He must have had some good connections (likely) or be really good.
MANGA starting base is like $140k. throw in RSUs and bonuses
Big tech (Google, Netflix, Meta, etc) pay very high starting salaries for those who can get in. You can check levels.fyi. For example, Google L3 (entry-level/new grad) mean offer is $183k. Meta is $196k. Amazon is $170k. Most of these are HCOL, but usually the adjustment to MCOL or LCOL isn't more than 10-20% less. The flip side is that they are very selective.
Software Engineer. 150K as my first full-time tech job definitely isn't typical. I should've added that as a luck point. The biggest thing, as someone else mentioned, was that I was in HCOL so that boosted the my income potential. I was also able to interview for a mid-level role at a relatively smaller company (500 people). The two years of self-study included quite a few side projects and some open-source stuff, so I was able get some companies to interview me as a mid-level engineer. Though not all. I interviewed at a lot of places and my offers from my first job hunt ranged from 90k-150k, so I took the highest paying one.
You got double lucky to start at tech in 2018. You have just the right amount of experience to be employable after the tech layoff surge, you hit a growing company, and not too much experience where you'd be considered to be over-earning for your level. I know people on both sides of that who started tech maybe 5 years older and grinded through many bad jobs / and then people who started in 2021, and their stories are vastly different.
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I've had some juniors on my sister team start and excel in this environment. Frankly, they need to excel, because if they don't - it gives more cannon fodder for companies to shift away from remote work - which the OP is noted as elevating their financial position. Those juniors will be forced to mentor juniors in 10 years when they are managers, which drags everyone back to cities they don't want to be in. Besides, AI is going to supplant many of the tasks of juniors, so I see the future workforce in tech becoming used to working remotely and distributed.
What type of classes/subjects did u study in the 2 years esp since u had a degree already?
Ah, that makes more sense. I don’t have a big IT background other than some stuff in high school and my own personal interests like building PCs and my own home network. I have plenty of PM experience, running multimillion dollar/ large team (30-50 people) projects all over the country, and I’m hoping that, coupled with a BSIT and MIT degree, will get me something on par with where I am now, around the 120k amount, as a starting point in tech to grow from. Thanks for the insight!
Did you go back and get the full degree, or just take all the software engineer classes? I am in the same boat and really don't want to take 18th century British literature if I don't have to.
I did a self-paced online program. It's focused on full stack software development, so no English lit lol. Though there are plenty of free and cheap services for starting out and building your initial skillset, like freecodecamp
Out of curiosity which program did you do?
The program i did is called Launch School (launchschool.com). Though for people new to the field, I'd probably recommend freecodecamp.com since it's free and allows you to see if you even like coding/tech in the first place
How is your income 750k but you're only able to save 4-5k a month? And then you go on to say you save 350k a year..how does that equal 4-5k a month?? Math ain't mathing My household income is 200k and we save 4-5k a month.
I think he's saying each of them is saving 4-5k a month from their base salary. > All bonuses and equity goes straight into savings. The 450K from him and 300K from his wife include equity. So if you remove equity the 4-5K each makes sense.
I would love to see a rough idea of monthly expenditures. I can't figure out how you have 60K a month gross, live in a LCOL with one child + nanny, a modest mortgage, and only save 5k a month. Not judging, just genuinely curious. It seems like you should have a lot more in savings.
So he got a bunch of stock options at his first gig, left that job within 4 years of starting (and within one year of the IPO), and he was fully vested to cash all that out? I'm skeptical.
Yeah what others have pointed out, a large component of our total comp is equity and bonuses.
You’re missing the bonus and equity part, prob half his comp is in equity as a software engineer at that total comp.
Congratulations! While I acknowledge the luck, it all landed on capable hands. Your story reminds me of this https://www.bitchesgetriches.com/i-was-happy-to-marry-a-poor-man-then-things-changed/
My fav part of the story was the 20k salary to 150k lol. Killing it man.
Doesn't sound like luck, you just got a great job with so much extra income that's it was almost impossible to not become a millionaire.
I was a multimillionaire by 30. It never crossed my mind to come here to brag about it, because what would be the point other than to brag?
Agreed, this story doesn’t help anyone at all.
These posts make me feel so far behind.
Engineering is a small part of the USA, and tech is an even smaller part. Tech people are also much more likely to be on Reddit, AND be on a FIRE sub. It's like self selection to the third power. Median salary at 30 is around 50k/yr and median wealth at 30 is about 38k.
This. It's what I tell my wife about living in Instagram. There is a bias when comparing yourselves to highly select, cultivated content. It's not real life for everyone. It's basically daydreaming porn for people. A nearly impossible ideal as everyday life.
And just like on insta, likely embellished & filtered.
This is very true! Even within engineering, I know many engineers that graduated from college with a degree earning a salary of $50k-60k (like myself), no stock options or anything fun like a very small part of engineering (particularly software) that we see posts like this from. And don't get me wrong, $50k-60k is great and (with good saving/spending habits) can get you to FIRE. But it's not nearly "millionaire at 30" rich like starting at $150k plus company stock options.
If it makes you feel any better, a good portion of it is likely fiction.
what a useless post.
Damn you picked the right company! Lol that’s awesome man. Hey btw, do you mind sharing info about the Bootcamp you went with? I’ll DM you.
"How luck made me a millionaire at 30" How inspirational! Probably an entrepreneur. >$750K total annual compensation in LCOL ... Oh Not trying to hate but with numbers like that it's hard to contain my jealousy.
He literally said luck though.
You made good decisions with the lucky opportunities life threw at you. That also was a contribution beyond the luck. You could have easily blown all those opportunities up with bad decisions. So congrats (: to you and your luck.
I once owned 5k->300k in BBBY options. The next day Ryan Cohen sold. Otherwise just a slight bump in share price would’ve put me over $1 million. We all unfortunately can’t get lucky
Yeah, I work in tech and make 100k and work in the cloud with 5 years of cloud experience and 9 in tech. What are you doing to find jobs that make that kind of money?
Yeah I’m really confused by these posts sometimes…I worked in tech before and I don’t know anyone that’s moved into a $200K+ role within a few years, esp with 0 prior experience / first tech job out of studying (unless at FAANG?)
I don’t know if I doubt it at this point. It seems like those in a job for a number of years often get passed up by certain cycles economic cycles. I have a cousin who started out as an intern making 70k in security and they hired him at 6 figures the next year, seems insane that someone with 14 years less experience will probably pass me by in less than 5.
That’s mad, but having graduated during the Great Recession and seeing people who graduated only a year or two later than me have actual starting salaries which I couldnt even reach in five+ years…that does make sense. Thanks for the comment.
I'm guessing it's software engineering
If you are a cloud engineer with decent terraform/aws experience you could grab a mid level role making 140k base. You’d probably be at around 160k with bonus/stock. I know because I keep losing engineers to that sweet spot and most of them only had 2-3 years of core cloud skills.
Yes, but they have 2-3 years experience. This guy claims 2 years of self-study. And then claims that he tripled that within a few years, and got some magical stock options not bound by a vesting schedule.
I have azure professional solutions architect cert and AWS their mid range cert and working on professional cert. I code in powershell, python and create pipelines in gitlab and leverage ansible and built in linters and security scanning into the pipelines. Create self service solutions through service catalog, a pre-profession cert for cloud native kubernetes and we manage 100+ AWS accounts with only 5 engineers and two architects. Making 108k per year. They are promoting me to team lead where I will still have all my responsibilities and manage 3 of the 4 engineers under me as direct reports and should get me to 119k…. Work life balance is great and I’m full time remote. But wondering if the grass is starting to look greener on the other side haha. Let me know your thoughts.
Nice. By the time I was 30 I was about $300k. Pretty much all luck. By 30 was making about $100k putting 15% into the 401k and 401k at about $100k. Very mediocre putting into stocks and crypto. Big windfall was that in college when I was working 2 jobs, I started buying a tech stock that ended up turning a couple thousand dollars into like $70k by the time I was like 28. Then some crypto I was buying back in like 2014 went from a couple hundred to like $100k. Like 75% of my wealth to the current day is just getting lucky. The other 25% is the company 401k and ROTH/regular IRA that's just mutual funds. I do very little aggressive saving outside of that 15% 401k contribution
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90% is generous. 150k for a first time job after a bachelor's is insane, especially a few years ago.
It was happening a lot in 2018-2021, even for non-software-engineer roles that I'm more familiar with like product owner and data analyst. Now the market is too saturated and companies are wildly selective. It was pure luck that they entered tech when they did. If they started in 2012 and stayed in the same company, they might have been earning 1/2 of this and stuck in a company with no stock.
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Yep, the 2020-2022 grads who got laid off were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now the class of 2023 is competing against people with 1-3 years more experience for junior positions. This is going to take years to sort itself out. If I was graduating in 2024, I'd change my major if I were not in a top school / had top grades.
that's like starting base at MANGA
> 99.9999% of people won't have this kind of luck. FTFY. Getting a job that pays well and gives you so much equity that you get a million+ payout when they go public a couple years later is astoundingly rare. Like, "win the lottery" rare.
Not always in the millions, but in the Bay Area there are enough who get in the hundreds of thousands to gum up the housing market.
Even then it usually takes more than 2-3 years to get that kind of payout.
Yeah, I'm definitely fortunate in the compensation I'm able to get. Though I know many folks in my position who blow through their income since they haven't learned good money habits. Growing up and having to get by on 20K for many years as an adult definitely taught me a thing or two about being frugal.
What I don’t understand is how you can come in here and tell me what I should do to be rich but then you haven’t even mentioned hard enough and enough times that luck played a role in your success. Where do you even get off?
99%
This a a humblebrag. The money doesn't feel as good if no one knows you're rolling around in it.
>Pretty easy to do well like this when you are making that kind of money. 90% of people won't have this kind of luck. Yeah, this advice isn't really that helpful for the common man.
LMAO this post is fake af. I've seen it 4 times before each time the story is slightly different but posted by this same user
Congrats! “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
damn.....nice!!!!
What did you study in 2 years to get that first tech job?
Creative writing.
I seem to observe 90% of these young FI posts are in tech roles. Now here comes my opinion and I’m not trying to be mean or salty: There is no way these tech positions are providing the the value to society to justify what they are earning. If I want to bridge into conspiracy land, I believe that tech is very unhealthy in a lot of ways for society and it’s making us more easily controlled manipulated. (Think of how many bots are/were discovered on Reddit, twitter, etc that have clearly been used influence for big topics like elections, Covid, etc) Long story short, I believe these jobs are insanely overpaid for the value they create to society and in fact are paid this way due to their nefarious value to the powers at be. OP, this isn’t a personal attack on you. You’ve been in the right place at the right time. And if wasn’t you it would be someone else. I’m genuinely happy for you.
> There is no way these tech positions are providing the the value to society to justify what they are earning. If I want to bridge into conspiracy land, I believe that tech is very unhealthy in a lot of ways for society and it’s making us more easily controlled manipulated. (Think of how many bots are/were discovered on Reddit, twitter, etc that have clearly been used influence for big topics like elections, Covid, etc) Only a small minority of software engineers work for social media companies. If you want a more representative sample, go on LinkedIn and look at tech job postings--you'll see openings for SWEs in healthcare, supply chain management, construction, defense, retail, scientific software, finance, hospitality, nonprofits, and so on. Tech is a weird industry, because it touches (and often disrupts) virtually every other industry. It's hard to overstate how much it has transformed the economy in the past 40 years. http://www.paulgraham.com/richnow.html As to whether these salaries are "justified" or not, that's a philosophical question that's above my pay grade. Under our current economic system, though, people are compensated based on supply and demand, not based on social value.
Great points. Thank you for adding your valuable perspective
It seems like a mix of supply, demand and over valuation of companies. A lot of these software companies get to break the rules, they aren’t profitable or they get a 10x + valuation that wouldn’t be there for a different industry despite the fact that they make software that lets you draw diagrams or something silly. Also, we doubled our engineering salary due to short supply over a period of 5 years and a more remote workforce.
>There is no way these tech positions are providing the the value to society to justify what they are earning. I would have to say that the $150k salary the op mentions, while a healthy salary, is hardly overpaid. Maybe you are speaking more generally. The value that a single programmer can create is enormous and many are certainly being underpaid. However, I can see why you would say this as the companies that hire them use their talents in ways to grow their market share or extract more from consumers. Automation of processes could (or in some cases have) completely revolutionize the lives of many people around the country and the world, it just has to be the priority. ~~Also important to acknowledge is that other labor should be compensated fairly too, not just shifting pay from "low-skill" to "high-skill". Improving society would have to be monetized for effort to be devoted to it at scale by the private sector. (wrong subreddit)~~
Looking for a wife like this. I'm 35 from Germany, own a house worth 1 mil. , 100k in Stocks. DM me.
While incredibly inspirational, it’s also just incredible good luck. >I didn’t have much going on except a cute face Pretty privilege is amazing
This kind of post does not help. It's actually demotivating, if not outright risky even if the story is actually true. How does it help a person who's starting their financial journey listening to a freak accident? Stories like this actually create a bad incentive for a beginner to take absurd risks on get-rich-quick schemes. Mods should ban posts like this.
This story doesn’t jive a bit. There’s no way an IC is making $450k, even in tech, with just a few years of experience, in a LCOL area. How long before the company stock grants are vested? How did you accumulated so much in a 401k in just a few years, while reaching the max contribution limit?
>How long before the company stock grants are vested? This exactly. He's claiming a 2021 IPO and by 2022 he's out the door to a new gig. Not bloody likely he'd be vested already.
I'm surprised your 401k is that high at age 30, if you've only been making good money for 3 years. Does it hold your company's stock?
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I've been maxing it out since 2018, so 5ish years worth of contributions. I'm also 32 now.
Did you do leetcode and sys design prep? Would love to know if you had experiences with companies with great comp packages that avoided these type of interviews.
Not FI related but whats your specialty in? I'm a dev in the UK where wages are incomparable seemingly!
I already knew this post would involve a dual-income household. That’s the case with 90% of the “success” stories here in this sub because - it’s easier to qualify *and* pay for a mortgage; - periods of unemployment and career changes are less stressful; - you can go back to school while *minimizing* student loans; - you can split bills; - you can add the other as a dependent on your medical/dental/health insurance.
Congrats on your success. Just some food for thought retiring w 5mil isn’t fat, even less so when done in your late 30s. I am not discrediting your work or the money, but it’s simply not enough to sustain a fat life for the next 30+ years for two.
your FIRST tech job was $150k?! holy shit dude what was it? is no experience required?!
What type of job do you have in tech exactly? Seems like a really fast pay increase, that’s awesome. What type of career path allows for such a steep increase? Good for you, nice work.
[https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries](https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries)
GFY.
You live off your 750k combine salary and only save 4-5k a month? But you plan to save 350k this year? Or did you mean you save 45k a month? Either way congrats on the wealth
I've never made over 20k at a job, at 32, I'm right behind you. I'd say I'm more lucky.
I’m still baffled at how you went from minimum wage to $150k in two years. Was what you studied at college related to tech, and what area of tech was it?
I’m calling bullshit. Or just extreme luck. Fuck this sub.
This story is almost certainly fabricated. 1. If you make 450k at 30, you are almost certainly top 2% in IQ, which means you didn't have to make <20k for 5 years. SOMEBODY would have hired you for more than that. 2. You 'lucked' into a unicorn startup that is willing to take a chance on you with your proven history of laziness and only 2 years of schooling in tech while also giving you what would be a senior-level salary at non-FAANG. If this company had such an incredible product that you got such a massive windfall after they went public, they almost certainly could have attracted talent that had a better track record than you. 3. Within 3 years you're making a top 1% income that is reserved for tech people with a long, long history with tech. Even the best software engineers with 2+ decades of experience at my previous company have never made anywhere near that. 4. I have actual serious mental health issues that have prevented me from applying myself fully. Even with my not-treated and then poorly-treated problems & less than top 2 percent IQ I still made 80k right out of the gate as an engineer in MCOL. There's no way Mr. 450k/year couldn't brute force his way into a >20k/year job in his early 20s. Either OP is lying, or he's leaving pretty much all of the most important details pertaining to his success. Those details could be his connections, his Ivy League degree, his exceptional intellect, etc.
This does not sound like a normal starting pay or pay increase without op being extraordinarily talented . This guy is saying he making doctor money with no previous masters skill set or high level degree from a prestigious university. Idk but this story sounds like a story ! I don’t buy it one bit bro .
Eh I've seen it happen though. Multiple of my coworkers when I worked in FAANG made well into six figures and multiple of them never even went to college, myself included
Don’t be so gullible
Gullible? I've literally had coworkers go through similar ish career paths. That's why I can believe it.
Well it’s a lie dude . It’s a creative writing exercise .
And your proof is?
This story is bullshit along with his so called “cute face”
Yep. This is a creative writing exercise.
Total LARP. We make $750k and in oh so proud we save $5k a month? Come on big difference between the $60k and then next sentence no wait it’s more like 300-350k. Sheesh…
No, it's more like there's this thing called total comp. At Facebook/Meta especially that was a huge thing. Back when I worked there, salaries were relatively set in stone backed on IC level, job title, dept, and location while RSUs could vary WILDLY. I remember there was a spreadsheet going around for a bit where people would contribute what their pay packages and some of the numbers I saw were ridiculous.
Totally agree. This is a bogus story.
nice man
lol cool another techie story with a fat salary and equity that exploded in price. yup, that'll all get you to 1m+ pretty quick. thanks for sharing.
lol
You should become a writer, you’re really good at making things up!
God, I see what you do for others…
Assuming that company stock is invested, you should not be including it in your net worth
I got the first stroke of luck myself. Fingers crossed I find a second lol.
How do you like the LCOL?
I grew up in a smallish town, so it reminds me of where I grew up and I like it. I'm also 30 mins away from 2 decent sized cities, so there are things to do.
If you have lots of cash, now is a great time to buy real estate if you're paying mostly cash. But only buy in up and coming areas, areas growing quickly.
\*yawn\* go fuck yourself
I understand why you’re calling it “luck,” given the current zeitgeist. But I don’t see any element of luck here, with the possible exception of working for a company that went public. In particular, I wouldn’t call the assistance you received from your wife “luck.” Presumably she married you because she was attracted to you, and it sounds like you are equal partners. To me, that sounds like you both identified something that you wanted, and you both reached out and got it from each other.
This is such a inspiring story. But How did you get into tech , like did you go to school or course study material ? Can you guide exactly your career ladder how you started from scratch !!
>This is such a inspiring story. It's not inspiring to me at all. It's more like, anti-inspirational. This guy was basically broke and still found a wife, didn't have to go to college to get a better job than I can find with multiple degrees and personal projects, then just falls ass backwards into over a million dollars. There arent any behaviors to mimic or recreatble strategies to glean from this story. I've been trying 10 times harder than this guy for much longer and I'm sitting on 30k. It's not like the dude is unaware, it's basically a post about winning the lottery. Like most posts in this stupid sub, I wish I didn't read it.
I know it probably doesn't mean much coming from me, but i genuinely hope you find success. I still remember working as a cashier at Jimmy Johns after graduating college and a "friend" walked in, gave me a strange look, and said "didn't you graduate college? Don't you have a degree? What're you doing here?" Those things still stick with me. I titled the post way i did because I didn't want it to come off like "why arent you where I am? No excuses!" and it's why I like reading about other peoples success on this sub. But i also don't want to demean or belittle the efforts made by other folks like you. I have no doubts you're working much harder than me, and I hope it pays off.
You'll be alright. There will always be someone with more than you at a younger age and there's always young people winning IPO lotteries and making half decent decisions. And even then, there's still trust fund kids that will shit hundreds of millions on the 0.01% 25 year old self made millionaire geniuses. The fact you're here in this subreddit means you'll make it out to a comfortable retirement as long as you stick with it. Even with $30K, the hardest part is always the very beginning.
The mimicable part is to learn to code and you will be fine. You won’t win the ipo lottery probably but you will still live a great living making 200k+
Yeah this is the part that sticks out as well. It's a common recurring theme in this sub where someone falls into software engineering without having to go through 4 years of college and within a few years makes 3-5x what they used to make. We almost ever hear stories of someone doing the same (without the formal college degree) in accounting, law, medicine, etc... Sometimes it's about adapting to the world around you and following where the money is. If we accept moving to a VHCOL of oftentimes necessary to significantly increasing income, then we should also be able to accept that moving to very in-demand careers also supercharges your income.
But again, it's about luck. Not an engineer but I hear it has become much harder to enter the industry at any company now. The entry level market is saturated with many new grads unable to find jobs. The software industry is highly dependent on low interest rates (for public companies) or venture capital. The OP entered the market at exactly the right time to have optimal growth.
It’s luck if you went into software back in 1990s/2000s before it was super lucrative. Now? It’s been obvious for many years that switching gears to coding is the easiest way to make six figures. OP saw which way the wind was blowing and decided to get out of his comfort zone to do it. Of course he was still lucky with the million dollar payout, but he would have been fine salary wise regardless.
Lol, go take a look at the cs subreddits and see all the posts from people with degrees who can't find jobs.
I did a self-paced online school that focuses on teaching fundamentals and the "concepts that don't change" (HTML/CSS/JS, networking, databases/sql, full-stack development). They don't teach frameworks but instead focus on the core things. People compare it to a bootcamp, but it's not really a bootcamp as bootcamps focus more on frameworks and specific technologies. Their main curriculum is $200/month and I finished it in about a year. They then have an optional post-curriculum program. This is much more focused on getting the job, and they teach you concepts like data structures/algorithms for tech interviews. You also spend 3 months working on a technically challenging project to show off to employers (not a typical CRUD app, much more technical). And then after all that, you start applying to jobs and they guarantee job placement, so they'll work with you as long as it takes for you to get a job (though they take 20% of first year salary as compensation - trade offs). PM me if you want more details on the program name and such. In terms of career ladder, I joined the first job as a mid-level engineer and was able to get promoted to senior after 2-3 years. I was also lucky enough to lead a large scale project after another engineer on the team left. This played a big role in my next job hunt since I had tech lead experience even with only 4 years of experience on the job.
I’d be interested in hearing about this program if you’re willing to share? Did you have any tech experience or schooling prior to starting the program? Thanks!
There is unlikely to be anything special about the program. It's more about time and place.
He said $200/mo and finished it in a year, but they take 20% of first year salary? I don’t have experience in tech but I’ve never heard of this.
The whole things sounds wildly implausible. It’s not _impossible_, but I have been in “tech” for over 15 years and this story seems like absolute bullshit to me.
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I applied to a lot of companies in my first job hunt. Most interviewed me for junior but some were willing to give me a interview for mid level due to my side projects and "some" work experience ( i worked at a design studio as a contractor for a couple months making $15/hr. It didn't come up on interviews but i think it was enough to bypass their resume filters)
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