Comment by fooker 2 days ago
Yeah someone joining a good company as a senior engineer in 2015 would retire with about 15M in assets now assuming smart investments (say... half on big tech stocks, half in market indices)
Someone joining now on the other hand, might have to resort to physical work at some point in the next ten years of things go south.
Okay, assuming you could invest 100k out of your 170k per year into companies you know were doing well on tech from 2015, how much would you have ?
(say: AMD, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Facebook)
The answer is about 10M, which is not that far from what I estimated, even without including Nvidia. Now add in house price appreciation.
There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.
Sure, just save 100k out of your 170k comp, that's totally how normal people operate. And not only that, also pick the right stocks rather than just sticking everything in an index!
Just magically turn 10x 100k into 10M!
You do not understand compounding growth.
You could have looked up the numbers for indices yourself, but here you go -
S&P500 -> ~4 million
NDXT (top 100 tech) -> ~14 million.
> just save 100k out of your 170k comp
Yes, that was my starting salary, and that's almost exactly what I saved.
This calculation assumes your salary is somewhat constant and maxed out as the person I was responding to claimed, but in my experience you can expect your tech salary to double every ~5-6 years.
$170K a year after taxes is $9900 a month net if you are living in GA - with fairly low state taxes. I calculated this on paycheckcity.com. That’s without taking into account health insurance cost.
So to invest $100K a year let’s say some pretax and some post tax, they would have to live off of $1700 a month. They are not going to be buying a house with that.
As far as wealth through equity in a house, that’s not liquid. What are you going to do borrow against it?
And actually I can speak for one of the best case scenarios for buying a house. I had a house built in 2016 in the most affluent county in GA for $335K - a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath - and sold it in 2024 for $670K and moved to state taxe free Florida and bought a condo in 2022 for half the cost (we kept both for awhile)
Even then, we could only do that because my (step)kids were both grown and I pivoted to customer facing cloud consulting in 2020. A niche that hasn’t suffered from the return to office mandates - ironically enough except for AWS ProServe (former employee) and Google’s equivalent internal department (who has been trying to recruit me for years).
Most people won’t and shouldn’t be picking individual stocks. Of course it’s easy to be a genuis saying what would have happened if you picked stocks that went up.
> There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.
Yeah, but there also isn’t enough wealth in the system for everyone to do this.
Like suppose that a) we’re now at a reasonably correct valuation for Nvidia b) assume a hypothetical where everyone in the US had plowed all of their savings into Nvidia in 2015. Result: The market cap of Nvidia is still $6 trillion, and the median American owns less than $10k in Nvidia stock.
170k after taxes leaves you with about 130k net, maybe 140k; if you live in a big city and have a family, it's almost impossible to save 100 grand of that 140k. More realistic you would save about 50k and still come out ok, but lets be realistic noone is saving 100k from 170k gross salary
$110K a year is more realistic after taxes and then you have housing, health insurance, car insurance, food, clothes, school expenses, etc.
You’re not realistically saving $50K a year.
In GA, after taxes your take home would be ~125k. So you think someone can live in a big city like ATL for 25k/year? What if they have a family? Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar? The 125k also doesn't have healthcare deducted yet.
Some of the comments on this thread highlight just how disconnected many people were/are from everything outside of the FAANG bubble.
If you live in an expensive city and do not have a proportional salary, obviously you are going to save less.
> Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar?
Yes, suppose spouse contributes to household expenses, but assume separate savings and investments for this calculation. Do you see you'd easily get to 100k saved?
The difference between having a large fraction of your savings in your bank account versus invested for the last 10 years can be quite a few millions, which is what most commenters here are failing to see. I'm sure the story was different between 2002 and 2012, but that was not what I talking about.
I did the math by going over to PayCheckCity.com. It’s actually $118K before health insurance.
https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/salary/georgia/resul...
This is very much tech bubble thinking.
Most developers in the US don’t work for tech companies and will never make ovdd $200K inflation adjusted. Developer salary is very much bimodal
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal
If you are working for boring old enterprise companies like banks, airlines, insurance companies or even most YC funded companies, “senior” developers will top out at around $160K-$170K inflation adjusted in tier 2 cities.
I spent my pure developer career [1] in Atlanta GA. Well known companies based there like Home Depot, Delta, Coke, and GE Transportation are paying their top developers around what entry level developers getting in BigTech.
But choose your non west coast city and you will see the same.