Comment by raw_anon_1111

Comment by raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

34 replies

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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.

fooker 2 days ago

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.

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  • ahtihn 2 days ago

    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!

    Reply View 15 replies
    • cwbriscoe 2 days ago

      I haven't got to 10m yet, but I saved 70-80% of my take home pay since ~2008 and I have enough to quit at any time and live the rest of my life without working. That is just by investing in the 3-fund portfolio and without the crazy SF salaries.

      Reply View 5 replies
      • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

        No one knows you here. Give some real numbers. How much are you paying for housing? What’s your gross pay?

        Reply View 4 replies
    • fooker 2 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 7 replies
      • ahtihn 2 days ago

        Your math seems way off?

        NDXT went from ~2300 in 2015 to ~12500 in 2025. That's ~5.5x return. So even if you had your whole 1M saving in 2015, you'd only have 5.5M now. No idea how you get nearly 3x that?

        And it's way worse if you take the actual scenario which is 100k added every year instead of starting with the 1M.

        S&P500 is worse yet, at about 3.5x total return if you had the whole million at the start.

        Reply View 3 replies
      • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

        I calculated saving $100K out of $170K gross some pre tax and most post tax is living off of around $1800 a month.

        And again, expecting your salary to double every six or seven years is not realistic for most developers.

        Most developers making around $120K in 2013, aren’t making $480K now.

        Reply View 0 replies
      • LunaSea 2 days ago

        $170K as a starting salary, scratch that, as any salary, is already way beyond the average SWE salary.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

          That’s true. I said “top out at”. When I left AWS working in the ProServe (cloud consulting division) in 2023, I was seeing “architect” positions in Atlanta - I didn’t live there any more, but most of my network was still there - topping out at $175k. But for “senior” developers it was even less.

          I obviously decided to stay in consulting and work full time for a third party consulting company.

          Reply View 0 replies
    • fragmede 2 days ago

      Shit, dump that $100k into bitcoin at the low point of 2015, and you'd have $37 million today. Easy!

      Reply View 0 replies
  • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

    $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.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • Marsymars 2 days ago

    > 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.

    Reply View 6 replies
    • fooker 2 days ago

      I meant everyone with a good tech job, not everyone in the country.

      About a 1:1000 ratio I'd guess.

      Reply View 5 replies
      • Marsymars 2 days ago

        Sure, but there was nothing stopping people with $10k in savings in 2015 from buying Nvidia. If someone with $10k in savings had bought Nvidia in 2015, they’d have $2.5m today. But that only works for a relatively small number of people before the $2.5m is no longer $2.5m - they’re all drawing from the same $6 trillion pot. “Everyone with a good tech job” is accurate, but besides the point, it would work exactly the same if you limited it to “everyone who’s a plumber” or “everyone who’s a fedex driver”, but literally cannot work for everyone at the same time.

        Reply View 4 replies
  • FitchApps 2 days ago

    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

    Reply View 1 reply
    • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

      $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.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • matwood 2 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 6 replies
    • fooker 2 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 4 replies
      • matwood 2 days ago

        Ok, so you need 2 people working in tech making near top end salaries for the area? You do see how this simple idea of saving 100k/year isn't so simple for anyone outside of FAANG?

        Reply View 2 replies
      • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

        > If you live in an expensive city and do not have a proportional salary, obviously you are going to save less.

        I assure you that my hometown in South GA (a cheap city) didn’t have $170K a year developer jobs.

        A friend who moved to Columbus GA after college in 1997 I doubt is making $170K now.

        I know my friend who still lives in Atlanta and is a lead developer at Home Depot (one of the few F500 companies based in Atlanta) just crossed around $170K and he has been there 10 years.

        Reply View 0 replies