Alternatively, don't sell your youth to Google, facebook, Microsoft or Netflix.
Travel the world. Party with friends, within safe limits do sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Get a job at a company you like, learn stuff, educate yourself, better yourself, become an awesome software developer.
Buy a car that's too expensive, crash it, be stuck with the loan for six years.
Try to start your own startup, fail, go back to zero.
Have 20 girlfriends/boyfriends.
Have fun, live life, and at 35 don't sit around regretting that you gave the only youth you'll ever have to online advertising and increasing the ridiculous wealth of Larry and Sergey.
If you do that, you'll have an empty heart where your soul was meant to have been forged.
This is a popular narrative, that you make money or live, but you can’t do both. That is complete BS - it is equally dumb to be on either extreme, but it is very possible to do both. I have several friends who took the ‘live’ route, only to wake up in their 30s realizing they have an equally empty soul as the guys who worked too hard, and feel boxed out of the future they want with not much nest egg to start a family, or the experiences to have the career they want.
Here is to taking the reasonable middle road, the one no one writes songs about, but (I think) the one that most often leads to happiness for the average person.
You can also work for Microsoft in a different country like China, do that for 9 years, in exchange for the lower pay check (but really still quite generous salary), you can have the time of your life, and vacation in Thailand/Bali on holidays. Then afterwards, you come back to the states because you are expecting a kid, and the air pollution is a bit too much in Beijing, and then you get the job at Google because, why not?
Try not to crash your car on the public roads. The injuries might prevent you from having fun for the rest of your life after that. And I know a couple of people who were involved in crashes when they were young adults who are obviously mentally scarred (bring it up all the time) by seeing their friends die or feeling responsible for strangers dying, and they were not even driving.
You have only one body, why crash a car with it? Why give it the boat load of stress from being stuck with loans? Who is paying the world travel?
I read a blog on world traveling here once. A person did that for years and then realized that she was now a bartender with no valuable skills. She only had "experiences".
But you can do almost all that while working at Google. And imo, the stability makes it even easier to do so.
It's been my experience that Google is a super chill place to work, especially when you take advantage of the fact that you're just one cog among many.
You get 5 weeks pto plus 4 weeks work from anywhere. This year alone I'm going to the Arctic, Antarctica, and the Carribean.
Including a 40 day stretch without internet. I couldn't imagine doing the latter in a startup.
And all the while getting paid and having the comfort to make plans knowing that I'll (probably) continue to do so in the future.
I never understood religious people who confessed that they use to “live a horrible life of sin”. If it was horrible, they weren’t doing something right.
Or just do both? I’m currently 25 and doing all of the above whilst making more than my peers in FAANG. There is no reason having more fun means getting paid less. Work hard play hard.
Maybe it's a mindset thing, but I can't think of anything worse than wasting ~16% of my life like this (average male lifespan in the US is around 79 years). You're sacrificing a fair chunk of your prime years in the hope that it pays off long term; imagine if you followed this and died at 40? What a waste of a life. Or what if you make some bad investment calls and it doesn't pan out? What a waste of your time.
I made some good judgement calls and I've worked for decent companies where I'm not on a treadmill chasing every dollar; I'm still well paid to the point where I go on multiple holidays per year, own a majority of my own home, paid cash for our decent cars, and my wife has taken extended maternity leave because we can cope fine without her salary. AND I got to enjoy the shit out of those years.
No way in hell I'd trade that for the two million.
What is the quality of that time though? How much development have you missed out on? What relationships do you have? What's your health like? These are factors people don't think about.
I retired this year at 40 after a high demand career. I gave up a lot, but did manage to have a family and friends, though my health is completely trashed (big reason for the retirement).
I don't know how to do that nor do I have the capital do that properly, I think anyway. What I do know is what the modern US school system taught me: get a skill, trade that skill for a salary, save, live below your means, and invest.
You’re far less hedonistic than the target for this article I think. I’m sure there’s a balance, a sweet spot between investment returns and quality of life. Maybe you’ve stumbled upon it. But for me growing up working class poor this, if I could do it over again, I’d do this. I didn’t get married until 29 anyway so I’m not too far off from the timeline I proposed.
Maybe you're right and I'm just not the right sort of person for this in many ways. However, I would question how living in such a way that you're literally counting every penny for so long would affect your relationship with money. It would be a crying shame to have worked so hard for so long to earn it and then not be able to bring yourself to enjoy it.
Paying cash for cars though? Everything I’ve read says that’s not a wise use of cash. The asset loses a ton of value and by paying cash you’ve used it all chasing something that will never appreciate. That being said if you can get value from something for 10+ years that only needs upkeep and insurance maybe the savings pays for that? I dunno.
You pay cash for it and then run it into the ground. Cars will never be an investment (they're a depreciating asset, except in 2021), but this way you can keep your consumption to a minimum.
I've got a 14-year-old Honda that I paid $14K for. That amortizes out to about $1K/year. Annual repair bills and smog checks are still way less than $1K/year (I think I spend amortized $200-300/year, plus vehicle registration renewal, which is less on super old cars than new). I hear there are people out there now who spend $1K/month on their car payment. It's pretty nice to not have to deal with that.
It's got plenty of life left too - I'm hoping to keep it until EV technology stabilizes a bit and then just upgrade straight to whatever EV gets it right.
There is tons of great investment cars. Latest example of something nobody wanted until everyone does is VW Porsche 914, 2-4x in value in last ~5 years. You can never go wrong with any 911, Mercedes Pagoda or old BMW M. Even "newer" nineties BMW are starting to climb up from $1000 scrap value drift missile to $20-40K.
This is why you move somewhere with little rust and buy old classics. So many old mercs and porshes and rolls royces here in socal, among everything else you can imagine. A car like that bottomed out in depreciation 30 years ago. I've seen model A's, those probably bottomed out 90 years ago.
For starters I don't buy brand new, the family car was a low mileage, well specced 18 month old car. I'm not concerned if we lose a bit more money on it than we would have spent on finance; we can afford it. I worked for a bank for some time and it left me very much averse to using credit if I don't need to - I saw some horror stories there of people who ended up with so much debt that they would never clear it. Here in the UK it's ludicrously easy to get crazy amounts of credit. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I like to own things outright.
The other car is my fun car (2018 BMW M3), I don't see myself selling anytime soon.
What’s the alternative to paying cash for a car? Borrowing to buy it (more expensive), leasing it (usually more expensive), or taking Uber everywhere (way more expensive).
Borrowing to buy it isn't necessarily more expensive.
You could pay $50k for an average new car, or $10K + $40K over 5 years at 5% (~$5k extra in interest)
If you put that $40k into the stock market, average annual returns for the S&P500 are ~10% going back to 1928, so you would have made ~$24k over 5 years on average. That would put you ~$19k ahead after you pay off the loan with interest.
You could certainly buy at the wrong time and lose out by taking a loan. There are plenty of +/-30-40% years in those "average" stock market metrics. But historically it's been a pretty good bet if you're a gambling sort.
I did basically this except that I already had ~4 years of work experience (all in startups) when joining Google, I "retired" at 33, and then un-retired at 39 to have kids and buy a house in the Bay Area.
I wouldn't recommend doing it now, simply because "past performance does not equal future results". Joining Google in 2009 was an awesome move; the stock has roughly 15x'd since then. Joining Google in 2023 will probably not result in the same performance. Tech companies have this pattern of growing and growing and growing and then...dying. Just ask anyone that worked at Silicon Graphics in the 80s, Apple or Sun Microsystems in the 90s, or Yahoo in the 2000s. It's unlikely that Google will have the same growth or compensation in the 2020s that it did in the 2000s and 2010s.
The stock thing shouldn't matter right as long as the stock doesn't fall a bunch. If it stays stagnant like MSFT did for some 10 years that'd be fine because in this scenario you're vesting your shares every quarter not speculating on them growing in value over time since you can't predict how the company's stock will do any better than you can any other stock (otherwise you'd be the richest person in the world being able to reliably know when companies were going to fare well or not and where their stock prices would go).
It's funny you would bring up Apple. Accounting for stock splits, it was at $0.37 in 1995 and now it's at $184! I think the lesson is, if you can, work at Apple instead of Google. Also have a time machine and buy AAPL in 1990. Or NVDA a couple months ago.
Except nobody in their right mind wanted to work for Apple in 1995 - it was a broken, dysfunctional company hemorrhaging a couple billion dollars a year because nobody was excited about their products. And if you had gone to work for them, you would've watched your stock grant go from $0.37 in 1995 to $0.13 in 1997. I was a die-hard Mac fan - first computer was a Mac LC - through the early 90s, and even I gave up on them when they took the MSFT investment in 1997 because I felt like they'd sold out to the evil empire. Working for Apple in 1995 was sorta like working for Twitter in 2022. (Hmmm...)
I mean, I certainly didn't want to work for Apple in 1995. And Google didn't exist until 1999, so there's that. Back in 1995 there was Sun, Oracle, HP, and IBM, among others. Working at OpenAI would be cool now, but three years ago?
It's hard not knowing the future. AMD would be a cool place to work if they turned things around, but you don't get the same upside if you join after they've managed to turn things around.
There's usually an information gradient between when employees & early adopters realize a company is turning around and when Wall Street realizes they're turning around. It'll be subtle signs like: the company's hiring again, and hiring back people who aren't idiots. Prominent ex-employees who left go back to work there. The products don't suck anymore, and you actually get excited when they announce something. The product strategy starts to make sense again, and isn't an unfocused mess.
Microsoft under Nadella is a good example. Nvidia or OpenAI I'd argue might be an anti-example: most of the excitement for their stock seems to be because of the hype around AI, and they're already incredibly richly valued, while a true sleeper hit usually has much more subtle signs. (When I went to work for Google in 2009, my previous boss told me "Didn't you miss the boat already on that one?")
The truth is that those 13 years with a stupid high salary will change your relation to money.
You will live in a HCOL area, be around people with much more money, start thinking it is normal to spend 3M on a house, buy stupid things because it doesn't really impact your savings, making so much money will become a source of pride and make you feel good about yourself, and suddenly 2M will seem barely enough to keep up with the social circle you are now part of.
No one's getting promoted every 2 years from L3 to L8. Even going from L3 to L5 in 4 years is rare. Plus, most people who try to walk this path will plateau at L5 anyway.
That's still not bad, though. Graduate at 22, having banked a decent bit of savings already from 2 or 3 Big Tech internships. Make L5 by 26, coast for 5-10 years, and then call it a wrap. Invest in real estate as soon as humanly possible during that time, and scale out the real estate portfolio at the same time as the brokerage account and the 401k.
If I were to do it again, that'd surely be the fastest way to go.
Then again, if I were to actually do it all again, I'd love to do it all entirely differently. Maybe become a carpenter or something.
Thank you for the feedback I was leery of my assumption of the rate of promotions. I like your summary though that's more or less what I was thinking when I decided to write teh post.
Ha Ha! That really is pretty funny, and extremely telling of who actually is reading this stuff.
Thrust me millenials, you still have a long way to go... What you're calling "all grown up" is still not even into middle age.
But, the gist of the article does survive a forensic analysis even decades after the age of this author: discovering compound interest at a young age is indeed a major source of accruing financial success.
Of course, for most people this can't really be taught. I've been trying to tell my mid-20s son to invest 20% of his take home into a ROTH for years. Trust me, there is no satisfaction in being told "yes, you were right" once it's too late...
> discovering compound interest at a young age is indeed a major source of accruing financial success.
THIS!
I didn't listen to my parents when they tried to teach this to me, and I wish I had. If I had, I would not only be wealthier, but would have lived a happier life too.
I picked up on it in my late 30s, and while it still served me well, it would have served me exponentially better if I'd listened to my parents in my teens.
Sure, in general, and I'm not saying that this is a bad deal for everyone. But I bet your parents managed to have a real life in that time. There's something to be said for that.
I wouldn't do it for two reasons. First, it would be working at Google (which is a work environment I would very much dislike). And second, I have a temperament that allows me to start businesses. My first profitable business was five years of working (admittedly) more than 80 hours a week. I personally made a little more than $2M from it.
That return wasn't monetarily worth my sacrifices, but if we're talking about giving up my life for money, I'd do that instead of doing it for someone else's company.
All of which is to say that everyone is different! Just, to me, the question was "am I willing to not have a happy life for 13 years in exchange for $2M". No, I'm not. If the alternative is a life of making minimum wage, but living, I'd do that.
I wasn’t willing to be unhappy for one day to make more money. When a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me at 46 about a software engineering job, I wasn’t willing to relocate from my in house in the burbs of Atlanta (built in 2016 for less than $350K), and I never wanted to be a software developer for any large company nor did I want to be on call - even it did mean making $100K + more per year.
My bullshit tolerance is extremely low.
The only reason I work at BigTech now (at 49) was because the recruiter suggested a remote position in cloud consulting with no on call.
When I do leave here, it will probably be for a smaller company.
I didn’t have millions in the bank to make that decision. I was working for a small startup that offered 5 weeks PTO.
Yeah, it’s a tough balance for sure. I think the biggest difference is that we have options and greener pastures that have high risk and high reward. My parents were always there for me my whole life so I can’t complain. Would they trade all of that for more money? Depends how much probably. But they never even had the choice to begin with. I often reflect on that now that I’m older with kids. Is a job worth it regardless of money? What can I do so that when they are my age, I can support them to make risky decisions but have a fallback?
Neither have my parents - a retired factory worker and a retired school teacher.
But you know what they did? They have been married for 50+ years never seemed to be overly stressed about their jobs, lived in the same house since 1978 (which they expanded in 2006) and retired at 55.
Inflation. $100k/year in 1980 is $350k/year today. So $2M really isn't that much these days like it was for our parents (or at least, my parents, I'm not sure how old yours are/were).
I made an error. The error was not seeing that American companies pay 2x a month. So the numbers I was inputting were half. I've corrected it and it's not 5.5M.
What a waste. The goal is important but so is the journey. Sacrificing your youth for money by living at the edge of poverty is not worth it to me. But to each their own.
Society is what it is. Most of us will need to earn a living at a company and have a life in addition. Our goal should be to make the best of every day. Believe it or not having a job is a actually a plus but you have to balance it along with the other parts of your life. Too much of anything is a problem. We need balance in our lives.
I spent the first 13 years of my adult life drinking too much, dating the wrong women, hanging out with friends and getting married (to a former stripper) and divorced once (since remarried), I had a house built in the burbs of Atlanta at 28, and was a part time fitness instructor, bought too much investment property before 2008 and by the end of those 13 years, I was only making $90K
I would not give up those years for anything - especially not an adTech company.
I stumbled into my first BigTech job at 46 and did this in 2022.
1. Firstly how is it 4.6k / month, it should be more like 8-9k per month. I work in Seattle which is lower tax but also lower base and I get 8k per month as a new grad. So no you can easily save 4K a month, not 1.2k. The authors numbers are closer to that of a grad student that I also was.
2. Next, the main thing this article gets wrong, no you’re not going to become a principal engineer in Google in 16 years. L5 is terminal in Google, though with recent level inflation, a smart ambitious grad can reach L6 in 6-8 years (though much longer is common). Anything beyond that is not guaranteed, even if you spend long hours working very hard. Google is annoying in the sense that the promotion is far more political than it needs to be with a committee and whatnot that I often find it to be a shitshow but even if you take a much more results oriented company like say Apple, going beyond ICT5 is not easy. As an engineer the main thing that gets you promoted, is either solving a really hard technical challenge that the rest of the organization was struggling with. By definition these problems are hard, long hours won’t solve them. You also need to have an intuition of what’s solvable and what’s not, there are a class of technical problems in the organization which might essentially be impossible to solve with the current knowledge we possess and you can easily waste years of your life with nothing to show. I see few people who rise up like this and they are all exceptionally brilliant. The second way, more doable for the average engineer is to bring a product to the masses that’s moderately to highly successful. This requires luck, timing the market and good management skills to get something out there, you need to be the reason Google chrome exists etc. Both these pathways require more than just hard work, they require you to pick up a lot of skills and most importantly they also require luck. Sometimes you can be brilliant, use the right strategy etc and still have your product fail/ not solve the problem.
TLDR; going beyond L6 is not easy and most won’t reach there in their career
yes, I've fixed the errors in the calculation but the bigger problem is the promotion schedule. A more reasonable assumption is plateuing at L4/5/6 or so.
I am happy I traveled a lot in my 20-ies. Goa, India, Thailand. I haven't gotten into FAANG, moreover I rejected Facebook offer 1.5 years ago.
I have 9 year old kiddo, and I'm 40. I don't believe it's worth it - working your ass off for 1-2M, especially when real money is evaporating from your accounts: chicken I was buying a couple of years ago for $8-9 today costs $17-19.
My plan is to make a successful business. I have a couple of ideas, and one of my patents is in progress at the time of writing. A good friend of mine managed to get millions (air conditioners alone at the top of his roof cost 1M), so I believe it's possible when you think outside the box. Working for FAANG is inside the box.
I don't believe being engineer working for someone is a way to go, especially when companies like Google lay you off at the time when you're most vulnerable. Good luck paying off your mortgage on time when you're in 50-60-ies.
It feels like in the US, selling your body to anyone but corporations is seen as taboo. But selling your physical health, your sanity (good luck staying sane with 13 years of grinding and ramen), your young years, and so on to a corp is all above board.
I saw the same. Assume this is why he didn't pass the Google interview :)
The calculator he is using defaults to "semi-monthly" which I guess is twice a month. So you can double the money available before expenses which means a lot more after expenses.
The weird thing is that the semi-monthly number comes out to $5160. I have no idea where $4600 came from.
$10320/mo lets you have slightly more than $400/mo of fun while still saving quite a bit of money.
(I also take exception to $300/mo for utilities and $200/mo misc for someone trying to run their way up the Google ladder. We’re talking about people who are pretty serious about technology and who live in California where utility prices are nuts.)
There are many reasons I didn't pass the Google interview but every time I did interview I had the most pleasant experiences. The engineers were really, really nice.
Past performance is a poor indicator for the future performance of a company - just look at the Top Nasdaq 100 constituents for '00s,'10s and 20s. Google is in maintenance mode and not necessarily the best company for rapid promotions. Even worse, there might be a decade without a rising superstar corporation that could provide such an environment.
Also don't forget the side effects of early retirement: you "age" faster as most of your companions during the day will be actually retired people. You will loose the connection to your working friends etc...
It would kinda suck if you lived years hating your life for the future and then some stuff happened that would thwart those plans. Life is risky and nobody is guaranteed a death in old age, and no insurance can give your younger self a happier life, so consider living for the moment from time to time.
I mean no disrespect, but this is incredibly depressing, and the result is a few million dollars?
I didn't see any mention about doing what you are passionate about. Maybe it was implied by the result: save 2 million dollars, startup with no prior experience of doing so, instant success because $$$, then die of cancer because you ate nothing but ramen for 15 years?
You do you, but there is so much more to life - so many mistakes to be made - than living like Gladiator so you can be "retired", whatever that's supposed to mean.
If you want to make software, do it because you love it. If you want to make coffee, do it because you love it.
Love your family. Love your neighbor. Love yourself. You may die poor (maybe not!), but you will surely die very happy.
Average life expectancy is around 80, I think. Health insurance is really expensive, and it gets more expensive as you get old.
2M is a lot of money, but almost 50 years to spend it is also a lot of time. So, in the end you'll trade 13 of your prime years, will party like crazy for 2 or 3 years, then you'll realize that is time to get back to work.
This worked in an era where we naively believed in economical growth forever. It is becoming clearer that this can't be sustained forever and we are probably very close to the end of the era of eternal growth.
Compound interest is not magic, it can only exist if the real economy is growing.
This only works if you move out of the expensive areas and live a more simple life in probably a rural area. $2M invested at 4% a year is $80k a year. $2M invested at 7% a year is $120k a year. That's already outside the realm of possible in most top cities.
And if you're taking all of your interest each year, it's not growing. $2M and $80k/yr might sound OK in 2023, but by 2040... it won't be.
I never knew that metro Atlanta was “rural”. The median household income in the US is $80K. Yet, people aren’t all living on the street or living in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska
Lol, I actually live in Atlanta (are we a "top" city? we're like #10 largest metro in the US), and while our house prices are not as insane as SF or NYC, they're still astronomically high. Houses in Cartersville and Adairsville an hour north of GA go for $400-600k all day long.
Yes, the median salary in 2023 is 80k, and if you spend 100% of your interest, you'll average that. Now how does that $80k look in 20 years? Is it still the median? Or is it approaching bottom quintile?
I had a house built in 2016 in Forsyth County in 2016 for $335K with a 3.5% down payment FHA mortgage. While the median income is $80K, the median income for a college educated couple is $130K. I qualified for my mortgage when I was making $135k being the only one on the mortgage.
At 400K the rule of thumb is that a mortgage shouldn’t be more than 3.5x your gross income - that’s still less than the $120K that the parent poster said would cause you to live in a “rural area”.
IMO, I think Forsyth is pretty far out. Most of it is exurban and far enough from Atlanta that most aren't visiting much. You pass a lot of suburbs on the way into the city. As a county that voted 70% red in 2020, it's a WORLD OF DIFFERENCE culturally for a blue state tech worker in a way that Atlanta ITP, Cobb, Gwinnett and the actual core suburbs are not.
Even so, a lot has changed since 2016! A $335k house is $500k or more now. Which is the entire point I am trying to help you understand: even if you think the money is ok TODAY, when discussing 20-30+ years of retirement, you have to think about how well it will be in the future.
With places like Forsyth going from $350k to $500k houses in about 6 years, you can only imagine how inflation will eat away at your $80k.
I’m a Black guy who lived in Forsyth county from 2016-2022 and I still own my home there. I know it’s very red and I know all about it’s history (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rSqMiqZsCiY). While none of my family including my 6 foot 3 very big step son has had any hint of overt racism, when I walked into the school, they automatically knew who I was there to pick up. His friendship circle is like the rainbow coalition and he has often been the “guess who is coming to dinner” guy and hasn’t had any issues with parents.
On a side note, one of my sons best friends (a white guy) did help me prank the school administrator in high school when I went to pick my son up and they assumed my (step) son was my son because “he looks just like me” and I said I “didn’t know who that guy was (my son)” and his friend overheard the conversation and ran up to me and said “Dad!”
But back on topic as long as you stay out of the inner part of Forsyth (Cumming) you will find a lot of northern expats and professionals moving to Forsyth and while it’s still conservative, it’s more of a Bush/Romney “conservative” than what is the Republican Party today.
I haven’t seen any MAGA signs, any mention of the culture wars, and none of the “we see a strange Black man breaking into a house by using a garage door opener and driving in”.
I did something similar, but with the current low rate climate I believe using Google salary to buy an apartment / house and max out a 30 year fixed house loan is a much better investment, as it's a safe leverage and it will always be easier for the government to print money than building houses.
I'm always feeling steered away
By someone trying to tell me
What to say and do, I don't want it
I gotta go find my own way
I gotta go make my own mistakes
Sorry man for feeling
Feeling the way I do
Curious, how many read the whole post? Any comments on the style? Did you get bored at any point? How many saw my snarky initial comment or just the title and began commenting here about that instead?
Travel the world. Party with friends, within safe limits do sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Get a job at a company you like, learn stuff, educate yourself, better yourself, become an awesome software developer.
Buy a car that's too expensive, crash it, be stuck with the loan for six years.
Try to start your own startup, fail, go back to zero.
Have 20 girlfriends/boyfriends.
Have fun, live life, and at 35 don't sit around regretting that you gave the only youth you'll ever have to online advertising and increasing the ridiculous wealth of Larry and Sergey.
If you do that, you'll have an empty heart where your soul was meant to have been forged.