Comment by everdrive
4 months ago
I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op.
I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.
There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.
My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.
> I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours.
Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.
Sounds as if you think you have no agency in this.
You realize as a worker you're allowed to demand better working conditions right?
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> but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America
I actually think it’s easier to cut back vs chasing some magic high networth before retirement.
The average salary in Costa Rica is only 1200$ a month. Meaning if you live an average life there you might be able to retire with 240k. Assuming 6% yields per year.
Agreed. I'm quite content living a rather simple lifestyle, owning very few new things, doing almost of the maintenance on my belongings myself. The "magic number" was really more about giving myself permission than anything else.
The one thing you do have to factor for, though, is what happens if you don't keep your health. The thing that kept me in tech a little longer than I hoped to be there was a parent with long-term care needs. I could live a happy life on ~$2k a month, but it took five times that just to keep my mom alive the last few years of her life.
Living that cheaply does require adopting the lifestyle. But cooking at home or eating a casado from the local soda instead of a US-style restaurant meal sounds preferable to me anyway.
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Don't wanna spoil your dream, but have you actually lived in Latin America? Cost of living might not be what you think. I also have the feeling that foreigners don't really understand the crime situation. Of course, its a big regions with some variation.
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> I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it
This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then.
However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.
You got this!
>I had been used to six figure salaries
Great post but this is what it reduces to.
99% of people on the planet work because they have to work, not because they want to work.
This is hardly news for anybody but it still has to be pointed out from time to time.
> now at a community-owned grocery co-op
I find that space really interesting. Do you by any chance have a blog, or would you mind sharing a bit of your experience with it?
Also, any advice on research or reading materials? :) Thank you!
Folks who do what I do don't seem to have much of an online water cooler, aside from some National Co-op Grocer forums which are restricted access. Do check out ncg.coop though.
That said, I'll take the word of encouragement that maybe a blog would be interesting. You can do some really fun things at smaller businesses because it's fine if it doesn't scale. I can actually save us money by 3D printing or laser cutting things myself, and have done some fun projects around that. A lot of the tech projects I do are pretty much solo endeavors, which is challenging but also rewarding - that self-hosted project you tried out at home will almost certainly be robust enough for work. I'm one of two people here who write code at all, so I get to make pretty much all of the architectural decisions myself, and even a shitty Bash script is probably still 10x better than whatever process existed before. I also manage our product and marketing teams (did I mention it's a small business, lol?), which means I get to shape our message and values, and even be our taste-tester-in-chief.
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Sounds like you found peace. Good for you brother/sister.
What are your responsibilities at the co-op? I thought the idea was that people would work a few hours to get access to the product, but you said you work full-time.
Most grocery co-ops these days are staffed almost entirely with normal W-2 employees, the one standout exception being Park Slope in NYC which requires you to work a shift in the store to be able to shop there. The other ~170 co-op grocers in the US don't use this model, and in fact, don't require you to be a member to shop there at all. The co-op I work at is a little different in that it's a hybrid model, jointly owned by shoppers and workers, whereas most grocery co-ops are exclusively shopper-owned.
I run a lot of administrative functions that don't fit neatly elsewhere: POS, web, marketing, member services, community outreach, pricing, purchasing, product selection, vendor management, etc., but because I came from a tech background I also was gifted a lot of digital transformation and operations projects, which is fine because I enjoy that kind of work too. I've got a two pizza team helping me, although one would need to be vegetarian and the other gluten free. :) Ours is a fairly large co-op, with four retail locations and a wholesale operation. The median number of retail locations for food co-ops is generally one, so in many ways we behave more like a chain than most co-ops (although still small enough that locations run pretty independently).
That's lovely
I think we need to unionize, across companies. We need to be able to block stuff like this, and to be able to demand that you can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI (bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China). We also need to be able to hold our leadership to some kind of code of ethics. I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.
The best way to unionize is to follow what Mahatma Gandhi did: Non-cooperation movement.
It consists of two broad strategies:
1. Consumer Non-Cooperation (Boycott): Boycott of stuff sold, or given by these companies, irrespective of how attractive it is.
2. The Constructive Program (Self-Reliance): Building and supporting alternatives, even if they cost you a little bit more.
All it needs is little self-discipline and a very very tiny bit of sacrifice on daily basis.
https://www.nextias.com/blog/non-cooperation-movement/
Massive individually coordinated group actions only work is very dire circumstances which means for most everyday things they cannot be relied upon.
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The individual self discipline is great but the “collective” in collective leverage is what makes all the difference.
A heavily unionized tech industry over the last 30yrs would be an interesting counterfactual.
IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive? As is being able to get rid of bad performers
Unionization would hurt the startup ecosystem, at least at the margins, no?
This is a flawed argument, the current system gets rid of good performers all the time, and we have evidence of wage suppression, so employees don't get to negotiate on fair terms. You just get stuck in your pay band.
I agree it would be a good counter-factual, but I think the differences would be more around industry stability. Particularly, I think the ability for employees to push back against historical threats like off-shoring would have made the industry more appealing to younger people looking for something stable, and prevented this weird cycle of labor shortages causing salaries to explode, unqualified candidates pivoting to the industry using low cost training solutions (bootcamps, shitty masters programs), then companies failing to deliver on initiatives because the people they hired are poorly trained.
If we had 30 years of steady growth in CS education, then we'd have more experts in the field, doing a better job at executing. And it would likely cost companies less in wages as well. There are many industries where incredibly talented people make fairly modest salaries while producing world-changing products.
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> IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive?
I keep hearing this, but FAANGs don't allow individual negotiations. You are banded, like you would be at a union.
Also you're assuming that unions would be able to, or want to block the firing of bad performers. Since the bad performers would also hurt the bottom line, and therefore your pay.
Unionisation might hurt the startup as it would stop certain levels of exploitation (ie not being able to ask people to work for free in exchange for shares that will be worth nothing.)
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A union is merely a group of people who agree to work together for a shared benefit. That doesn't mean that there cannot be individual negotiation, nor does it mean you can't get rid of bad performers. There is no reason why it would need to hurt the startup ecosystem either.
If the tech workers wanted those things they could make it so, but they already could have made those things so already and didn't so...
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It would be a hard model to pick up and move over and just drop into place. The trades that have union halls for carpenters, electricians, etc., aren't normally working in anything as unstable or dynamic as tech startups. If I try and think back to how things were thirty years ago I don't think it really applies. Unions are for big shop floors where bosses could fire you on a dime and replace you and then you're SOL. Skills in high demand 30 years meant fine, you could just go work somewhere else just as easily. Who expects to be in the same place for 35 years anyways?
>IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive?
Why in the world are you convinced that you as an individual have a stronger bargaining position than the entire labor pool?
How in the world does that work in your head?
> bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China
I don't strive for 996. Is this really the bar we want to meet?
The funny thing most Americans don't realize about 996 in China is that the Chinese, while very hard workers, don't work the same way as Americans do. For example lunch is expected to be good (and taken pretty seriously) and followed by an in office nap. This is not some secret thing either but typically encouraged by the company (most office works will have blankets, pillows, eye masks etc at their desk).
Even the Chinese don't believe you can grind at your desk non-stop for 12 hours.
Don't get me wrong, 996 is awful, but the American re-imagining of it is even worse.
> I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.
Then don't? How is this a union issue?
OP is just using "union" as a way of articulating that he's extremely unhappy with current corporate behavior, and also that he wants there to be some sort of at-scale, easy-ish way to correct that behavior.
> can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI
This measure would either be toothless or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
> or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
The issue at present is that everyone is being laid off. If we accept this anti-union trope, let's t least accept that it is strictly better than the current situation where no job is safe.
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Right, let's do absolutely nothing so we can fire Joe, who's been underperforming for the last two quarters (because of healthcare issues, life affordability, lack of direction, burnout, etc).
My single minded focus is getting my finances in order so I don't need to work in this industry (financial independence) past 50. It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the open contempt for employees from the top down with no end in sight. Once you reach 50 it's just luck of the draw whether or not you are in the annual culling of the senior folks.
There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.
Another way to look at it is that naked emperors and snake tongues are leaving a LOT of passion and talent on the table. And customers (we all are, to someone) are similarly yearning for some basic progress, too. How did we get so good at failing to make anything out of that? How can we change it?
And there is no money cushion anyone [0] can leave to future generations that could offset just leaving it to the worst of the worst, the "synergy" of the insane running the asylum with no counter efforts, like pulling all cooling rods in a reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice
In that story the sorcerer saves the day. There is no such person in our story, and no group that play its role, and if we don't step up -- all of us, all of "them", everybody -- everything will be "awash", and nobody will "win" anything worth talking about, not on any timescales beyond what I would consider very short term.
Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.
Sure, but using the above comment as reference, I think it is increasingly a lot of things that are off-putting in the industry.
Maybe the opposite at Apple? I was told by another engineer (paraphrasing), "They can't lay you off past age 50 without expecting an age-discrimination lawsuit. They'd prefer to give you nothing to do and you leave on your own."
Perhaps you mean "fire" not "lay off"? Generally layoffs are structured to avoid discrimination risks.
But your performance reviews don’t have anything to do with age, so I don’t see how that could be.
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Yeah same. I guess I'll barista FIRE at some point and maybe have some little side projects here and there.
I dream about it everyday.
I love building software, but I can't stand working in the industry.
It's such an unholy combination of bad corporate culture and questionable moral principals.
There was a part of me who dreamed of doing simple entry-level jobs instead of working in tech, so I got a part-time job cleaning hospital ER rooms on the weekends. Everything has been fine for the most part, but it has been made clear to me how easy it is to get fired at entry-level jobs. The pay is really pretty dismal and the stability really isn't there. Overall the experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table. If there are things I can do to earn more and make my life more comfortable I just do them now.
> I got a part-time job cleaning hospital ER rooms on the weekends.
> experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table.
Sorry for the dark humor, but I'm imagining you meant collecting the pocket change that fell out on the operating table.
None of that is specific to this industry. It’s far worse in others. Grass always looks greener elsewhere
From what I've observed, the big problem with working in tech is that you have all of the responsibility but none of the authority or autonomy. By comparison, in most service sector jobs you have no authority or autonomy but also little responsibility. In other engineering disciplines you have a lot of responsibility but also much more authority and autonomy.
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Came here to say exactly this.
If people don't like building tech that's one thing.
But the problems most of this thread are discussing are just people and organizational problems.
If you want to live and make money you're probably going to have to put up with some level of bullshit.
Find the company with the least of it and enjoy the rest.
Yeah my job sucks shit too, I just make 1/3rd as much as MANGO software engineers.
Should’ve learned to program. At least writing python scripts with Claude has automated a lot of my job away.
Anyway, there’s a support group for your shitty job, it’s called the bar, and we meet daily.
This is the kind of attitude that keeps the world the way it is.
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When it comes to the shit imposed to the rest of society, and the shit imposed on office workers, it's worse in this industry.
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I see all this complaining from people in big tech nowadays, but I can't help but wonder, why act like the industry is just big tech?
There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.
A lot of those companies are located in the middle of nowhere or don't make enough for you to live in a city. If you are a minority in America, living outside of a city represents a MASSIVE hit to quality of life.
I work at one such research lab, right next to a very big city, with the ability to commute from said city. Similarly there are several in California, located near universities etc.
People want to make 500k$/year without the inconvenience of having a job.
Or rather they want to make good money without being treated like shit.
Believe it or not you can have your cake and eat it too.
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A large proportion of those smaller companies just cargo cult the practices of the big organizations, so you end up with the same kinds of frustration with the bonus of being paid much less.
Your call, of course. But when in your situation, I looked at when my youngest was to head off to college (when the nest would be empty) and I marked my calendar. To your point, while the rest would empty when I was at the age of 57, it didn't seem like I would need to continue to accumulate the spoils of a software engineer when I had the 529's, the 401k by that point [1].
And so at the appointed time, I walked away.
(My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.)
[1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)
About a decade or so ago, I started to see people I used to work with working at Home Depot and Costco. It struck me as odd seeing these brilliant developers stocking shelves and providing advice on sanded vs. unsanded grout.
The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, hence the job. All of them loved the physical work, interaction, and especially leaving work at work at the end of the day. They seemed relaxed and genuinely happy.
If you end up at Home Depot, chances are you'll really enjoy the work, plus I think they were still using an AS/400 the last time I peeked at their displays!
Haha, strangely enough that's also my post-retirement plan. Just dip over to Home Depot. And, I also know ex-tech workers who made the same move once they had enough to retire. Wonder what it is about that particular store that's appealing.
Today is my last day at my current employer. After some time off, I'm considering several different options. I have enough saved that retirement is probably doable, although last time I took extended time off I got bored much quicker than I expected. I'm also considering retraining for a different field but that seems kinda daunting, and no certain bet either. I was thinking of doing some open source contributions to test the waters on whether I really want to give up software dev or not. I might do part time work just for something to do and for decent health care. Luckily working in tech has been very lucrative, so there are plenty of options on the table.
I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.
I retired last year at 38. I live off 4% of my investments and I get to travel around to different countries every 6 months.
The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.
Do you live in a city? That's my number one concern. I don't need a lot of luxury but living in a major cosmopolitan city is a non-negotiable for me.
You could live anywhere. Just need to budget for it. Obviously living in Williamsburg is going to be a different than living in Houston.
When I was younger (50ish now) I could juggle full time work with side projects but I just can't now, especially with family demands. Full time work is pretty much burning me out. I'm close to leaving and starting a mobile food cart.
When I do get out I'll definitely miss the salary. I'll miss lunch with the other devs. Miss the walks with other devs around the building. Theres something special about folks in engineering. When I'm serving up lunch and overhear some folks talking SDLC I'll smile and reminisce. But its not for me any more. I'm the gray hat now and have no desire to write code for someone elses fortune. Good luck getting out!
I'm younger than you, and probably haven't been working in tech as long, but I've been having similar thoughts. No kids, so I'm maxing retirement accounts, saving as much as I can, and trying to start my own small software company for niche applications.
Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.
I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing...
I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).
>and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements
How about quality of life improvements? Or life in general?
how much have you been saving so far? I talk to a lot of people that saved 10M$ and still feel this is not even close to enough.
Ha, if I had $10M, i'd be way gone. Pretty sure I could live my lifestyle for the next 30 years on that. I could live it on $5M, pretty easily. But where I'm at, I'm at the fringe, even if I have to move to Canada for healthcare when I'm old. And I'm saying this from having a house paid-off (where the taxes went up something like 40% last year -- and I'm guessing will keep going up?).
I'm not convinced living in the US that all the financial planning algs that big finance institutions are using and going to hold up in the future, and curious how it works for a whole generation. But time will tell. So far the cycle always corrects itself. I'm especially curious how it works when there's going to be a lot more early to mid-50s employees being forced into retirement, who are going to be living a long time, yet.
I'm especially paranoid about my prospects of retirement if the market dives 50%. It's happened in the past, and plenty of old hacker news articles about how it really screwed up people's retirement plans. Look back at Stock market returns for some tech companies from 2000 - 2014. That's a big span to fill.... ( I think I read somewhere that the market return for 2000 - 2010 was just over 1% year, someone should fact check that, though).
If $10M or, hell, even $2M doesn't seem close to enough then there is no amount to satiate one's thirst for more money.
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Same here, I just need to figure out what I realistically want to do. Health care is the primary requirement; enough money to get by and not hit my retirement accounts is a relatively close second.
I agree, health care is primary. I see a lot of people on the FIRE forums who are young and haven’t really looked into what insurance can cost in the years leading up to Medicare eligibility age. It’s the best argument for working until close up 60.
Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
Why does everyone absolutely need insurance?
Nowadays insurance costs upto 5000$/month with high deductibles and plenty of bureaucracy and paperwork.
I have decided to not get any insurance and negociate directly with healthcare provider (They almost all give you huge discount if you pay cash so they don't have to deal with the insurance backdoor deals). If you FIRE anyways, you should really consider medical tourism and do major procedure abroad.
Everyone is afraid of a catastrophic 1M$ one time event. I get that. But if you end up paying 50k$/year in insurance cost for 30 years that you could have invested and compounded instead, do you really need insurance? For that one-off event that you could have saved for instead?
I guess my view is that I'm also ok to have a 0.1% to go bankrupt over this. We all got brainwashed into getting insurance at absolutely any costs. It is clear to me that it is not worth it at the current price.
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Yep, I could probably retire already if it wasn't for the crippling cost of health insurance and healthcare in general (Thanks, USA).
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I'm pretty much there right now too. I'm not quite 40, but I want out
Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out
Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something
I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI.
However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.
The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.
I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.
Hello! I am in the same boat. Got a kid under 10 too. But I have no regrets yet. The time off was priceless and we never know what tomorrow will hold. My dad was dead when I was 11 so I never planned on playing it safe to try to retire early or even on time.
Hang in there and stay with it.
Already did it. Own a coffee shop now. I still do some tech work, but it's mostly for my own use.
Does it make a profit? I looked into it but the startup and running costs means I would have to sell more than 100 pretty expensive coffees per day just to break even.
Yes. Margins are high in coffee. We serve a high quality product that customers feel is priced in the value range and we are at like 70-80% blended gross margin. There are plenty of busy shops at >80%.
It takes time to ramp up, but 100 orders a day is nothing. We do more than that in an inexpensive suburban strip mall. You can easily get into the hundreds in a high traffic location.
The key is to develop a base of regulars. Even a couple hundred of them is enough to keep the lights on.
We are open from 7:30-3 and do about $50k/mo. Work is like being at a party all day and cleaning up at the end. It’s the same people all the time so you’re basically hanging out and chatting with them all day.
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100 is no big deal
I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been looking into becoming an electrician for maybe like 6 years before I retire.
I know someone who was a DBA and became an electrician and now retired after about 10 years doing that. By all accounts he loved it, spent his days doing odd jobs for old people while chatting with them over many cups of tea. However (here in the UK) you do have to obtain and keep up with certification.
Maybe you can stay in tech, but help undoing all the nonsense that's been done.
Make a dumbphone (that is actually smart and works for you). An open-source television. local AI models. A browser that doesn't spy on you.
Idk I calculated through my financial needs after retirement for 13 years (67-80) which would be around 400k€ and calculated through my savings I'll accumulate until then, if I keep up my current saving rate. I'll end up saving around 270k€ so ultimately I decided fuck it, Ill just take jobs where I can live comfortably right now and hope for the best in retirement. I take jobs that are fun to me. I have 37 years until retirement and will never be able to afford a house or whatever so I can switch industries whenever I feel like doing so.
Man, do I feel this, but my situation is a little different in that we are similar ages but my kids are (nearly) all adults. I've put enough in 529s that both of them will be able to graduate without any debt, something that I feel will give them a huge advantage in life.
I dream, often, of working somewhere where the problems are simple and the work is rewarding. I will likely end up retiring before that happens, and then spend my time volunteering and gardening.
I have similar feelings. When I started working at my first job, we were trying to make our enterprise product so easy to use it would be like 'a piece of software you'd buy on a CD at the supermarket.' (this was the late 1990s). We really did spend time on polish that made the product better and easier to use (it was sold as a product, with optional support), and I loved re-writing bits of UI and refactoring on my own time to make it great. But over the decades that followed, the new features became subscription based, and metrics were introduced, and were gamed... Now I'm quite cynical about the industry. I'm 54, and the company I work for is about to announce a restructure. I'd consider doing something else for a similar last few working years too, but I'm not sure what else I'm good at!
It's been obvious for a long time that if you get a tech salary you should be saving for financial independence, meaning saving aggressively (above 50%) and investing that in a low fee tracker fund. Like planting a fruit tree, the best time to start was a decade ago and the second best time is now.
If I can get a few more good years in the stock market and save and invest as much as possible I could probably be done in 5 years and not have to work anymore or just work till I’m fired.
Nothing solid, but if I have to spend 55-62 pouring beer at my local pub to cover medical insurance, I won’t be sad.
Or I’ll finally get around to obtaining an Irish passport and move to the Med.
save 70% of net and (try to) reject the hedonistic treadmill
I’ve been searching. I can’t find anything else that pays even remotely close to tech. It’s a sea of $40-60k jobs with a lot of work at the ground level.
Every CxO on the planet is foaming at the mouth now, because they see AI as the way they can finally cast tech into that sea of $40-60k jobs. I knew a (jerk) founder who would openly grumble about how expensive tech talent was and how "one day, when tech cools off, you guys are going all to be paid like the guys on the manufacturing floor..." Typically they're not so mask-off but I bet a lot of them think like that.
If anything AI is going to get rid of the lower tier tech jobs. There will be much fewer but they will pay 7 figs. Basically you replace 10 devs with one super dev and a fleet of agents.
At least that’s what the CEOs seem to expect.
Interesting that they never seem to think the executive suite is overpaid -- for some reasons it's always everyone _else_ who is overpaid.
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I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites.
It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.
Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.
All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.
In my early 40s here, FAANG for 20 years, definitely don't see myself working in tech for much longer.
I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.
Is that research still happening?
I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
Fair point. I don't know the answer to that question but we definitely live in one of the worst timelines right now.
I don't plan on leaving technology, but I am scaling up a side hustle as a hedge.
I'm out in 2 years, late 30's and a decade in IT/Sec, run a security team now.
Going into something like nursing - union gig, a relationship with AI and tracking I'm comfortable with, walking around money, a job I can show my kids that is about service vs. the inhumane aspects of tech, a career that scales despite technology of the next 20 years (or at least my best estimate of these risks).
End of the day, writing on the wall is clear as day
- Automation of a professional class is coming, just like in trading from '90s-2000s. It's ugly, the pros will deny it until the end, but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts. Engineers are up, financial analysts are up, jr lawyers are up... that is a scary future, I don't need to wait for 5 years for thought leaders to catch up to this.
- Labor rights and labor conflict are always a thing, it has been fair that SWEs exempted themselves from caring about it pre-AI, but post-AI I'd buckle up. If you're an engineer that has dug into AI heavily, and understand how the nature of your job for the next 5-10 yrs has changed, then you should be thinking about your relative labor advantage. Is it still a cake 500k/yr job if you're tracked every 30 minutes? Give me a break.
Fwiw, this tracking shows up at Big Corp and should be expected - Fortune 500s, likely FAANGs, and other spots with top-line insider threat risk. There are specific vendors worth seeing if they are installed via the MDMs or local processes.
Past that, most IT/Sec teams can do it with existing tools, but it's often down the line after getting capable detection/response for real security issues, insider threat, and then monitoring a workforce if so desired.
> but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts
And what job class was this?
trading, from the 1800's to about the year 2003, to 2003 to today
I'm SO happy to have retired a few years back!!
probably a year or two. definitely less than three years. by then SWE as a job is gone.
Leaving tech altogether and working for dystopian companies like Meta are just two choices in a broad band of possibilities. You could also go work for yourself.
What if you were a brilliant young engineer and you wanted to work for a growing company that is being run by sophisticated business leaders who are financially successful enough, and who respect and value their employees so highly that they can afford not to do any of this degrading employee tracking at all?
Is it too late for that already?
Well I wouldn't consider myself particularly sophisticated, but I run just such a business myself.
So... no! It's not too late!
You can absolutely do that. But you'll have to network hard and find those people.
It's not impossible, and you may have to work some of those less-desirable jobs in the process. I have a theory that you'll actually find more of those companies as AI proliferates because the work that a single good engineer can do is being scaled very quickly.
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> how many more years do I need to work in tech?
The right answer should be "until you are able to do it".
That's the whole premise of welfare. Anything less or more is privilege/vice
Working in tech until you are able to do it is sage advice, but getting employers on board is difficult. Usually being able to do it is a prerequisite to begin working in tech in their eyes.
As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less.
Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.
A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.