Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hiphipjorge 2342 days ago
> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career.

I’ve never quite understood the dynamics of this. Do people mostly self select? Is there organizational pressure to do this? Is the constant rate of change in terms of technology too exhausting for people to keep up (More senior engineers are def capable!)? In my experience I’ve seen a it of all of these, but honestly not enough examples to see clear patterns (...precisely because I’ve only worked with people in their 20s and 30s).

9 comments

I'd like to think it is due bad HR practice, based on complaints about companies I've heard from recruiters.

The industry is still relatively young and the difference from one senior to another senior engineer is simply too wide to assess their competence with bad HR practices.

A senior engineer co-worker I had at previous big tech company had only experience working in big companies, and refused to learn new-tech. He stuck around his own module written in his own way, and rarely tried new platform/languages the department now used. Most HR people are told to avoid hiring a person like this, and with bad practices they just filter with age. That is at least the situation in Scandinavia.

This, while the industry cries for "tech talent shortages" and simultaneously refuse to hire entry-level engineers. The crazy thing is "old" in this context applies from 40+, according to a study conducted in my home country.

Personal experience about ten years in: Churning out code gets a bit sameish. I mean sure I've got a new job now with more responsibilities and a different domain, but in the end it's still forms, validations, API calls and database storage. The technology has changed but it's basically the same thing I learned in school.
Look at the salary change between Principal and Distinguished Engineer, it's virtually non-existent. Most projects, even at the FANG level, do not require 30 years of incredibly specific technical experience. There just isn't an incentive to pay these folks a lot more, and this has a secondary effect of pushing them into things that can (management), or retiring. Realistically, if you've made $500k+ total comp for the better part of a decade, you can retire.

I used to work for a healthcare company and we often, if not routinely, had radiologists (avg. comp $600-700k plus bonuses, starting after residency so around age 30 or so) retire between 40-45. Our manager jokes that they worked 8 years to pay off med school and 8 years to fund their retirement, then they were done.

Is radiology still so profitable now that it is so easy to outsource?
Well I didn't discuss profitability at all, only how much the average individual radiologist makes in salary (at the one company I worked at). What do you mean by outsource?

If you mean to other people/companies, yes. Hospitals are much more inclined to outsource to private radiology practices precisely because they're so expensive ($500k cash comp plus bonus seems the average for a couple years post-residency). Smaller and even mid-size hospitals can't keep a radiologist busy all the time, especially off-peak hours, so even with a retail markup it ends up being cheaper to outsource.

If you mean to AI/ML, those applications are incredibly specific, usually hit-or-miss depending on the model, and I'm not aware of any that are actually approved for clinical applications prior to a physician reading the study anyway (they may exist I'm just not aware of them).

Mostly self selection. This data is -extremely- off. Who is most likely worried about their salary, or most likely to search about it and compare?

If I had to guess, the median salary for a software engineer in the USA is about 100k. For 15 years experience, probably about 150k. Yes, you might make 200k in the valley sharing an apartment, but for every one of those are three in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, etc who are content with much less.

Most software engineers in the US don't take this survey. The ones who do have something to prove.

It's frankly crazy that software people make only 100K.

Yes, I know the industry is huge, and has many different areas and levels of difficulty, and required skill. But it's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.

This can't go on, it seems only natural that pay is going to keep going up, especially when people realize how hard and complicated this stuff is, and how much demand for it there is, in terms of how much power and competitiveness it gives businesses, and how relatively few people can really do it at even a passable level.

My property manager quoted me $90/hr to change a lightbulb. My jaw almost hit the floor.

> somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines...

You should do some research on how much mathematicians and theoretical physicists who actually do crazy feats of applied and/or pure math (as opposed to using some standard library sorting routine and calling that crazy feats of applied math) and put insane hours into incomprehensibly difficult problems get paid. (Granted, there’s seldom immediate effects on economy.) Then you’ll probably feel lucky.

The university won’t go bankrupt because someone’s research didn’t pan out. The lack of any commercial pressure means these jobs are not comparable.
Gp was arguing about merit vs pay. If you’re going by market forces then lawyers should be paid more, because market has thus far decided that they are.
> t's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.

This isn't mysterious: the legal profession is controlled by a corrupt guild engaged in regulatory capture, while engineering is more or less an entirely free labor market.

You are comparing average salary for software engineers to the revenue number for a lawyer. That revenue number isn't his salary because it is unlikely that he is able to bill 40 hours a week.

A better comparison would be the average salary of lawyers vs the average salary of software engineers. Or the average billable rate of a software engineer consultant vs the billable rate of a lawyer.

Have you looked at what lawyers get paid? The law field has a very strange bi-modal salary distribution.

https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/the-most-important-chart-in-...

Completely agree.

Just not sure what the endgame is. Attorneys and many other professionals are REALLY entrenched. They're kind of in the sweet spot of, enough money to be influential (unlike most traditional trade unions), enough members to have national lobbying clout, but not big enough to be considered "big and bad".

It's the same deal with realtors, doctors, attorneys, architects, CPAs, and other jobs considered "upper middle class".

I just can't help but think something has to give with these kinds of work over the next 20 or so years. If companies like Uber can figure out a way to break another massively corrupt guild (taxis and medallions), there have to be ways to route around many of these professions decidedly customer-hostile behaviors.

>Just not sure what the endgame is

Automation? Presumably most of the non-ambiguous parts of the legal system could eventually be translated into computer programs. If smart contracts ever really took off this might happen.

True engineering is a regulated profession in at least Canada. Legally, I cannot call myself an engineer of any type. Ironically, my current and potential salary seems to be much higher than an engineer below P.Eng certification.
There are a bunch of underemployed lawyers. I think the supply constraint is really about the number of people who can do the job well (aptitude+knowledge).
Many people in academia do all this and more for much less pay and job security. Some of them invent the math you get paid 3 times as much (at least) to apply.

I guess they fall into the dumb-ass category of your binary classification of everyone as either software engineers or dumb-asses.

This can't go on, it seems only natural that pay is going to keep going up, especially when people realize how hard and complicated this stuff is

Well your lawyer isn’t running around telling everyone that what he does is easy and anyone can do it, he isn’t slagging off every other lawyer and telling you the contract needs to be totally rewritten in a very slightly different style every 6 months, he isn’t crowing about a lawyer shortage and calling for open borders to get foreign lawyers to make up the numbers...

Plumbers and electricians don’t do this either. In fact no one else is so eager to devalue their own work.

The general disempowerment of tech workers relative to lawyers, accountants, doctors, MBA’s and so on is 100% of tech’s own making.

...in addition, only techies proudly acknowledge giving away their best, most innovative and most valuable work product, completely for free.
When someone says “I love programming so much I’d even do it for free” their manager has a good laugh, out on the golf course with their MBA buddies
Tbf you also cant go straight from HS->Lawyer even if you tried
This example is so wrong it's borderline lying. The median attorney salary in the US is $115k. Some make $500k but most don't, just like some software developers make $500k but most don't.
... software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy

Individual engineers tend not to do anything like that though. They work on tiny cogs that build up to a huge economic machine. No tiny cog is unimportant, but none of them have any real power either. Tiny cogs are replaceable.

An analogy would be suggesting people who design truck windshield wipers should earn millions because trucking is the basis of the retail and industrial economy, and without trucks everything who stop and we'd all starve. It might be true if you do a bit of mental gymnastics, but it's never going to change anything.

All I'm saying is that, if you look at the number of people qualified to do this kind of work (high-end software engineering) throughout the economy, it's vanishingly small.

Personal anecdote: I'm in the process of appealing my property taxes in Cook Country, IL. The attorneys who do this regularly work on commission and charge 10-20% of what they save you. This nets them in some cases 3-5K for a day, or even half a day's, work.

I'm not suggesting there's some terrible moralistic injustice being done here. Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL. Keep in mind, huge numbers of people graduate college in the US and can barely write a coherent paragraph, let alone manipulate symbolic logic or apply the kind of structured, rigorous thinking required to write bug-free code. And then consider how much overall demand there is for it, all the things computers can be made to do, the reach, and the scale, and it's not hard to imagine a future where software devs are compensated as least as well as, if not better than, attorneys.

high-end software engineering

Your original post was about the average salary engineers get, which implies you're referring to average engineers. Shifting the post to be about high-end software engineering means you should also shift to talking about high-end lawyers. You can't reasonably talk about high-end engineers who get average engineer wages compared to median lawyers. That doesn't make sense.

Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL.

That's absolutely not true. Programming includes all manner of things from complex tasks like hacking on the Linux kernel or writing shaders for games, right down to making a VBScript macro in Word or writing a formula in Excel. Once you realise that you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program" in the sense of turning an algorithm in to something a computer can understand. Programming is relatively easy. What's hard is programming well, designing programs that interact with each other, and working out what needs to be programmed in the first place.

> > maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL.

> you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program"

"hundreds of millions" seems comparable to 10% of the population.

> it's not hard to imagine a future where software devs are compensated as least as well as, if not better than, attorneys.

That future is already here. Starting salaries for attorneys at top-tier firms are higher than starting salaries for engineers at top tier tech companies, but not by much, around 10%. Once you factor in the 3 extra years it takes to get a law degree and tuition costs, it's fair to say that attorneys are paid less than engineers.

While attorney compensation at top firms grows pretty quickly every year (5 years out of school, you can hit 300k with bonus), very few attorneys last this long (average attrition is 3 years), and again, this is only the very top tier. Also, generally attorneys work far longer hours than engineers and have a much more stressful work environment.

Unlike a lawyer (say top 25%) at a good law firm pushing 15 years of experience, I'm was already salary capped at about 35 years old, and can count on barely inflation-level raises for the rest of my career unless I move to management or start my own business.

At 40, a good lawyer is making partner and starting to enjoy a share of his or her firm's profits. I'm still sitting in an open office working on Jira tasks without any idea of how my company is doing because engineers are completely isolated from the financial books, even at smaller firms. I am learning yet another JS framework, and not able to network or learn anything related to the business. I'm glorified 'IT'.

The lawyer is wearing $1500 suits, flying business class to meet with clients and other attorneys, has an office and an expense account. I'm relegated to JIRA monkey tasks, and on another death march on Friday evening fixing bugs and eating "free pizza and snacks" our scrum master bought us for working another weekend.

At 45, the lawyer is now making more and more money, and respected more as he's now an experienced attorney, and can assume he will probably continue his upward path for the next 15 years

At 45, I just got replaced by some 25 year olds on H1Bs, and after doing well on several interviews but receiving no callbacks after the in-person, am researching Just For Men™ to get rid of the gray in my hair. I'll find it harder and harder to find jobs as I'm told I'm "not a great fit" for most teams, and will spend increasingly longer time periods completely unemployed, burning through savings. The jobs I do eventually get, will pay less than I earned at age 30.

At 60, the lawyer, now full partner, owns a large chunk of his firm in equity, and can work what he wants. He's made enough to take it easy, or can put in more hours and keep pushing up his salary.

I've pretty much given up as half the corporate jobs in my city were offshored or using H1Bs, and the rest are only hiring cheaper 20 somethings as there is now not much demand since the bubble just popped (again) like it did when I was 30, 40 ,and 50. At this point, I just pray I can make it to 65 and Medicare before getting really sick, and that my 401K will last me until I can take early social security at 63.

https://blog.shortbar.com/the-end-of-the-country-developer-7...

I wrote that about two years ago. There are many parallels between how attorneys and software people work which I think you recognize.

One I've brought up several times already in this discussion is that where one chooses to work -- not just how well one interviews, how hard one negotiates, etc., has a big bearing on pay. And there are many reasons why someone might choose to work in a non-FAANG (parallel: BigLaw) setting. Maybe they want to live somewhere else, they enjoy a more specialized boutique area of work, they want more lifestyle flexibility, etc. Larger point, us devs could learn a lot looking at how attorneys or other professions think through these tradeoffs.

Funny, I was talking to my wife earlier tonight about what we should aspire to. Is making as much money as possible really the goal? How much income is it worth to have a short commute and less stress? With a kid on the way in 2-3 months, I find my thoughts coming to this stuff rather often.

Comparing an annual salary to attorney's contract rate is not apples to oranges. Developer median salary is quite a bit closer to attorney median salary. Additionally, salary is not based on difficulty. It is based on supply and demand. Sure, high difficulty is going to reduce supply. But more people need lawyers than they need programmers and as mentioned above, attorneys enjoy some regulatory capture (including the extra, expensive schooling and testing required) that keeps supply low as well.
Its very expected if you think about the personality profile. What do you expect from a distribution that leans towards nerd? It makes sense too, some of us get to be super rich, and very few of us really poor. Most are in the middle, and ad “computers”, we earn better than nurses, actually, which isnt bad. We do get bullied by management often, but many others do too.

In the end, pain, especially financial, teaches; and its what helps people push themselves forward and up.

It's in waves. These dime a dozen boot camps are turning out some really awful programmers, and I have the displeasure of working with a lot of them. If there is a real wave of 'we want people who understand what they're doing', salaries will be through the roof. But in today's climate, those boot camp folks do fine.
> My property manager quoted me $90/hr to change a lightbulb. My jaw almost hit the floor.

Bear in mind that the tradie who does the job is most likely not getting paid $90/hr. There's overheads and profit margins involved.

I used to run a software contracting company so I'm well aware of the economics :) Just pointing out that tons of skilled trades regularly bill out well over $100/hr, hell, the damn Otis elevator techs charge, I kid you not, $550/hr to fix the elevators in my condo building. Deliberately chosen for extreme/shock value, but still, they aren't breaking their brains refactoring absurd legacy code, either.
My dad is an elevator mechanic, and you'd be pretty surprised at what the job actually entails. He has to maintain legacy elevators with logic implemented by relay (1), up to brand new computer controlled systems. Over the course of his caree he has taught himself what would have been called an electrical engineering education 20 years ago. He had to become proficient in the basics of mechanical engineering, in order to run retrofits in older buildings. He had to become proficient in CAD, because half the work to fit new elevators in old buildings is custom fitment. On top of this, he has to be a project manager.

Now, add in liability insurance and other normal business overhead, custom tools, and niche market effects, and $500 an hour isn't out of the question.

(1): https://youtu.be/_xjXdjj2m5Q?t=152

Your answer is in your question: “global economy”. That lawyer is licensed in his state. Software can be written in a 3rd world country.

Why is it that these high $ software jobs in CA have not been outsourced to India?

The median wage for attorneys in the US is $120k. For software engineers it is $103k. The difference isn’t that large overall, and given the additional education requirements to become an attorney it doesn’t appear to be a huge market failure. remember, the software engineer that is getting paid $50-60/hr probably gets a $120-150/hr external bill rate.
Supply and demand.

It typically takes 4 years of undergrad + 3 years of law school + passing the bar exam to be a lawyer. If software engineers had to overcome similar hurdles to legally work in the industry, there would be significantly less of them.

You are comparing apples to oranges, your lawyer is self employed and those 365/hr pays for his office rent, secretary, pension, professional insurance, ongoing professional education an so on.
Also a large portion of a lawyer’s time spent is not billable. The 365/hr also needs to cover for that.
This thread should have a sticky note - grass is always greener on the other side.
> The ones who do have something to prove.

Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers.

Sorry, I agree with you. I absolutely think that salaries should be open, and shared. That said, what I meant was who is most likely to be talking about their salary. A guy in SLC making 100k at a no name company, happy with his situation. Or a guy making 200k in the valley, unable to afford his own house? There's two issues at play that make the second person more likely. One is competition, as he can find a new job at any time. The other is inadequacy I guess you call it, because he feels he's not making enough.
Quite sure in Nordic countries everyone's salary is public data you can search.
Probably total income rather than salary?
> Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers.

Sounds like the definition of "something to prove."

That's a pretty cynical take. Sometimes people do what they think is right independent of whether they think they'll ever get credit for it.
Maybe I am confused about the idiom "something to prove."

Does it necessarily mean "something to prove [about their own name]?" I thought it might also mean "something to prove about [a group]."

Or, you could make $200k living in the East Bay by yourself, paying ~1/2 of SF rent with 5-6 YoE. That’s my situation, and I’m not an amazing engineer, merely average IMO.
68k. Other reports closer to what you estimate. What exactly is a software engineer? Someone who writes code? Someone with CS degree?

All the sources I have found seems to make software engineering just too broad of a bubble to measure.

1] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/software-en...

200k is low for a mid level engineer in the valley, and I'd have trouble believing there are more engineers elsewhere than here. tbh I'd love to see some numbers for how software engineers are distributed across the country.
Do more research. There are software engineers everywhere. Tulsa, Omaha, Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Atlanta, Miami... I'm just naming a few. If you think the bay area has more engineers than those cities combined, you're sorely mistaken. Northern VA has about as many engineers by itself to counterbalance the bay area...
Certainly not more engineers than all those places combined, but almost certainly the Bay Area has more engineers than any one of those places individually, and probably a higher concentration of them as well.
The whole state of California has about 14% of USA developers. So whatever the Bay Area is earning does not have that much of an impact on the nationwide average.
Not directly, but more in an “I can work in BFE nowhere for $X or the Bay Area for $2X” sort of thing for those capable of putting up with the bullshit interview processed. Even with cost of living, it often works out better in the Bay Area.
Why is your uninformed guess better than data?
That first statement "For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income" doesn't imply the second? Certainly there are possibly different dynamics at play wrt age, but regarding just experience as mentioned couldn't it just be that after 15 years you've gotten as good as you will get?

Edit: I read through the article, I believe these statement are not implying causation, just an AND.

That said, I don't think the editorial "tech is for the young" is really justified by the following statements, as neither is necessarily a bad thing.

Wouldn’t the best paid engineers be able to retire earlier?

Also, do people really expect there to be significant improvements in IC labor productivity after 15 years of experience?

Two thoughts.

First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics.

Second, our industry is really young. Average years of experience is what, like, 6? It's because the industry has grown so rapidly over the past decade. We have the demographics of a country like India. Compare this to an older field like architecture, law, or medicine--they've had a lot more time to work out the industry-wide division of labor between entry-level, mid, and very senior. The commercial software industry is maybe 40 years old, we're just starting to figure this out now.

I think overall the industry just doesn't know how to use very senior people. It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). We're a very youthful, faddish bunch and I think it's to everyone's detriment.

(Background: 10+ year experience, 35-year old software dev here, who's married to an architect that builds buildings, and works with a lot of people over 50)

>First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics.

True. An engineer can create much more value at a company with a thriving feature-driven business than at a stodgy low profit company.

>It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well,

A lot of that changes fast though - and the highest paying subfields of software seem to be new and/or fast-changing, e.g. web dev and ML, as opposed to say kernel programming). I don't think a person with 25 years of experience is like to have an advantage in things like domain expertise over someone with 15 years of experience in these sorts of fields, or what will be hard or easy in modern projects. The experience you gained 20 years ago is not going to be as valuable as the recent experience you gained in the past several years.

>how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully).

Right, but this is getting into skills that are valuable in the management ladder, not the IC ladder. I doubt you'll see the same leveling off in pay at 15 years of experience when you look at engineers & engineering managers as a group.

Depends on their spending habits. A friend of mine is a manager at Facebook, pulls down $700K+/yr, and then promptly blows it on the most ridiculously overpriced shit imaginable. Extremely expensive vacations with his wife, $100K+ cars (multiple), fully loaded Mac Pro, etc. I'm pretty sure my net worth is substantially higher than his, even though I make less. Remember as well that if you're not a business owner, there aren't really that many ways to reduce your tax burden, and we have progressive tax, so like 35+% of that money immediately disappears into the gaping maw of the federal and state government, never to be seen again.
If this is in CA I would be surprised if he keeps half of that after taxes.
A lot of Engineers (or workers in general) love what they do, enjoy working at their company, and like to socialize with their co-workers.

Truth be told, the majority of people are not hungry self-learners that will thrive in retirement. You need to be disciplined for that - or else it's gonna go downhill, real fast.

Partial retirement is something I've seen a lot. Or people simply retiring from companies, but doing work as consultants for their last decade or two.

I never understood this argument. Don't retire if you like your job. It's that simple. The reality is most jobs that pay well are mentally exhausting/stressful so the type of person that wants to retire early isn't the type of person that likes their job.
When you think about how long the modern commercial internet has been around (which is of course the source of the biggest part of software jobs), after 18 years of experience you're talking about people who have been coding since the internet was mostly just HTML. Even since before relevant degrees were worth anything in the internet world.

It's a small demographic, much of which is reaching retirement age. A lot of the rest dropped out of the corporate employment world along the way to found their own companies.

I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers change as time passes and there are more available people with that much experience.

There's a fairly large "bubble" of coders aged 45-55, who grew up with home computers (Amiga, BBC micro in the UK, Commodore 64, etc) before the internet, and went into development after that. I'm one of them. Spent my 20's and 30's building desktop apps, and only moved into web development in the late 00's.

My CV looks like a complete mess from an HR perspective. It's not the clean, clear, story of school -> CS degree -> internet company -> promotion ladder. I can understand how it's hard for a large company to grok my experience and where I'd fit in with a modern web dev team. I'm usually older and more experienced than the development manager in modern web dev teams, and that doesn't sit well with some managers (especially as I have an MBA, so I'm usually also more qualified to be a manager than they are).

Also, I can't stand (and I'm no good at) big-company politics. So I almost never apply for these kinds of positions, and stick to smaller companies and startups where my breadth of experience counts for more and I have more control over the tech environment. But smaller companies don't pay as much.

I'm clearly not represented in this survey, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an under-representation of my cohort in this survey. I meet a fair few people like me at tech meetups, we're definitely a cohort. But then , I also don't live in California or Washington, where this survey focuses. We may not be a sizable minority in those places.

People stop learning when they grow older. Think of advertising target groups - old people don't matter because they don't change anymore.

But I don't agree with the conclusion. The fact is that there is no relation anymore. That just means that more knowledge is not more useful. It doesn't mean that people have to 'retire, switch or change careers'.

I’m past 15 years. I don’t want to do management and other careers don’t pay nearly as well.

I am working on retirement though, because working in corporate America sucks. I don’t think getting a different, much less well remunerated office job will help that. And spending my days fretting over the very fine details of web pages has really lost its interest, if it ever had any. It doesn’t matter if the web page helps earthquake victims or plays a video or shows a stock portfolio. It is all boring and tedious.