[city41]

If salary is important to you as you get more senior, then you need to play the mainstream game. Which mostly means going into management, architecture, consulting, etc. For those of us who don't really want to go down that route, I think sacrificing salary is a common concession you need to make.

[WJW]

For me, getting better at managing my personal finances made a huge difference. It is way more feasible to do things you like while sacrificing (some) salary if you have managed to build up a nest egg. It doesn't even have to be a lot of financial skills, even just the concept of "wealth is cumulative money in minus cumulative money out, so if you spend as much as you earn you'll never get richer" is very useful to internalize.

[Syonyk]

The best thing you can do is work out the concept of "enough" and "satisfaction with what you have."

I've watched far, far too many well paid tech workers over the years just go down the road of "Oh, my paycheck is larger, so I can afford this [insert luxury item here]." Cars and houses are the big road to ruin.

You get a taste for $1.5M houses, and $150k+ cars, well... you're going to be working the rest of your life. Figure out early on that a cheaper house (exact value depends on the area) and a $20k car get you around just as well for a lot less money, and you can go far.

An awful lot of industries exist by trying to convince you that enough isn't enough. You deserve better. You have to buy the new one every year... because! Etc.

And it's nonsense, but it's both very profitable to them and a great way to drain out your money without ever realizing where it goes.

Get a grip on all that stuff early, and it helps a ton. I've made tech worker money for many years of my life, and have a 9 year old car, a 24 year old truck, and a range of esoteric and cantankerous motorcycles, the newest of which is around 8. They all do their jobs just fine - we just did a long road trip (2500 miles) in the car (Chevy Volt) with zero issues.

I mean, sure, I could get loans for $100k class cars, but... why? What do they do that my current stuff won't? Well, phantom brake, apparently...

[eclipxe]

The quality of life difference Autopilot makes is worth $100k+ (though you don't need to spend that much anymore with the Y/3). Your dig at the end about phantom braking is kinda interesting, but I think you are underestimating how much of a different Autopilot truly makes.

[WJW]

Regardless of how much better (or not) Autopilot is than manual driving, this comment is a very good example of the point GP was trying to make. If you get a taste for 100k cars because you convinced yourself you can no longer live without Autopilot, you will now need to find that much more income to pay for all the cars. That is money that could also have been spent "sacrificing salary" so you could have more interesting work, take time for a sabbatical or retire earlier.

[Syonyk]

Exactly!

I know people who have far more money sitting in their driveways (or garage, though having a garage clear enough for cars is a weird rarity anymore) than our entire property, including house, is worth. They claim it's worth it, and I'm not going to argue, but I could quite literally retire on the value of their house and car fleet. When I met most of them a decade or so ago, they were in the similar boat as me, vehicle/salary/etc-wise. They just inflated their lifestyles as their incomes rose, I fought that (and married someone who is far better than me at asking "... but why?" questions about anything nonsensical I suggest). I'm not retired, but that's halfway because I enjoy my work and halfway because I have plenty of things I can do that involve wads of cash at various points (the next one is buying a backhoe for a couple years of work on a greenhouse - yes, it makes sense to buy an old one, run it for a few years, and sell it, because they hold value very well at the age I'm looking for - it's a couple year rental for the cost of maintenance and maybe a set of tires).

My point is simply that if you can avoid those traps, you really don't have to worry about "How do I be a tech worker in my 50s and 60s," because you've either retired, or are near enough to retirement that you don't have to earn $500k/yr to support your lifestyle. It's a trap. There is no income so large you can't spend more than it.

[Syonyk]

I just drove 2500 miles over a week and a half with nothing fancier than cruise control in terms of automation - though I will admit, it's the fancy cruise control where I can tick the set speed up or down with a lever, instead of having to rely on the old coast/accel/set controls (I've got one of those too, and it's a bit more hassle than it's worth in a lot of conditions). Most of those miles were on the sort of two lane state highways that apparently are exceedingly prone to phantom braking events on current gen Tesla hardware, and I had... ah, yes, zero of them. Same goes for weird failures to hold lane, or anything else. I was in the loop, and didn't have to monitor automation that was going to be fine 99.9% of the time and try to kill me the rest. Going through Salt Lake during the edge of rush hour, "randomly standing on the brakes with no warning" would have meant someone was in the back seat with my kids after having totaled the car. I'm sorry, "random braking events" are simply not OK on anything resembling a regular basis, and at least some people, in some conditions that resemble what I drive, are reporting them very regularly.

But to your main point, I honestly don't know what a difference Autopilot makes. I've dorked around with an older version for half an hour, and it drove like an autistic student driver. "This is the center of my lane and I will be in the center of it, because this is the center of my lane." "What about the trailer over there, not really parked entirely off the road?" "This is the center of my lane..." etc. It was quite frankly terrifying to see, because it had no awareness of anything resembling the environment around it except the lane lines. I have no doubt it would have clipped the trailer (parked... oh, a foot into the lane, because the shoulder wasn't wide enough for the rest of it) had I not taken over, and at that point, I may as well drive it myself. As I've suggested to various people over the years, let me know when Autopilot can handle a sprayer coming down a two lane highway, and reasonably figure out what to do about a cow in the road, and I'll pay attention. Right now, it seems alarmingly unable to reliably figure out that the road is clear with anything resembling a useful level of accuracy.

However, the point remains: I've chosen not to spend the money on that, which means I don't have to worry about spending money on it down the road. The Hedonic treadmill is very much a thing, and so by deliberately not adjusting my standards higher, I can live on less money going forward. I pity the people I know who have huge salaries for a while and buy $200k luxury cars, because I've seen, in a somewhat close friend, exactly what happens when those salaries aren't a thing anymore for one reason or another. The end result is prolonged pain and bankruptcy, because after you've driven a 700hp German luxury saloon, going back to something cheaper and slower (and more affordable) is really hard. I've enjoyed driving those briefly, but I've never owned one, so that my car is a bit of a gutless wonder cresting mountain passes at 8k ft, well... so it is. I can hold highway speed, I just can't run in massive excess of it. Oh well. Stupid-cheap to run for everything else, low maintenance, no complaints.

I could come up with justifications for spending all sorts of money, if I really wanted to - and my point is that the ability and willingness to not do that is a very useful skill. Humans are great post-hoc justification machines. Always have been, always will be. And knowing that, working around it, etc, reduces an awful lot of stress in life.

You claim a car that will more or less stay in a lane is worth $100k. Well, OK... I spent not an awful lot more than that on a house and have been slowly upgrading the property over the years as we have money. Though I might have to drop a chunk of change into some appliances here soon, the service life of modern appliances seems to be about 5 years before major surgery, if you can get the parts.

I lived for a while in Seattle, and heard people go on and on about how amazing Autopilot was. I just rode an ebike in the rain, and spent the savings on good rain gear. One cost $100k. One cost... oh, I think that was a $1500 build, it was a nice commuter build. I think I got the better deal.