[that_guy_iain]

I've not been laid off either. I'm currently taking a break from jobs. I'm starting to think that it's time to go back to full-time employment. But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. Let all the companies that are going to do layoffs have their layoffs and then join a company still looking for new devs in a few months.

[300bps]

>But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months.

I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?

[KronisLV]

> I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?

In my case that'd be:

  - living in a relatively affordable country (Latvia), where rent and other expenses aren't too high
  - having an okay income by local standards, e.g. I make around 2000 Euros after taxes, which is in the upper 10% of salaries locally https://www.algas.lv/en/salaries-in-country (many earn more)
  - saving and/or investing for many years now, I have about 37k Euros saved up, which isn't much for someone in US, but with monthly expenses between 500 to 1000 Euros, they might last me from 3 to 6 years (though less in practice, due to inflation)
  - having additional factors that make things easier, such as sharing a residence or living with parents, having solar panels or one of those energy efficient homes if in the countryside, having reasonably affordable ways of heating if in the countryside (e.g. firewood with central heating), not having too many subscription services and so on

But then again, I live a fairly frugal lifestyle: don't use expensive cloud platforms for development (though I pay for JetBrains tools), only occasionally get video games (or other entertainment) on sale, don't have a car and routinely save about 50% of what I earn, if not more.

For people with higher living standards than mine: probably earning more than I do, even relative to their expenses.

[medellin]

Honestly i think most devs can do this. The difference is in the US our tolerance for seeing our savings go down is super low. I can live for 3 years with my current savings(just cash with invested but non retirement funds it would be about 8) but i still don’t feel like i can take any time off.

[ryandrake]

Also, the power of compounding interest over time. Take time off and eat away at your savings for a year when you are 25, and that probably adds 5 years to your retirement age. Better make that year really worth it!

[LouisSayers]

Yeah, but how much would you be willing to give up when you're old and decrepit to have one year off in the prime of your life?

And that's assuming you even live long enough to get to retirement...

[ryandrake]

I think there is an assumption hidden in your words, that years earlier in life are in some way more valuable/fun/important than years later in life. I get it, HN's demographics skew really young, and I bet a lot of people here believe that.

Even as I approach elderliness, I still feel that every year of my life has become much more joyful, exciting and enriching than the previous year. I would absolutely not trade away multiple retirement years for a single year of fucking around in my twenties.

[teraflop]

Software development pays incredibly well by the standards of the average American. You can spend that money on lifestyle inflation, or you can save/invest it and buy yourself an enormous amount of financial freedom. Whether you call that "being independently wealthy" is a matter of semantics.

[est31]

Yeah there is a lot of space between "has savings for 8-12 months" and "is independently wealthy, i.e. can live off interest of their own savings". Former is extremely easy to achieve if you can save significant portions of your salary. If you can save 30%, you can achieve it after 3 years. Latter takes a bit longer.

[brailsafe]

I've always had an extremely tenous grasp on consistently being employed, and know getting fired is just around the corner. Therefore, saving about 6-12 months of expenses is first step, then I'm allowed to start spending more than $100/m or whatever here and there on stuff. I usually end up needing that savings because getting a new job can easily take that long, and so by the beginning of age 30 this year I was back in the negative and almost homeless again with no real assets. That strategy keeps lifestyle inflation way down

[hcrean]

Are you choosing the right environments to work in? What do you find is the reason for instability in employment?

[brailsafe]

Variety of reasons, burnout, management style changing or expectations changing in a way that I can't keep up, I guess those are the usual ones and they're closely related. Most companies also just arbitrarily pick 2 week agile sprints with daily stand-ups, often increasing the amount of meetings as time goes on, and this is usually where things start going downward for me. There also tends to be a decrease in autonomy to get my work done over time, which helps me feel like shit on a daily basis, and so it starts a negative spiral.

In one case I was doing reasonably well with my software dev tasks for a while, but then they assigned me to periodic customer support, and I said up front that's not something I'll be good at. At the same time, my manager tried to increase the oversight of my work, because I was getting slower at it. So I'd wake up every waiting for my manager to "check-in" on me like a child, eventually getting to the point where I couldn't bring myself to get anything done and just resented my existence.

I'm in an ok spot now, for now, but who's to say how it'll be by January. All I want is a place I can do good work for, for a reasonable salary, but it's been very difficult to find.

[sokoloff]

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si... is a great article for those interested in the topic of high savings percentages.

[jxhdkdhdks]

never mind that anyone following mr money mustache advice to date, would be under water and strugling more than people that just saved in safer assets all that while.

[sokoloff]

Not if you’ve been following that advice for more than 3 years. The broad market is around the same price as 18 months ago.

[300bps]

Yeah there is a lot of space between "has savings for 8-12 months"

I think there is a mentality difference here. I have savings that would easily last me 10 years of not working. But... that's kind of my plan. I will be retiring some day.

I don't want to use up even a dime of that money by not working in my prime earning years.

[rootusrootus]

A good friend of mine spent his life being pretty frugal. Saved up a nice chunk of change, too -- his wife is also a software developer, they both made good money. Got cancer early last year and was dead 10 months later. 55 years old. Ugh.

Not saying you should run out and spend your nest egg. On the other hand, I'd be reluctant to suffer too much during my prime working years scrimping and saving for a retirement that might actually not happen. I'd rather have jobs I really enjoy, and frankly, if I enjoy the work well enough why would I retire? Just take longer and longer vacations and work part time. So I'm willing to use a bit of my saved up funds when necessary to get out of a work environment that is unpleasant.

[ryandrake]

Sorry about your friend. My wife also had a friend in the same boat. Made it to 59 and heart attack. Statistically they are outliers, though. For every one of those cases there are probably 10 that make it long past a normal retirement age and 2 that make it beyond 90 years or so. Given the choice, I’d rather be prepared for a 30 year retirement and unluckily die early than be prepared for a 5 year retirement and live to see 90, eating dog food.

[LouisSayers]

There's definitely something in not putting off the things you really want.

My sister's landlord always told her how he planned to live in the house she's in once he was a bit older.

He ended up dying in a motorbike accident a few months ago, right after a house inspection...

[VBprogrammer]

The other side of that coin is that saving for a post work life (particularly at normal retirement age) is a good way of spending all of your life working hard for a retirement which never comes. There is something to be said for spreading those retirement years across your lifetime rather than saving them all up for the end.

Different of course if you have a plan to retire at 45 or something.

[Jach]

It is largely mentality. Both for the initial plan and execution of saving up (and trying to do it fast, e.g. in 5-10 years) and then pulling the trigger and quitting. I pulled the trigger in late 2020 based on somewhat optimistic forecasting (more than the 4%/5% rule of thumb) that I might have enough for it to be indefinite at steady expense levels. TBH rocky markets this year have had me feeling like it'd be nice to have a steady income instead of only outcome (and I should have bought property/gotten a low interest mortgage on something before quitting) but the feeling hasn't been strong enough to make me actually take any steps towards that, and anyway dollar-wise I'm still overall above where I was when I quit. I don't really know if I'll "never work again" (unless forced, and there are several forcing functions I can imagine apart from the market performing much more poorly than expected) but I can easily see myself enjoying the rest of this decade not working, maybe dabbling in some side income gigs eventually, and only getting back into full time employment stuff if I really want to in my 40s. As a man in a knowledge field my "prime earning years" are probably in my 40s-50s anyway, while until aging is solved my physical body's not getting younger.

I wonder what sorts of things influence the mentality. I've been reading Walden here and there recently, I remember being forced to read some of it in I think junior high, I suspect at least a little influence lies there but there's no better trick to make kids dismiss a book's messaging than to force them to read it in chunks via some textbook and then be quizzed. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet." "Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live -- that is, keep comfortably warm -- and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode."

Of course by Thoreau's standards I'm positively roasting and happy about it, and I think 10 or even 20 years at a career is more than a fine tradeoff if that's all it takes to secure a retirement. As a teen I remember thinking I'd be happy enough to avoid having worked for 40-ish years straight like most of the adults around me had done/were doing (some of whom died right before or after their retirement age goal, too).

[shagie]

Regarding Walden and the "have to read it in high school" - I recently came across it again while playing Dear Reader ( https://www.dearreadergame.com )

If you've got an iDevice with Apple Arcade, it's something interesting to play.

It uses books that are now in the public domain that are twisted into games of word order, spelling, and passages that make you read the abridged version and to an extent, force/encourage you to become familiar with the words to better play the game.

[inadequatespace]

> gotten a low interest mortgage before quitting

Meaning it would have been easier to with a demonstrable income stream? Or just incidentally, due to macro stuff and time raising interest rates over that same period

[ummonk]

Less than 3 years, since your expenses are only 70% of your salary.

[est31]

Good point, I've just calculated it and you'll need 2 years and 4 months to save one year's expenses that make up 70% of your salary, at a saving rate of 30%.

[klipt]

But then inflation...

[userulluipeste]

There's a lot of range of what constitutes "independently wealthy, i.e. can live off interest of their own savings" when one gets there. Say, you may live a single life of relative leisure for the rest of your days, but if you plan to start a family and have kids (with all it implies) - nope, you'll still have to get back to work! Or want to live large and not have to worry that much about material side of life (i.e. when money is just for keeping score)? Well, you'd better find out ways to make most of your current financial independence to get there, which in itself is work (although just investment related kind, but still).

[that_guy_iain]

Honestly, German unemployment money. I'm entitled to 2/3 of my original salary for 360 days. 2/3 of my salary is enough to live on while still saving a bit of money every month. I paid all the taxes for 7-years, so I figure I should take advantage of the unemployment money.

[thesumofall]

To add some context: this is capped at EUR 2400 per month (or lower depending on state and if one has kids)

[fhd2]

You can also only receive this for up to 12 months - afterwards you go into the much lower, somewhat notorious program nicknamed "Hartz 4". You receive funds around the poverty threshold, and they get withheld if you e.g. travel out of state unannounced of fail to attend interviews or seminars they book you for. If they think your apartment is too large for you, even if it's cheap enough, you are forced to move. Any savings you have, you are forced to spend. Unemployment life in Germany isn't as rosy as this post makes it sound. That said, the system is being replaced by a less controversial one called "citizen money" soon.

Personally, if I get laid off, I would probably also not jump on the _very_ first offer I get desperately, but try to land something good. That's what the higher amount you get for up to 12 months is quite useful for.

[stkdump]

Well, you should not publicly admit that you aren't looking for work, otherwise you might risk that sweet unemployment money.

[that_guy_iain]

There are also some legal stuff preventing me from getting a job just now so I'm in an area where I legally can't even look for a job right now. Germans and their red tape :)

[progman32]

Lots of financial ideas in this thread, but I feel this misses one point: achieving the comfort level. For me, it started with focusing on my mental health, finally getting to the realization that I'm worth taking care of, and that my non career dreams are valid and important. So jumping out of the rat race for a year to just exist as a human was an almost no brainier. I'm not getting any younger.

[skeeter2020]

I think it was Scott Adams he presented this formula to me: "Happiness = Health + Freedom". This includes mental, physical and emotional health, while freedom is far more variable and personal in definition. The key is you need both.

[HDThoreaun]

I make 180k and spend around 35k a year. Easy to save money when only providing for yourself and living with roommates. I live in a major American city and don’t feel like I’m penny pinching at all, but I’m not really into “classic” money spending activities like drinking and shopping. Saved well over 3 years of expenses this year alone.

[mwint]

Is that 180k base or TC (including stock, etc)?

[HDThoreaun]

I work for a startup whose equity I consider worthless, 180 base.

[mwint]

Can I ask what industry and your seniority (And maybe whether you’re doing 80h weeks?) Been considering a move, trying to calibrate myself on what I’m actually worth.

[HDThoreaun]

It’s a data warehousing company and I’m an se2. Sorry but would prefer not to say anything else. I will say that I got this job at the height of the market froth and am not sure if they’re still offering this salary although we are hiring

I used levels.fyi to find comparable salaries and my friends in tech said it’s pretty accurate

[nicoburns]

> Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?

Having low outgoings. While I would prefer to have income (I'm hoping to be able to buy a house at some point), I'm a single person with no dependents, and I probably spend around £1200/month in total (including rent). And that's in London - one of the most expensive cities in the world - and without putting any effort into living cheaply (I often buy groceries at the local store rather than the cheaper big supermarket for example). If I chose to live somewhere cheaper (even in the uk) that could probably be halved without completely destroying my quality of life.

[great_success]

This is very impressive and difficult to maintain in London. Rent for a "double" room - meaning a room in a flat/apartment or house that fits a US full or European double bed is like 900/month right now. Spending only 1200/month is very difficult to achieve. I have no idea how this is feasible. To add to rent, local stores are usually more expensive than the supermarkets.

Maybe you ought to make a masterclass on this topic.

[richardknop]

If you took out mortgage when interest rates were really low, it’s possible to have your own place and spend about that much per month if you live frugally (well at least until you need to remortgage in few years and rates might be much higher). If you are renting though I also finding it difficult to believe. I was spending around 1600 pounds per month and I was living very modest live, spending little and trying to save as much of my income as I could.

[nicoburns]

Well my rent is only £600/month which helps a lot. It's in a less popular neighbourhood, but it's still in Zone 2 with good transport links and it's very nice.

[richardknop]

Do you live alone or with other people and you split the rent? How much do you pay for council tax and bills? 600 is very cheap in London.

[pixiemagic]

There's zero chance they are living alone anywhere in London for £600, let alone zone 2.

[ummonk]

If you're not saving money on a software engineer salary, you're being very frivolous with your spending.

[poulsbohemian]

Or you’ve got sick parents, a sick kid, your own health problems, day care costs, student debt, a non-working spouse…

[sn9]

Fair, but lots of people without anything close to a SE's salary have those problems, too.

Software engineers still have a much harder time justifying having a low savings rate when you compare them to the rest of the population.

Generally, there's some degree of frivolous spending going on.

[Existenceblinks]

Or software engineer in a 3rd world country.

[caskstrength]

> Or software engineer in a 3rd world country.

Actually, software engineers in 2nd and 3rd world countries can afford to save a lot.

[Existenceblinks]

Definitely not true.

[Archipelagia]

Not sure about the OP, but I could easily spend 3-5 months unemployed despite not being either wealthy or dependent. Up to a year if I had to and decided to budget more carefully.

Mostly comes to low cost of living in my country + being reasonably frugal + slowly building my savings over time.

(Though note that I don't have kids yet, if I had children my calculations would be totally different.)

[manimino]

I just recently took a year off to study, do side projects, and take care of family. It was a much-needed break following the many stressors of the covid era. Some things matter more than money.

Having worked for 10ish years beforehand, it was financially easy. When I was ready to work again, I responded some recruiter emails and was hired again fairly quickly, at a position better than the one I left.

Living in a low cost-of-living area helps a great deal, as do the excellent salaries US devs make.

[Existenceblinks]

Are jobs via recruiter good quality? I never have desire of getting jobs through recruiters.

[revskill]

Most of them is not good, but some are good.

[krn]

> Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?

It's not that hard to accomplish for those who can be(come) location independent. For instance[1]:

> You would need around 2,582.16$ in Budapest to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,700.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities).

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

[ricardobayes]

Budapest is a very weird place unless you live in an expat bubble in the 5th district downtown or in a villa in the 2nd. The city is basically a parody of itself, for example they didn't have money to keep up the mental hospital so they just released everyone on the street. Even a good few years after the fact, the city is still full of visibly mentally ill people, who act completely random. You never know when you'll get spat on or some abuse shouted at you just for existing. One time a guy walked up to me and put arms up like a boxer and tried to fight me. It's very unsafe too. We interviewed a dev in a downtown café in broad daylight in a crowded place and he was robbed at knifepoint just outside the café.

[krn]

I agree with most of your points, even though I never felt unsafe in Budapest during the 3 months I spent there, including many many long walks after midnight.

I picked Budapest as an example because it's a well known international destination with very high level of walkability, great public transportation, and affordable prices.

Prague and Krakow are two other similar options in Central Europe, only much less "weird" (and, as a result, a little more "boring").

There are also plenty of pleasant and affordable cities in Southern Europe, such as Valencia and Porto.

[matsemann]

> the city is still full of visibly mentally ill people, who act completely random.

Actually, that makes Budapest a fair comparison to how SV and surroundings also deal with their homeless..

[jlarocco]

Budapest is a strange choice for comparison.

Just about anywhere in the United States will be a lot cheaper than SF, too, without the huge inconvenience of moving internationally.

[krn]

I picked Budapest for comparison, because as a European I don't know many large, safe, and affordable US cities that wouldn't require owning a car for comfortable living.

[throwaway20382]

Well yeah. And it isn't America, they will arrest you and throw you out of the country after a year.

[kirso]

Don't mean to sound condescending but I am fascinated by this fascination.

If you move to SEA your cost of living might be as low as $500/m depending on the frugality and living standards. Its not for everyone obviously due to various life circumstances (caring for relatives, wife with kids, illness). But for the young, single and free there is a world out there that doesn't require you to have a 300k/y job to survive in upper Manhattan and service the car / house loans :)

I wish people explored the world a bit more. It really does give perspective in terms of how the rest of 99% live outside of our tech bubble.

[rjh29]

I don't earn a huge US salary, but my rent and bills are less than a third of my salary. I don't have a family. If you do that for 5 years, you have 10 years of savings where you could potentially not work!

[UncleOxidant]

I'm not the OP, but I'm in a similar boat: my contract ends next month and I'm told they're not going to be able to get it renewed due to budget cuts. I'm also planning to take 4-6 months between gigs (possibly a lot longer depending on what the job market looks like then).

> How does one do this?

In my case my wife has a job that provides the health insurance (so your "dependent on another" is partly right). In addition, our mortgage will be paid off in January, so that'll make it easier to live on one (smaller) income. We'll still be running a bit of a deficit each month (between $200 and $300/mo) but we've got a good 12 to 18 months of living expenses saved up in our emergency fund (that would be 12 to 18 months of living expenses if we both were to lose our jobs). After that there's a Roth IRA we could draw upon. So not too worried at this point.

[dustedcodes]

As a consultant (someone who takes short-/midterm contracts) you can make $1000/day (probably more in the Valley). Many more experienced developers go down that route instead of being in a full time position. You work for a few months, make the income of a year and then you holiday for the rest of the year.

[noworriesnate]

How do I get those contracts? I'm a full-stack developer with 10 years of experience, also some data analytics experience. I got laid off almost two weeks ago. I would love to start my own contracting business. Do you have any insight?

[pojzon]

There is a lot of contractors and you have to be extremely good to do what the dude/dudette said.

Like - have a unique skillset, have multiple certifications, recommendations, proven B2B experience as a consultant.

Then getting contracts is easy. Probably less easy now tho.

[skeeter2020]

I contracted for the better part of a decade and I wasn't extremely good, but I was solid technically and trusted as a problem solver, so I got my first contract from my personal network, and then built it from there. If I had to rely on being extremely good and going in cold I'd still be looking. Your best bet is to go with a third party and then eventually go independent once you have your own reputation and network.

[mwint]

Second this, I’m full-stack with experience on everything from embedded firmware to frontend. I’d really like to try this route, but I’m not sure how to get in the door.

[himanshuy]

Lets talk. I have recently started consulting focused on data analytics. May be we could collaborate.

[noworriesnate]

Feel free to reach out! My email is my username at protonmail.com

[userulluipeste]

Although I see a lot of sibling comments, their message is about managing the money obtained from previous burst of (one's specialty related) activity, so I'd add something different. There are also cases when one may have another source of income (passive or whatever alternative active type may be at hand, there always is) or means of supporting oneself (say, having the needs covered by enrollment in a volunteer program). It's not great, but bearable. In that state a return to employment could mean in fact just getting back to one's previous quality of life and regaining access to resource levels that allows one to plan/dream long term. The trick is to plan ahead for such situations and not get over-leveraged.

[ojbyrne]

Some of the severance packages are pretty generous, lots of people got income for ~6 months (I did).

[blep_]

I did something similar. It worked out for me because I live in the midwest US, with a lifestyle that's not actively frugal but is definitely below the average cost of living, but I was working remotely for west coast salaries. That made it really easy to save up money.

I'm nearing the end of it now, and I've spent about $6000 over three months on things I'd categorize as normal living expenses (I took a couple of trips that added a few thousand to that). I'm not so well off that I can call this a trivial amount of money, but it wasn't the hardest decision ever, and I could make it work for much longer if I had to.

[jlarocco]

You're missing option three which is to save enough money that you don't need to work 100% of the time.

It's pretty easy to save money on a software developer salary in the United States.

[andsoitis]

It is common financial advice (in the US) to have a couple of months’s expensive in cash so that you can weather unexpected circumstances.

[andirk]

Since I graduated college, I have always:

- encouraged people and myself to hold on to about 6 months of runway because the future is unknown.

- encouraged myself and others to never have a single source of income.

- always be sharpening your skills. They get dull, redundant, and obsolete within ~5 years.

Live by these mantras, if one has the luxury to do so, and being laid off is nothing more than a disappointment.

[jrockway]

I've taken a couple breaks between jobs; about 9 months each time. The key is to save money while you are working so that you have a buffer. Obviously, it can be tough to save money. I did it by never getting comfortable with how much money I made; I lived like I made a lot less. (Basically, stock was half my compensation, but even though I auto-sold it whenever it vested, I mentally valued it at $0, so that was free savings. I did all my planning and forecasting around base pay. That is less possible if you have a family to support, but it is also very low risk. Everything financial is a matter of how much risk you're comfortable with. If you take on more risk for expenses, you have less of a buffer for "I don't feel like working" or layoffs.)

A lot of your money is going to be for housing, and there are a lot of "conventions" that I think you should be careful with. Housing companies will tell you to spend 30% or more of your gross income on housing. You can do that if you want, but you'll have more savings if you aim for 10-15%. It's quite possible; I've lived in a nice neighborhood in NYC for 10 years and pay about 16% of my gross income on rent. (Rent stabilization is a powerful force, though, and you kind of had to be here 10 years ago to be paying 10 years ago's rents.)

Similar stabilizing forces apply if you have a mortgage as well. If you get a 30 year fixed, your monthly payment isn't going to go up over 30 years, but the value of that money is going to decrease, so it will be less of a burden over time because your income is likely to be adjusted to inflation over time. My advice to myself from 10 years ago would have been to buy and not rent; the dollar becomes worth less and less over time, but the roof over your head remains as useful as ever. If you have savings, the dollar decreasing in purchasing power just wipes out your savings. If you have debt, then the amount of time it takes to work off your debt decreases instead. Rent stabilization does give a lot of this advantage to renters, but it's rare throughout the US, NYC is kind of an anomaly.

Regardless, always be working on building that buffer. You want to be able to pay for housing for 1-2 years without working; once you have that buffer, then you can decide to use it to take time off, or you can keep it stashed away for "quirky billionaire buys my company and fires everyone". (Such things do apparently happen.) The lower your monthly expenses are, the easier that is, so keep your expenses low. The expense that I think is easiest to dig into is food; it can easily be $25-$30 to order a cheeseburger and fries for delivery (at least in NYC), but you will be hard-pressed to spend $30 on ingredients to make a single meal. If you have any free time whatsoever, there is a lot of savings at hand. If you have no free time, then hopefully you're being compensated for that.

I suppose the elephant in the room is the disparity in pay between non-FAANG and FAANG (or whatever people call it these days; Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix seem to be facing hard times, Google definitely seems interested in reducing compensation across the board, Apple's still doing pretty well), and things like that. There are no doubt great software engineers making $70k a year doing the same work that Google is paying people $400k a year to do. Try and get that job, and everything will be a lot easier for you. HN hates this, but if leetcode is what's standing between you and 4x the pay, you should probably just practice the leetcode. Your safety net and quality of life will increase dramatically, even if you move to a high-cost-of-living area. I definitely did that when I was applying to Google 10 years ago, and it was probably the best investment I ever made. $50 worth of books and a few evenings trying the exercises, and I got a 3x pay increase and a free move to NYC. Would recommend considering it.

(BTW, it seems like every company in existence has min/maxed the cost of living thing; so you are unlikely to get ahead by moving to a low cost-of-living area. Your employer will just pay you less and keep the savings for themselves. But if you start cooking food instead of ordering it, they'll never know, so that's free money for your savings and investments ;)

[jpetso]

It's not just practicing leetcode though. It's also putting your considerable skills to work for an entity that will funnel the world's attention into advertising (Google), create platform lock-in and undermine repairability (Apple, Nvidia), successfully lobby governments against use of open standards (Microsoft), etc.

All companies pay you to put its interest before your own interest, but some companies are much worse and much more effective at working against the greater good than others. I'm not selling out to those just to add another few years to my already very achievable retirement.

[jorblumesea]

Can you save 8-10 months of expenses as cash?

If yes, then...yes this is easily done.

[bfung]

Severance pay from layoff and having 6m emergency savings.