[scarface74]

You saw the part about my spending my entire career from 1996-2020 doing your bog standard enterprise dev?

In 1996, I graduated from an unknown state college in South Georgia and I made $11/hour as a computer operator working on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes.

Because of…poor career choices …I didn’t hit six figures until I was 40. Even now I make about what a software engineer II makes at my same BigTech company at 49 in cloud consulting.

As I say, please play the worlds smallest fiddle for me.

Last year, my wife and I got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in 3 suitcases - including our cars - and bought a vacation/investment property in a resort area in Florida. We stay here half the year from October - mid March and we fly around the US the other half of the year “digital nomadding”. My wife in the meantime is retired at 47 and she is involved with her passion in the fitness/wellness industry and meets up with people everywhere we go and flies to conferences from wherever we are staying in a given week. I also fly for work a few times a week.

We take Uber everywhere.

This is what I meant by I can make different life choices at 49 than I would recommend a college grad making. I can be okay barely making L5 compensation.

Our fixed expenses are really low.

[YZF]

By cultural I meant American. Just to be clear I am not American.

I'm not quite sure what your point is. You seem to be supporting what I'm saying which is you can get by perfectly well with various choices. You made choices (poor or not) to not go after the biggest paying jobs and you're doing great. Why does a new grad today have to go work for Google?

In the US there are lots of really good paying software jobs that aren't with the biggest tech companies. I've worked remotely for a small US startup many years ago and got paid really well. The current market is tight but over the last decade if you had a pulse and could code you could get pretty decent job.

[scarface74]

I can make different choices at 49, after having a 25 year career, a house that doubled in value in four years that I could leverage, no family responsibilities, parents that have been retired for 20 years who still have four sources of income (2 pensions and social security) that are healthy and independent at 80 that don’t need me (for now).

I also had no college debt (scholarships and going to a cheap school) and I was able to get into BigTech by being old, with industry experience that allowed me to bypass the leetcode grind. But only by pivoting into consulting.

These are life choices I could make that a new college grad couldn’t. Also when I graduated, $BigTech wasn’t a thing. Apple was barely hanging on for dear life and MS wasn’t paying more than your average company adjusted for cost of living.