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by greenie_beans 525 days ago
gen x in tech are some of the wealthiest people in the world. y'all are the new kings.

i graduated high school during the great financial crisis. i remember being near done with college at the university of mississippi when i visited birmingham, alabama and walked through the occupy encampments. i didn't make enough money to contribute to retirement savings til 2019 when i was in my late 20s. your generation has experienced unprecedented stock market gains over your peak earning years. i'm not hopeful that these gains will continue through my peak earning years therefore i prioritize finding creative ways to generate income before it's too late after being complacent with my fat ass tech paycheck sitting at my standup desk and drinking my kombucha with the wool over my eyes while the ai writes my code.
1 comments
scarface_74 525 days ago
And you were on the opposite side of the bimodal distribution of comp within the industry from 2012-2019.

The top end of enterprise dev salaries for seniors is around that of entry level salaries at BigTech and adjacent companies.

That’s not meant to be an insult. I was on that side until I was 46 and now at 50 I’m back on the very top end of enterprise dev. But it’s still somewhere between entry level and mid level at BigTech and closer to entry level.

The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.

If you graduated in 2008, yes it was a shit show. But that means by 2012, BigTech comp and enterprise dev comp started really diverging. The stock market has been gangbusters since 2012. But it stagnated most of the 200x’s.

If you had jumped on the BigTech wave in 2012 you would have been set.

By that time, relocating wasn’t an option for me because I was 38, just gotten married and had two (step)kids.

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greenie_beans 525 days ago
i didn't start working in the industry until 2019.

> The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.

this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now. nonetheless, we are not talking about maximizing income here, we're talking about surviving in a changing world with a tougher job market for devs. let me remind you of the grandparent orginal comment that started this all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42631755 that person is right.

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scarface_74 525 days ago
> i didn't start working in the industry until 2019.

Yeah for an entry level developer getting in the industry right before Covid hit had to suck.

> this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now.

The entire market sucks now. But BigTech is still hiring as well as the enterprise dev side. You might as well shoot for the moon and settle if you must.

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