The Secret Lives of Millionaire Tech Engineers Who 'Rest and Vest'(insider.com)
insider.com
The Secret Lives of Millionaire Tech Engineers Who 'Rest and Vest'
https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-who-barely-work-silicon-valley-2017-7
27 comments
I have a job that I like. I work about 40 hours a week and enjoy the company of my teammates. I even like the work we do.
And still, this makes me livid with jealousy. To get paid 500k - 1m a year to basically just fuck around with side projects and stuff you like to do is the dream of dreams.
I don't even know how to think about this. I can't decide whether I have some moral superiority to make me feel better or if I'm just a pure sap for trying to do the right thing and work hard. It would take me around 8 years to net a million dollars. My mortgage is a chunk of change that hurts to pay every month. Saving is challenging and I just can't help but feel like I'm a sucker when I see these folks who do fun stuff all day and get paid 5-10x what I make.
Someone, please: make me feel better!
And still, this makes me livid with jealousy. To get paid 500k - 1m a year to basically just fuck around with side projects and stuff you like to do is the dream of dreams.
I don't even know how to think about this. I can't decide whether I have some moral superiority to make me feel better or if I'm just a pure sap for trying to do the right thing and work hard. It would take me around 8 years to net a million dollars. My mortgage is a chunk of change that hurts to pay every month. Saving is challenging and I just can't help but feel like I'm a sucker when I see these folks who do fun stuff all day and get paid 5-10x what I make.
Someone, please: make me feel better!
If you get paid $125,000 a year then I can guarantee that there are a ton of devs in Europe that look on you with envy the same way you’re looking at these guys. Senior wage over here most places is between 50,000 - 80,000. And they in turn probably have a ton of guys from India and other lower income countries looking at their wages with envy.
I left my last dev job because they wanted to pay me £30,000. Such shit salaries are pretty common in the North of England. The average wage across the UK is £39,000 so you get paid 2.5x the average in another 1st world country. I know everything is relative but it seems you’ve got a good thing going to me.
I left my last dev job because they wanted to pay me £30,000. Such shit salaries are pretty common in the North of England. The average wage across the UK is £39,000 so you get paid 2.5x the average in another 1st world country. I know everything is relative but it seems you’ve got a good thing going to me.
Don't those European engineers have guaranteed health care, more than a few weeks of vacation per year, and more than 0 months of paid parental leave? Are those engineers also in tens of thousands of dollars in debt on average from university too?
Google gives like 7 months for parental leave. Healthcare costs are lower than what average employee spends on coffee. 5-ish weeks of vacation, in addition to holidays and sick days, is probably about average.
European fast food workers, garbage collectors and store clerks are mostly living more comfortably than their American counterparts. American engineers, doctors and other professionals are mostly living more comfortably than their European counterparts.
European fast food workers, garbage collectors and store clerks are mostly living more comfortably than their American counterparts. American engineers, doctors and other professionals are mostly living more comfortably than their European counterparts.
Vacation:
Depends where you are. I live in the UK which if I remember right has one of the stingiest holiday policies in europe. We have 28 days and our employer can also dictate when we take some of it e.g bank holidays and my last dev job it was mandatory to take a holiday day for Christmas Eve.
Paternity leave:
In the Uk we’re entitled to two weeks. Other countries have more.
Student Debt:
The average student loan debt in the UK is actually higher than the USA. The only difference is that ours is more of a graduate tax you start paying when you earn a certain amount rather than something you need to start paying off after six months regardless of income level. The amount of loan you can get is also limited to four years e.g if you drop out after two years of university you’re shit out of luck if you ever want to go back. Similar to the US, it is never wiped out even if you are made bankrupt. Unlike the US, there has never been any student loan forgiveness thus far in the UK. Link at the bottom if you’re interested.
Edit: Student loans DO get forgiven, but only after 30 years. I forgot about this.
Health Care:
In the UK we do have universal health care yes. However there are currently close to 7 million people on various waitlists, vast swathes of the country cannot access a dentist, and waiting times at A & E are at record highs. Nurses are about to go on strike as they have had a pay cut of 8% over the last decade and the government is trying to fob them off with a pay rise of 5% despite inflation being in the double digits and rising. Many people are now turning to private health care as the NHS is on the verge of collapse. Mental health care is pretty much nonexistent: you can get six hours of CBT therapy and that’s it. Unless you have a serious mental breakdown you’re on your own. Want to try a drug that’s routinely prescribed in the US? Absolutely not a chance unless it’s on some official NHS list. Oh and I even had to explain what Heart Rate Variability was when I went to speak to my doctor the other day because he kept assuming I was talking about heart rate. The NHS is so behind the times it’s embarrassing. Links at the bottom.
As a 31 year old with no children and who has had the good fortune to never have had a serious illness but who has been trapped working on the minimum wage and taught himself how to code to escape, who built a feature that added hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds to a billion dollar company only to get offered a 30k salary in return, who is still living with a parent because I still can’t afford to buy (although now close) yes despite the problems in your country, I would swap it all to go live in America if I had the opportunity.
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/10/record-71m-p...
https://news.sky.com/story/amp/average-waiting-times-for-amb...
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/01/dental-deser...
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/09/real-terms-f...
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/24/student-debt...
Depends where you are. I live in the UK which if I remember right has one of the stingiest holiday policies in europe. We have 28 days and our employer can also dictate when we take some of it e.g bank holidays and my last dev job it was mandatory to take a holiday day for Christmas Eve.
Paternity leave:
In the Uk we’re entitled to two weeks. Other countries have more.
Student Debt:
The average student loan debt in the UK is actually higher than the USA. The only difference is that ours is more of a graduate tax you start paying when you earn a certain amount rather than something you need to start paying off after six months regardless of income level. The amount of loan you can get is also limited to four years e.g if you drop out after two years of university you’re shit out of luck if you ever want to go back. Similar to the US, it is never wiped out even if you are made bankrupt. Unlike the US, there has never been any student loan forgiveness thus far in the UK. Link at the bottom if you’re interested.
Edit: Student loans DO get forgiven, but only after 30 years. I forgot about this.
Health Care:
In the UK we do have universal health care yes. However there are currently close to 7 million people on various waitlists, vast swathes of the country cannot access a dentist, and waiting times at A & E are at record highs. Nurses are about to go on strike as they have had a pay cut of 8% over the last decade and the government is trying to fob them off with a pay rise of 5% despite inflation being in the double digits and rising. Many people are now turning to private health care as the NHS is on the verge of collapse. Mental health care is pretty much nonexistent: you can get six hours of CBT therapy and that’s it. Unless you have a serious mental breakdown you’re on your own. Want to try a drug that’s routinely prescribed in the US? Absolutely not a chance unless it’s on some official NHS list. Oh and I even had to explain what Heart Rate Variability was when I went to speak to my doctor the other day because he kept assuming I was talking about heart rate. The NHS is so behind the times it’s embarrassing. Links at the bottom.
As a 31 year old with no children and who has had the good fortune to never have had a serious illness but who has been trapped working on the minimum wage and taught himself how to code to escape, who built a feature that added hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds to a billion dollar company only to get offered a 30k salary in return, who is still living with a parent because I still can’t afford to buy (although now close) yes despite the problems in your country, I would swap it all to go live in America if I had the opportunity.
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/10/record-71m-p...
https://news.sky.com/story/amp/average-waiting-times-for-amb...
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/01/dental-deser...
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/09/real-terms-f...
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/24/student-debt...
How do people live on 30k gbp? I was just in London and stuff is expensive, eating out and drinks etc. And programmers that are like 30 years old are getting 30k gbp?
Yeah the divide between the North and the South in this country is really fucking stark and getting ever wider. The North hasn’t been as expensive as the South although house prices have been rising to silly levels round here as well recently. They’re building new bungalows near where I grew up and they’re trying to sell them for half a million just because they’re in the suburbs and near a school, it’s absolutely ridiculous.
30k would have been enough for me to buy a small terraced house or an apartment round here but not much else. I pointed out that the wage wasn’t even the national average salary and they tried to claim that it was good for the area but I’m pretty sure it’s still below the regional average too. They were a billion pound international private company and could absolutely have afforded to pay me a decent wage. Sales staff up and down the company were regularly taking home six figures in commission bonuses. I was offered a max bonus of £3k. Absolute joke company.
30k would have been enough for me to buy a small terraced house or an apartment round here but not much else. I pointed out that the wage wasn’t even the national average salary and they tried to claim that it was good for the area but I’m pretty sure it’s still below the regional average too. They were a billion pound international private company and could absolutely have afforded to pay me a decent wage. Sales staff up and down the company were regularly taking home six figures in commission bonuses. I was offered a max bonus of £3k. Absolute joke company.
Name and shame
aren't London and North of England, like... different places? Like SF and Sac, maybe?
London is south
> And still, this makes me livid with jealousy. To get paid 500k - 1m a year to basically just fuck around with side projects and stuff you like to do is the dream of dreams.
Like, let's be clear. The vast majority of this money was in stock, which was pushed upwards by the incredibly low interest rates we've had since the GFC. Those days are gone (for a while at least), and the likelihood is that most of these people have taken 50% pay cuts this year due to this.
And it's also worth noting that these people are a very very small proportion of the total workforce at tech companies, and many of them are kept on hand because they are really good at things that are difficult to hire for (how much is someone who deeply understands a GBM implementation used in the ads system worth to FB/GOOG)?
Like, let's be clear. The vast majority of this money was in stock, which was pushed upwards by the incredibly low interest rates we've had since the GFC. Those days are gone (for a while at least), and the likelihood is that most of these people have taken 50% pay cuts this year due to this.
And it's also worth noting that these people are a very very small proportion of the total workforce at tech companies, and many of them are kept on hand because they are really good at things that are difficult to hire for (how much is someone who deeply understands a GBM implementation used in the ads system worth to FB/GOOG)?
That these types of engineers make up a tiny fraction of the overall tech field should really be emphasized, especially to those who browse HN, Blind, etc.
HN is a bit like Lake Woebegone where every child is above average
Yes. Feel the same. There is a story in the bible where workers are perfectly content working a full day at a vineyard until they find out other guys got the same wage for only a few hours a day. So it is an ancient problem of the human condition. My only consolation is there are many more people who DON'T like the work they do, and get paid a lot less.
Wait until you find out that there are millions out there who have inherited wealth and don’t even have to bother with the pretense of working!
For me, it helps to remember that just by virtue of making six figures working in tech, I’m easily one of the richest 1% of humans who have ever lived (probably more like 0.01%), and practice gratitude for that. Who cares if a handful of people out there have it “better”? My life is awesome, and I’m happy for them.
For me, it helps to remember that just by virtue of making six figures working in tech, I’m easily one of the richest 1% of humans who have ever lived (probably more like 0.01%), and practice gratitude for that. Who cares if a handful of people out there have it “better”? My life is awesome, and I’m happy for them.
I think the difference is that it feels almost attainable, although for most of us it isn't. I'm a software developer, I can write code and build systems. In theory I could get these compensations if I worked harder. What's keeping me from making that much is 1) I'm not in the US 2) I can't pass faang interviews.
Nonetheless it feels within reach. Unlike being the child of a billionaire. Hence the disconnect.
Nonetheless it feels within reach. Unlike being the child of a billionaire. Hence the disconnect.
This isn't about passing a faang interview as much as joining a startup which gets acquired, and you hang out while your shares vest (bad idea, unless you've got retirement money)
That's a matter of luck rather than timing, although being in a VC-hub really helps.
That's a matter of luck rather than timing, although being in a VC-hub really helps.
It's like a lottery you can only play in the US. It happens, but it's unlikely. Unfortunately you're right being out of the US makes the less likely(although I'm sure it exists for at least one person in most first world countries). It basically sounds like these people either get lost in the system, or are so important that companies pay them to sit around instead of working for a competitor.
Presuming you’ve tried more than once, if you can’t pass faang interviews, why do you still think it’s attainable?
Because they might have missed it by a tiny margin and were borderline. The feeling of totally bombing an interview and being within an inch of passing are enterily different. I wouldn't be upset by the former, but the latter would grind on me for a bit.
To the grandparent poster: if you actually have the goal of passing that faang interview, just keep trying. Taking multiple tries to succeed doesn't make you a subpar engineer. I worked for one of those FAANGs for a while, but there was another one i wanted to work at, and I kept coming short every single time during onsites for that one specifically. Like, it would always be good enough to go to the hiring committee, but it would inevitably end up with "you were so borderline, only if that one interviewer out of 5 gave you a slightly higher score, you would have been hired." Turns out, 4th time was the charm, and I got hired. And now, I am not noticing being "subpar" to any other engineers i work with who got in on the first try, my perf review was quite good, and I like the job I do, so trying all that time ended up being worth for me. So if you have that as your goal, don't get discouraged by failing, just give it another try later.
To the grandparent poster: if you actually have the goal of passing that faang interview, just keep trying. Taking multiple tries to succeed doesn't make you a subpar engineer. I worked for one of those FAANGs for a while, but there was another one i wanted to work at, and I kept coming short every single time during onsites for that one specifically. Like, it would always be good enough to go to the hiring committee, but it would inevitably end up with "you were so borderline, only if that one interviewer out of 5 gave you a slightly higher score, you would have been hired." Turns out, 4th time was the charm, and I got hired. And now, I am not noticing being "subpar" to any other engineers i work with who got in on the first try, my perf review was quite good, and I like the job I do, so trying all that time ended up being worth for me. So if you have that as your goal, don't get discouraged by failing, just give it another try later.
Also, theres more companies than just FAANG out there that pay comparably, go down levels.fyi and start applying, for anyone who wants to try
My only consolation for you is the phenomenon is largely concentrated at companies that profit on selling user’s information.
Also - I question their characterization of how carefree these folks were. Of the few folks in my network that we knew rested and vested, many were so burnt out they eventually left the industry all together.
Edit: I wonder if they were smart and got out of their equity and into something better diversified. At least for a couple, my gut says no.
Also - I question their characterization of how carefree these folks were. Of the few folks in my network that we knew rested and vested, many were so burnt out they eventually left the industry all together.
Edit: I wonder if they were smart and got out of their equity and into something better diversified. At least for a couple, my gut says no.
This is from 2017, and if anything I think this has become more prevalent now with remote work, post-COVID burnout, and a white-hot job market. It’ll be interesting to see if it changes now that the tech labor market is finally slowing down.
It seems like your value as a "rest-and-vest" is to a specific company
From the discussion of layoffs, this could be dangerous.
Perhaps the best thing to do if you find yourself in this situation is to work on your marketable skills, and learn (or invent) something new.
Perhaps the best thing to do if you find yourself in this situation is to work on your marketable skills, and learn (or invent) something new.
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The article opens with an extreme corner case, then just has a bunch of these. It's just a rehash of the "quiet quitting" BS from earlier this year. It's got a mention of 10x engineers though, so bottoms up if you're playing the bad work culture drinking game.