HN user
L6 @ Google, personal AGI last year (not counting capital gains or spouse's income) was just over $900K. You forget the massive stock-price appreciation between 2020 and the end of 2021. If you were granted $400K/year in stock compensation in March 2020 it was worth over $1M/year in Dec 2021.
There probably is a plateau, but I was surprised at how high it is. My first job was for $8/hour. Next was for $20/hour. The one after that was $32K/year. Then I went to college. Then it was $66K/year. Then I did a startup for nothing. Then it was $100K/year salary, but TC was about $160K/year. Got up to $300K over the course of that job. Then another startup for nothing. Then back for $630K/year, and it went up to about $900K/year with stock appreciation. Probably less now with the market crash, but still a lot more than I ever thought was possible as a plain old employee.
You do have to interview & negotiate well, and keep your skills sharp, and I'd bet that I'm about at the ceiling of what's possible as an IC. But now I've transitioned into management and all those startup exec positions are theoretically open. :-) There is always somebody making buttloads of money in the economy; if you want it, figure out who it is and how to make yourself useful to them.
I've doubled my compensation every time I switched jobs, plus doubled once through internal promotions, and another 50% increase through stock appreciation since most recent rehire. It's been about 5 doublings over a 20-year career. Most recent employer is in my username, and income history is here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10760918
(Plus $630K in 2020 and about $900K in 2021.)
It doesn't. I semi-retired at 33 and then spent the time since then doing 20+ different startup ideas. Still no success. Bank account is bigger now than when I retired, but startup dreams are effectively dead.
Bottleneck is that the market moves on in the time you spend pivoting, and eventually your inside information about what's hot and what's worth building gets stale, along with your technical skills. I know a number of other entrepreneur/retirees in the same boat - 5+ years working on various ideas, often after having a previous exit - and it never seems to result in a big company.
I doubled my salary each time I changed jobs, from internship -> first job out of high school -> first job out of college -> Google. When I got to Google I said, "I guess that's the end of the doubling." Nope, my compensation doubled again while I was an employee there, and then doubled again. Left to do a startup and then went back - at double the compensation.
Yes. $500K+ is roughly L6 at Google or the equivalent at another FAANG. It's quite a bit easier and less risky to get to that level than to start a business that nets $500K+ annual profit. (Believe me, I tried.)
Not better ones. Self-employment leaves you more exposed to the randomness of the marketplace, not less.
Would your experienced well-being have been higher in 2008 with half-million in income?
Probably not by much. All I really wanted was a basic place to live, enough food on the table, and a reasonable expectation that that'd continue into the future. My job was already doing what I would do for fun beforehand.
"Would your experienced well-being in 2020 be lower if you were making $100K/yr?"
Yes, because those things - food & housing security - are increasingly precarious on $100K/year now. You can still live on $100K/year in the Bay Area, but you're a couple years of rent increases from being priced out, and forget homeownership.
Could also be that the environment has changed since the original studies were done in 1999-2002.
I know that my subjective well-being was higher with an income of $100K in 2008 than it is with a half-mil+ in 2020. Why? Because the social system around me wasn't crumbling. Pre-GFC it was hard to imagine the degree to which your fellow Americans could end up hating and distrusting each other. $100K/year was a very respectable upper-middle-class income that could buy a house and have plenty left over for savings.
Now, you can be making a couple million a year and only be worrying about who's about to take it from you or whether your assets are going to be worthless in the next financial crash. You're certainly better off with that couple million than without it, though.
I did that and found that I hated it. There's a lot of bullshit that you have to deal with in a small business: incorporation papers, taxes, staying away from the zillions of people who try to scam or extort small business owners, sales, finances, etc. If you're wealthy enough that you don't really need revenue and can pay people for that, you'll likely find that being wealthy just exposes how money won't make you happy anyway.
So I "retired" at 33 in the sense of having investment income > monthly expenses. Didn't own a house, but could've bought the Mississippi one you link to for cash easily.
What'd I actually do? Found a series of startups, none of which went anywhere. Fiddle around with technology, and learn some new technologies. Fret about how I wasn't being productive enough. I didn't read all that much - I read much more when I was in college. I got out of shape.
I have a friend who retired at a similar age who said "One of the worst parts about having money is realizing that most of your problems were not because of money in the first place, and then having to face them." Retirement removes a lot of constraints, but that also means that if you're still unhappy with your life, it's because of you and not your boss or employer.
Roughly $700K between my wife (ex-bond-trader) and me. We are a couple years past 32 but had about $600K then, at which age I'd already quit my Google job and she'd quit her finance job.
(Reactivating my long-term throwaway for this. Salary history is in past comments.)
5 years at Google, plus living cheaply (at least as much as possible in Silicon Valley).
Doubled (total comp) every time I switched jobs, and then once without switching. It's hard to measure exactly because college & a couple startups were mixed in there, but averaged about 2-3 years of work experience per doubling. Each switch was moving from edge to center of an industry - I went from a startup writing software for schools, to financial software, to Google, and then the doubling within Google was moving from a UI-focused role to one that included UI + backend data mining. No official management positions, though I've led teams.
Since I've already got this throwaway and already posted my numbers:
I was employee # ~45,000 and my stock options were still worth ~$400K. Not exactly a startup, but startup employees stand to gain even more.
Stock compensation benefits anyone who holds stock in a company that grows unexpectedly. The meme that it's worthless is because many startups don't actually grow. However, if the company isn't growing, why are you even working there?
Startup thing.
Not to my knowledge. I started in frontend but had touched every part of the stack (including infrastructure and some ML) by the time I left.
By unexercised I mean unexercised. Stock options vest continually (well, usually monthly or quarterly usually, after the 1-year cliff); when they've vested, you have the right to exercise them, and they're considered your property. You only exercise them when you choose to, and it's at that point that you're taxed on the difference between the current stock price and the strike price.
Many of my coworkers would auto-exercise-and-sell their options immediately as they vested. If I'd done this then it would've added between $15K-$60K for each of the first 5 years, but the last year would've been about $130K instead of $350K (I benefitted significantly from the stock price appreciation of GOOG, even if I did screw up nearly everything tax-related).
I left Google because five things happened within a year or so: #1 I started feeling bored at work #2 My existing project ended and I couldn't find one that really excited me #3 I passed a million bucks in liquid net worth #4 The outside tech world started entering what seems to be a period of high uncertainty and #5 I started thinking seriously about marriage & kids and realized I only had a few years left. So, in the spirit of YOLO and with immediate financial concerns taken care of, I figured it was time to do some things I'd always wanted to do.
Throwaway because I don't want my salary history to become public.
I spent 5 years at Google. My AGI (as measured by the IRS) during my time there went $130K, $200K, $280K, $280K, $300K, $356K (for my last 5 months there...it also includes unexercised stock options for the last 5 years, though). The bump to $280K was upon promotion to senior SWE; the one to $200K was largely because of a generous stock refresh grant.