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Comment by kobeya | Hacker News Reader

Salaries in the range of $200k/yr, plus benefits, is not big bucks?

Not in the sense that it leads to financial independence, no. A person earning this salary is still usually one relativley minor catastrophe away from bankruptcy. Also, these salaries aren't sustained: bubbles exist, and thousands of developers won't make those salaries consistently.

It can easily lead to financial independence if you're even moderately frugal instead of goldfishing your paycheck. Just look at /r/financialindependence, most posters aren't bringing in 500k+ a year or whatever, they're mostly upper-middle class professionals who live a middle-middle class lifestyle.

Financial independence means they could quit today, not have a single change in their lifestyle, and remain insulated from catastrophe (e.g. medical illness) destroying that ability.

It doesn't mean $1M in the 401k and a couple of residential houses they rent out.

It means they could quit today, and be able to comfortably live the rest of their life without earned income. It doesn't mean the exact same lifestyle - many people plan to retire early to LCOL areas. Especially in that subreddit(1).

You're right about the 401k - that $1M doesn't help too much until you hit retirement age. You need substantial unearned income or enough principle to draw down to be FI.

1. FatFIRE targets $4M-$7M, and is closer to your definition.(https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/)

No, financial independence means you could live indefinitely without further earned income. For some that would mean just basic living expenses, for others it would mean covering luxuries too. You don't get to define what others are okay with living on, sorry.

So a homeless person who chooses it is "financially independent?" At some point the phrase just doesn't have a meaning at all.

It's possible to argue that, but I'd argue that being dependent on the goodwill of others and charities for your sustenance means you're not actually independent.

You should check out /r/vandwellers sometime.

200k/yr is one minor catastrophe away from bankruptcy? You must have some very significant additions/vices! That would be a home run for me!

If you can't make it work and make it work really well on 200k/year, you have a massive budgeting problem.

Disclosure: not in the Bay area.

I agree, even in the Bay Area, actually. But that's a separate question from whether it's "big bucks".

The article mentions..."Not every engineer is a Stanford CS grad at Google making $200,000 a year....The median salary for American IT workers is $81,000"

The median family income in the US is about $60k[1], and most Americans have less than $1000 in savings.[2]

Way too many SV employees are completely out of touch with just how privileged they are.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/how-much-americans-at-have-i...

I'm not sure privileged is the right word. I mean, they have to work hard at learning the skills and keeping skills up to date. It's not just given to them. Perhaps fortunate to pick a good, growing career maybe.

There is earned privilege and unearned privilege. You can work hard and "earn" whatever privilege you have. That won't make you any less privileged.

Someone far less privileged than you are could also be working far harder than you are.

I'm sure privileged is the right word. Coming from an impoverished past, I'm certainly very privileged to have been born with the intelligence to go through a physics PhD, have had the guidance of teachers and educators who saw the potential, and am now able to earn ~$200k/yr. These are all lucky coincidences that most are not privileged to have had.

That doesn't fit easily into the definition. I mean I guess if you think nature / God granted you intelligence, but nature grants lot of people intelligence. The fact that you had good teachers and were impoverished is more luck than privilege.

Privileged doesn't typically mean luck, it means advantages granted to you because of social class or parents and whatnot. I mean I guess you could stretch it to mean luck.

>a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.

So in this case, privilege and luck are synonymous?

SV costs of living is also completely out of touch with the rest of America.

> The median family income in the US is about $60k[1], and most Americans have less than $1000 in savings.[2]

As a mostly out of touch techie: How does that scale with living expenses? Do average people in SF have more than $1000 in savings because their living expenses are also that much higher?

I come from a relatively unrich area in Europe and when I had $1000 in savings over there, I felt super rich and like nothing can touch me. Now I'm in SF and I have 20x more savings, but feel like I'm one small catastrophe away from homeless.

My decision to leave a career where I made very little (hospitality), teach myself software engineering, and then make this transition successful was...work, not privilege.

You had the opportunity and means to do so. That's a privilege many are not afforded, due to various circumstances.

Privilege isn't a bad thing. Acknowledging it shouldn't take away from the fact that you had to work really hard, maybe harder than many others, to get to where you are.

Sure, but I feel like people just throw that word around so much that it glosses over the fact that people did work hard to get to where they are. Maybe I just have privilege fatigue after hearing it at conferences, meetups, work, forums, etc.

Privilege is not necessarily something you're born with (though some are certainly born very privileged). Starting from very little one could achieve great privilege. Endless stacks of motivational books and accounts of self-made men bear constant witness to this.

In SV one doesn't have to be any of those things to earn $200k/yr. It might not be super common but it's hardly an extreme outlier.

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