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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

Most people won't have a 40 year career in a high paying industry like software engineering in silicon valley.

A huge amount of people in high paying positions don't stick it out for 40 years straight. People become burnt out, have kids, live off savings/their partner, or just pay off their mortgage and live an lower-stress life. Sometimes people die, get long term sick, retire early or retrain. Or they hit a glass ceiling and don't want to keep pushing against it and quit.

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I meet a number of people at Apple in this category (i.e 20-30 years + experience). At a certain point salary tends to flatten out unless you go into management or do something incredibly specialized.

Why do these engineers not switch jobs? Wouldn't inflation actually reduce what they are earning if their salaries do flatten out?

Switch to where? There are hardly any 6 figure professions out there that don’t require a significant amount of training and sacrifice in the early years.

This isn't unique to tech. My father has almost 40 years in medicine and his salary hasn't gone up beyond inflation/cost of living in at least 20 years.

I worked on the core audio team. It’s kind of hard to find another company that pays as well as Apple where you get to continue doing that kind of work. The only other companies I can think of are either lab126 (Amazon) or google. Lab126 doesn’t pay as well as Apple.

Also, apples 401k match and internal stock discounts are amazing.

Doesn't matter. They lived in the golden age, they had a long time to buy their house when they were much more affordable. They have no renting problem.

Not to mention that apple pays well and has good benefits, so they are not sacrificing anything by staying, quite the opposite.

Because most of them can't. Only so many of senior engineers can become managers (because of obvious mathematics, management is a much smaller fraction of overall jobs available). Most of them get to a point their salaries flatten out and there isn't any advancement they can do. At that point that usually have paid off mortgage and kids so they are content just having better work life balance, doing 9-5 work & collecting their paycheck, not caring too much about advancing from that sweet spot.

I would honestly be fine with this, as long as the salary plateau was high enough to comfortably do all the upper-middle-class life things (homeownership, put kids through college, take a couple of vacations a year, etc).

Trouble is, the current plateaus are still too low to even contemplate homeownership, unless you want to commit 2/3rds of your paycheck to housing costs.

Maybe you won't find people in their 60s working in the startup scene, but that doesn't mean they just drop out of their career, which you seem to imply. Most just go to work in established companies. I work with plenty of people over 60.

> have kids

Is there any data showing that full-time working engineers with children make/work less than childless ones?

Is that true though? Can't comment for SF tech, but developers in the manhattan financial sector (at least at the high end of things at least as well paid with similar stresses) tend to measure tenure in decades.

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