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Comment by NicoJuicy | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if you take work/life balance into respect.

You can have all the money of the world, but if you're only enjoying it at >60 years it's too late.

Working for tech in the Bay Area you have a pretty reasonable and predictable path to financial independence in maybe a decade or so of work (so, early 30s if you start right after school). After which you can have any wlb you want for the rest of your life. You don't even have to work at absolute top companies like FAANG to achieve that, although it helps (FAANG & hitting L6+ you have a decent shot even at FatFIRE)

This is nearly impossible in Europe except by extreme luck. Enjoy your 40+ years of sub 40h/w work ahead of you with slightly longer vacations. While I can have a life long vacation after my 30s. Perhaps even spending it in Europe.

[ deleted my original reply - sorry I thought you were replying to another one of my posts ]

True, you probably work harder and are more stressed in the US, but at least you have an option to retire early there on your savings. In the EU, I suspect most developers have very little savings and plan to just work until old age and state pension kicks in.

Where I live, we are record savers ( Belgium). Everyone can go on pension at 56 ( much lower pension though) and can have a break for multiple years if they want, during their active career, that's not possible in the US.

I have 1 year to go for being debt free ( included buying a house) at 32 age.

I also thought it was US citizens that didn't save money?

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Even then, Europe catched up with productivity and some even doubled it vs. the US ( quoting : https://www.euractiv.com/section/innovation-industry/intervi... )

> Hours worked does not mean more productive.

I once got a contract offer from Belgium and checked your taxes. They are something like 55% for anything over 60k EUR per year? It means that, even if you get a high paying job, literally most of the money gets taken away. Seem rather hard to save significant amounts in such conditions.

Cost of living is lower?

600€/ month was enough to pay off my house loan. Leaves plenty of room to save money.

I literally save like 3-4/5ths, i do think that's more than average though.

Renting a place here would be 300-900€/month. I know someone who rents at 250€/month in the city with a decent house ( that's an edge case though)

Note: I'm paying off my loan early.

And there are places in the US where modest homes in good areas are $90-100k and will get you a similar payment even with less than 20% down. I'm not sure what your point is?

> In the EU, I suspect most developers have very little savings and plan to just work until old age and state pension kicks in.

This is also true of developers in the US. The number of lucky ones who can retire significantly early is a tiny fraction of the market — but companies have very successfully used those dreams to get lots of free overtime from people who didn’t notice where most of the money ends up. FAANG developers do well but even there early retirement is not a reliable plan.

That must be due to lifestyle inflation? If you don't save anything on a $100k+ salary, you have only yourself to blame (assuming the savings weren't wiped by medical bills or some other calamity). I suspect these people prioritize their McMansion, changing family cars every 3-5 years or funding fancy out-of-state schools for their children over freedom from work.

Have you looked at the cost if living in the Bay Area since 1990? $100k is not exactly buying you a high-end lifestyle involving private schools in a city where under something like $120k qualifies a family as low-income. Both parents in high-income jobs gets closer but then you’re talking about additional expenses like housecleaning, nannies, dining out, and probably multiple cars.

SF is an extreme but most of the high paying tech jobs cluster in areas which are closer to that cost of living - doing well, sure, but far from rich and definitely not able to count on being set for life since one illness, untimely layoff, etc. can easily derail a career.

That’s not to say that there aren’t ways to economize but there’s a long history of lazy editorializing about how kids these days are spending too much on avocado toast while studiously ignoring the data showing that the big problems are healthcare, housing, student loans, etc.

The Bay Area is an outlier as one of the most expensive locals in the world to live in. The median developer salary in the US is somewhere around $100-110k, and the vast majority of those people live outside of SF/NYC and work for boring companies doing boring forms-over-data work.

You can save a shitload of money in Iowa making $95k/yr.

I completely agree but how many jobs are there in Iowa paying that much? I'm sure there are some but it's hard to fault people for going where the jobs are.

My whole point is most jobs aren't in SF or NYC, and most software devs make six figures. Even if the high six-figure jobs are concentrated in those two locations (I'm sure they are, especially if you expand it to Austin, Chicago, and D.C.), there are going to be plenty of people making six figures in low COL areas. FAANG only accounts for a small percentage of dev jobs (a few tens of thousands at most, out of nearly 4 million devs in the US). Let's call it 100k to be super generous, and that they all make above the median. With 3.8 million devs, 1.9 make six figures. 1.8 non-FAANG. NY State has 220k developers so let's remove all of them for the sake of argument, even though that's going to include the guys in upstate in low COL, and double-count a bunch of FAANG folks. We're down to about 1.58 million non-FAANG, non-astronomical-COL living folks at least who are making six figures.

The BLS stats might be a good place to test those estimates:

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151251.htm#st

Again, note that I’m not saying you can’t make a good living elsewhere - having spent the first 15 years of my career doing that, it’d be odd - but that it’s not a simple ticket to being rich or even especially upper middle class. The pay scales definitely drag down, there are fewer jobs (and thus promotion opportunities), and they’re concentrated in the higher cost areas of low cost states.

Still solid, no question, but not a gold ticket. Note that many of the things the person I originally responded to are expenses which don’t scale down: if you live in a rural area your house is cheap but the two cars your family needs cost the same, computers and other consumer goods are only slightly less, etc. Those private schools are cheaper but not dramatically so, etc.

State pension won't be nearly enough to cover your living standards. You'd still pay insurance (less than before retirement though) and taxes off your pension. You still have to save on your own or go with an additional private pension scheme in Germany to somewhat be able to keep same living standards.

This is true, state pension is enough to survive, but not enough to live. You should absolutely put money into work/personal pensions while you are young.

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