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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic advice. For senior engineers, its common for stock to be up to 1/3rd of compensatation. If the stock goes up by 6x - then you’ll be making 3x your original negotiated compensation. Being able to save multiple years worth of take-home salary every year is life changing.

After 4 years of this, you may not have your original career - but 8-15 years of pay saved provides lots of optionality.

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Nothing special happens at 15 years expenses in savings. It's way past what you need for security, but not nearly enough to retire on (that's more like 25x). It's way past what you need to rent, but it won't buy you a home you want in the region where you earned it, unless in combination with a PITI that commits you to earning at the same level for another 30 years. It could set you up nicely in a different region, but that would probably have to be combined with a career change, or else you're gambling that you can sustain full-remote employment.

If you're telling yourself to hang on until you reach this point... just realize that you may reach it and find you're still stuck.

This doesn't seem responsive to GP's comment. GP didn't discuss 15 years' expenses.

>but 8-15 years of pay saved provides lots of optionality.

I guess that depends how you're defining "pay" in relation to taxes and deductions.

It’s income, as opposed to expenses.

Throw 15 years of savings into the stock market and it will almost certainly double in value in 7 years.

It is most certainly transformative if you pretend you don’t have it for what amounts to a pretty short period of time.

If you're saying "I'll just hang on in this job I don't like until I'm in this 8-15 range" you may find that it's not reasonable to make any big life changes from that position either; you still need to "pretend you don't have it" and keep going for another while.

Holding on to your job you don’t like for not that long to retire easily is an amazing privilege that most don’t have.

"it will almost certainly double in value in 7 years" implies 10% is an almost certain long term return. It is not.

10 years is a common rule of thumb to double your investment, this is a good guess since after adjusting for inflation, the real return of S&P 500 is about 6.8%. Which is about 10.5 years to double your investment.

(give or take S&P 500 being one of the best returns you will find historically)

10% is almost certain but yes I wasn’t adjusting for inflation.

100% - quote from parent fits perfectly: "It's a perfectly valid thing to stay for financial reasons, but that must come with acceptance that sometimes you'll have to roll over and take whatever they decide to dish out."

Not an engineer but in tech. My career has stalled out but I'm making better money then I would in a different place with more upward trajectory. It's been wild (and blessed) being able to save 1+ years worth of expenses each year (after taxes, retirement contributions, expenses, etc).

> For senior engineers, its common for stock to be up to 1/3rd of compensatation.

Relatively common to be significantly higher than 1/3, too.

Assuming the company stock has an upward trajectory the correct ratio to cite here depends on whether you're looking at the original grant or the value upon vesting. You could plausibly have grants that are 1/3 of your compensation at award but integer multiples of your salary upon vesting.

E.g., my signing offer was >1/3 stock at grant and with refreshers (at grant) my pay is significantly >1/3 stock, even if you model the stock price as flat. (Refreshers were 4-5x the size of salary bumps.) And I'm not especially senior.

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