Hacker News Reader

Comment by jprince | Hacker News Reader

As terrible as this experience was, what's most alarming is that you're 37, have been working for nearly 20 years in this field, and don't have enough savings to tide you over even two months without work. You really need to learn to save your income and cut your lifestyle.

I hope that if it turns out your story is true, that these guys are in some way brought to justice, karmic or otherwise. Best of luck.

View on HN

This guy is a symptom of an alarming trend I've seen in the field. We're all riding high, spending every $ we make because we think the end will never come. I think it will, and a lot of us are going to be bankrupt.

I don't care what financial disasters may occur - I very much doubt they'd occur in such frequency that over 20 years of working in a high income job this guy wouldn't have 15,000$ handy for something like this. If he made 80k per year for 20 years, that's 1.6M dollars. Let's say 800k after taxes. You're telling me in 20 years, he couldn't save 15k out of 800k? Less than one half of one percent of all money made?

Also, I'd expect if he didn't have that much handy, he wouldn't have been naive enough to relocate without any kind of backup funds in case things went south with a startup, which often happens.

It all points to a certain ignorance when it comes to financial matters with this guy - the fact he relocated without enough funding to fall back on suggests not that he has weathered several storms over a 20 year period, one every year wiping out all his savings, but that he has a pattern of monetary mismanagement stretching back to the beginnings of his career.

EDIT: Accidentally replied to my own comment but meant it to be to the "you dont know me, you don't know my problems" naysayers below.

The thing you have to understand, 80k USD is a very very very high salary for most people (even developers) in Europe. And the ones that make that can most likely see 1/2 of that go away in taxes/social security. Cost of living will probably be higher than the equivalent salary in the USA.

On the other hand, people should get unemployment benefits when situations like this occur, unfortunately for him, the moving countries may have prevented that (for Sweden employment agency, he quit his Swedish job, not fired, and for Portuguese one, he didn't work enough months to qualify. I'm sure there are some international provisions for these situations but they are beyond me).

$80K is not so much at it might seem when you're living in the Bay Area. Rent for a small apartment $24K a year living outside of San Francisco, and up to $30K+ inside the city. Everything is very expensive. When I lived in another city I could get by at $500 a month for a similar apartment.

That is an excellent point, and very fitting. If you take in account 80k is current salary, and most likely started at 40k and over 20 years raised it (lets say linearly), making an average of 60k over those 20 years, and paying high taxes, I doubt many would be able to save much as well unless your partner also worked. Also, Stockholm has quite high rents, looking at [1], studios start at around 1000 usd and small apartments at 1600 or so (not in central Stockholm, but suburbs)

[1] http://www.bostaddirekt.com/Private/default.aspx?custType=0&...

Whether or not you can live comfortably is not in question. If you're only making enough in your city to live comfortably if you use all of your money to do so, then you need to live uncomfortably. There are plenty of poor living in all of these major cities and they get by on less than 80k, or even 60k, so it stands to reason if you're making that much and you can't afford a burn-fund then you're probably making bad choices.

It's not a new trend with engineers. It's been around since the mid-20th century if not earlier. On the other hand, you still also have a lot of engineers living like college students with a lot of savings and investments.

Good point

You don't know what the OP has been through it done. I'd avoid giving financial advice without knowing more about their situation.

I think this critique is meant mostly for us, readers. Anyway the author decided this is related information so i don't see why it should not be discussed

That's fair but then I would ask why take the risk of working for a startup and moving across the continent?

Good point. To add to that, I must say that something is odd with this story.

Honestly, if I hired a 37-year old, that started programming at the age of 8, I would have thought that I was hiring a “senior developer” (or hopefully a “wizard”).

Salary would be, appropriately, much higher than that for a beginner, or an intermediate.

What I would expect is, that the “senior developer” will look at our code, understand what is right, and wrong, and tell us what to do to fix it.

What I would not expect is, is that the “senior developer” is twiddling his thumbs waiting for a “guidance”. And is bitching about the quality of the code. Well, you were hired to tell us what to do, and to make things happen. What we expect is advice and leadership. If all you can offer is bitching & random complaints, thanks, but “this is not a perfect fit”.

To me, being employed as a senior developer doesn't imply being able to figure out the whole system and assigning tasks by yourself from day one. I didn't bitch and complain, or twiddle my thumbs for that matter. I asked for help, told them what I thought didn't work and how we could improve it, and here we are.

Did you read yourself?

What do you know about his life? Could he have lost all his savings due to a a divorce, or an accident, or some other type of tragedy? What if he always had to support others?

I hope he didn't take the decision to leave a good job in a country with one of the best economies in Europe for a start-up job in a country with one of the worst economies in Europe - while having no savings and/or having to support others.

Unbabel is unique in that they offer Valley level compensation in Portugal. From what I could see at the time, this was a good move.

I cannot speak for the OP, but we are more likely to make "bad" decisions when the situation appears desperate.

With all due respect, my personal finances are none of your business and have nothing to do with this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com