deanmoriarty

I cannot advise but just wanted to say you’re a hero, congratulations for quitting.

I am in a similar financial situation and age ($6M liquid, $60k spend, 38, not single), and have been in burnout for a while and haven’t found the courage to quit yet.

Similar burnout reasons as yours: nothing is horrible about the work but I feel deeply inadequate, I feel in my 20s I was a high performer with incredible mastery of my domain, and as the industry “progressed” complexity-wise and everyone became more advanced in their craft, I got left behind. There are many (most?) younger (and older) folks at my current company who are producing 100X what I do (this is not some kind of impostor syndrome btw, I literally had a trusted colleague say to me: “you really should be more ambitious and build more, much more”), and are hired on the same ladder, for the same comp. As you stated, that chips away at your confidence every day and it plants the seed for burnout.

Similar worries as yours: I am quite honestly afraid of what I will do with my time. I would just be running away from work and not running towards something else, and having grown up with some money trauma I did not want to regret willingly stepping away from the high pay, but I think a forced layoff would probably be the best gift someone could give me right now.

I hope for many more insightful replies to this thread.

Retire. I lived fairly frugally since when I entered the workforce 15 years ago and saved a bunch, so I like to think I’m financially prepared for it. I hope to retire soon even if AI doesn’t replace me :-)

If my financial situation won’t be enough, I like to think that things would be so bad that not even keeping a job would have helped.

> as long as people like you maintain such a callous attitude about those who came before them.

I think you might be barking up the wrong tree here since I just rent a very modest apartment here and I’m not going to ever buy a property, nor vote against any housing shortage policies. My suggestion was purely practical.

But what would you expect exactly? The Bay Area has a massive marketing machine that screams to the world: “come here, make big bucks quickly and easily!”, which is true. Do you expect people not to take that bargain? People will always be looking to improve their situation, I came from the other side of the world just like many others.

It should be up to the government to either limit the inflow of people (via immigration control or other means), massively increase housing inventory or any other solution (I’m not an economist so I don’t know what’s the right one).

The condo you listed just sold for less than its last 2019 sale value when accounting for the massive inflation rate of these past 5 years. Thinking that it was a bubble-driven price is really not the right attitude, in my opinion. It’s how much it’s worth, and the market confirmed it.

I live in SF, find it a beautiful city but I’m not particularly attached to it, so I rent.

The area where that property is located is really good, I live nearby. I think the property is worth that amount, since someone paid for it in a competitive market, that terrace with views of Sutro tower is spectacular. It’s also a good deal compared to its previous 2019 sale price ($1.4M), so it’s likely it was intentionally priced below market, the owner never meant to sell it at the asking price.

The city just has so, so many wealthy people, it’s difficult to comprehend. I, a complete nobody, know a lot of people in their 20s with $10M+ net worth. I’m in my 30s with a $6M liquid net worth and I’m the least successful in my peer group. It’s not unreasonable to drop that much in a beautiful city with such a scarce inventory. I don’t think that property value will significantly drop any time soon, if ever.

You are entitled to your own opinions and venting, but it might be more productive to just vote with your feet and leave, if this is too frustrating to deal with.

I struggle to understand why an educated crowd like HN routinely forgets dividends when posting any sort of financial charts. Total returns are what matters.

I have been fighting your same battle. Every day I wake up hoping this will be the day I get fired. I cannot bring myself to quit as it would be voluntarily squandering the privilege ($$$) I’m afforded, though my courage is increasing every day.

I think this is a very reasonable take, I’m not sure where the hate for dating apps comes from.

I am a very average looking man (I’d say look wise I’d be considered a 7/10) and never had a problem using dating apps in the Bay Area, they worked as intended for me, I had experiences with Tinder, Bumble and OkCupid mostly.

Sure you have to work a bit for it, but I dated dozens of women, had very fun times, and ultimately met my wife there.

Most of my friends had a similar experience. The convenience that dating apps brought to my life is remarkable, in my opinion.

In the Bay Area:

- A 10 min visit to a specialist office, where I was seen by a nurse practitioner who was able to refer me to an exam without involving the main physician, costed $800 (just the visit, not the followup exam), which also went through deductible.

- A routine colonoscopy came at $19k with bills that kept coming for the next 6-12 months from various parties. Consumed my deductible in one shot as the first bill came.

- A visit to the ER that lasted 10 mins with an XRay costed me $5k, also sent in tranches for the next 6 months, to the point where I thought I was victim of some scam (I wasn’t). Maxed my deductible as well.

I have a couple non-critical health concerns right now I’d like to consult a doctor about, but I won’t drop another huge deductible just for that.

I am a dual citizen from a European country with a high quality healthcare public system (but admittedly longer waits than the US ). I’m not eligible for it since I’m not a resident anymore (I will when/if I move back), but as I went visiting family I booked a private appointment with a well known cardiologist and he spent a good 50 minutes with me, for a total of EUR 100.

Every time I start doing some network packet-based troubleshooting, for example firing up tcpdump to debug a tcp window size improperly tuned that caused a performance degradation over a high latency link (this is a random example I did last week), coworkers look at me like I pulled off some sort of wizardry. I feel it’s knowledge that most SWEs working on distributed systems should have acquired early and routinely use, but clearly that’s not the case.

I personally think it’s better to struggle early on than to give away money like candies to founders with dubious businesses who will then trick gullible employees into thinking that these companies’ massive valuations mean anything. I kid you not one founder told me once my equity was safer in the company than liquidated and put in the SP500, when I inquired about tender opportunities.

I have vested equity (that I painfully exercised) in a “2020-era unicorn” that has been a complete zombie ever since. I wish they’d just go out of business for me to at least declare a capital loss on my taxes.

I just have myself to blame clearly, so just stating an opinion.

It’s truly the biggest scam in the industry.

Staying years at an early startup in exchange for paper money (and having to pay AMT + exercise costs) is one of the biggest regrets in my career, I truly don’t know what I was thinking.

I still have a bunch of this paper junk and I wish they’d at least go to $0 so that I could claim a capital loss on my exercised cost basis, but they are stuck in zombie land.

Genuine naive question: when it comes to Google HN has generally a negative view of it (pick any random story on Chrome, ads, search, web, working at faang, etc. and this should be obvious from the comments), yet when it comes to AI there is a somewhat notable “cheering effect” for Google to win the AI race that goes beyond a conventional appreciation of a healthy competitive landscape, which may appear as a bit of a double standard.

Why is this? Is it because OpenAI is seen as such a negative player in this ecosystem that Google “gets a pass on this one”?

And bonus question: what do people think will happen to OpenAI if Google wins the race? Do you think they’ll literally just go bust?

> Even if you have a $10m portfolio you’ll be next, once they’ve drained the $100k and $1m lot.

What does this mean, in practical examples? Just trying to understand your point.

I like to think I am extremely attentive to bug reports (I’m always paranoid about my code possibly containing bugs, so I err on the side of turning every stone), so I would probably not make Jerry’s mistake here, but sure as hell if a manager tried to humiliate me that much I would just quit on the spot.

In my opinion, there are ways to share feedback that allow another person to save face, letting them process it on their own terms instead of pounding them like this in a single session until they are “defeated”.

Such feedback can then be politely repeated, if the issue reoccurs later on, and formally documented as part of a performance warning, simply letting the other person know, once again without insisting, that this is a serious behavioral issue that will have repercussions if not actioned, and that you are there to provide any context should they want to talk about it more.

That is, in my opinion, a way for a leader to show that every team member is treated as an adult and responsible for their own actions and outcome.

Very beautiful and nostalgic, so well done.

I used to live nearby and my favorite “urban” hike was going up Glen Canyon, up and down the two Twin Peaks, loop through Sutro Forest and then go back to downtown walking down 17th. Loved those weekend walks.

Correct, and this is what I originally meant.

I read the post and I am thankful that these people exist, most of my life is made possible through the selfless work of wonderful open source developers like this person.

Sometimes I wish I was so passionate, whereas my philosophy in life towards strangers is a much simpler “fuck you, or pay me”. It allows me to sleep fairly well at night.

I have a few toy projects on GitHub, a couple of which gained a tiny bit of popularity, and I simply ignored every new feature request that I didn’t need, and especially those large PRs “here, I refactored your code to make it functional and it’s so much better now”. I simply said, with no regret: “I won’t merge this, feel free to fork the project, if it’s better I might even switch myself to your project!”. Some got mad, but I truly and genuinely couldn’t care less.

This is sad and surprising.

I’ve been through so many shenanigans during my previous life as a naive startup employee: paid huge amounts of AMT (which took years to recoup via AMT credits), was not offered 83b election, had to write huge checks to exercise ISO, had to pay taxes when exercising NSO, etc., but I had never heard of a company threatening to forfeit the RSU if tax is not wired to them, it’s simply wild, especially when the liquidity is so close.

If I was in your shoes and the amount was substantial, I’d consult a lawyer. I hired one to help me facilitate a secondary sale transaction contract and it cost me $4k, money well spent. Tons of them in the Bay Area.

I would truly love to know how this will end up for you.

He wants a wife that will be both attractive, loving, AND pulling in a $500k+ salary.

While I personally think it’s a pretty bad way to live life and I more agree with your overall stance (my wife is American but she is second generation immigrant from an Asian country and I can quite appreciate the difference in culture you are hinting at, thankfully she grew up with strong values from her parents more consistent with the ones of a first-generation immigrant like myself), I admit it’s going to be hard for him to fit the last requirement with someone from abroad (it still can be done though).

My speculation is that he comes from certain cultures that tend to be extremely aspirational, and given his looks and general transactional attitude he is going to be extremely disappointed in the long term, and he is robbing himself of precious years of love, affection and meaning chasing silly pursuits like cosmetic surgeries to improve his dating odds.

But I agree that if he wants all those requirements he probably should look for someone who is already a professional in the US.

What’s your take on finding a partner from abroad? I understand it sounds incredibly cringy and fake, but I have a couple of friends that would easily fall into the bucket of “very subpar facial+body attractiveness”, and went through their 20s without a single date. One found a wife in Eastern Europe, and one in South East Asia.

There are a million reasons to think how bad of an idea that would be (I thought the same for a while), but after many years they are still in very happy marriages, with attractive and loving wives that do genuinely seem to care about them after all these years.

How much do you expect a surgery to increase your odds of finding the partner you're looking for? Genuinely curious since it sounds such an incredible situation assuming that we are not talking about really serious surgery like trying to mitigate disfigurement or similar.

> My main issue is that I can’t find women who find me physically attractive

My main issue is that I can't find someone willing to sell me $VTI at $100/share. Is it possible that your standards of what you consider a woman "attractive enough to date" are too high, and so you are filtering out potential candidates that would be happy to be with you?

Four years seems like a really long time for someone actively looking to be in a relationship to stay single, and surgery with the objective of finding a partner seems wildly extreme (just my own opinion, I clearly do not know your circumstances).

I am the most average looking (if that) man on the planet, and really never had too much trouble dating, and I live in Silicon Valley where the statistics are not even in my favor. Certainly I never went after the prototypical "Instagram model" as that would have dramatically affected my chances, but by no means I am less happy.

It is surprising that this still happens, but I’ve had senior engineers (L6-L7 from FAANG) join my teams (multiple examples, different companies) and in the first couple days make extremely superficial but strong arguments on how the architecture of a system should be completely revisited, and how libraries that have been in production for years should just be rewritten from scratch asap.

In virtually all cases the suggestion was extremely naive and coming from a lack of understanding of all the requirements. This did not come from a curious angle “wondering if we could do X?”, it was always based on some ground truth they knew better.

Very calmly, you start explaining to them all the key requirements that they just missed in their grand vision. Upon hearing those, some will decide to double down and come up, on the spot, with increasingly complex and arcane evolutions of their initial proposal (this is always very comical, and painful to witness), while others will quickly get the message and basically say “oh sorry, seems like I lack a lot of context, please ignore”.

And let’s not even talk about their first code reviews.

I truly don’t know what goes in someone’s head when they decide, shortly after joining, to dismiss years of work of a competent team who has objectively solved problems for the business.

> who was working and curious

For a lot of people, not having to work would cause them to become much more curious, with a lot more going on too. I wouldn’t link work, especially modern office work, to those other qualities.

My dad is retired and is the happiest he has ever been. He had a very interesting working career, built several small businesses in his life, but retirement gave him a completely new joy and purpose. He routinely states how retirement is simply amazing, starting from the silly ability to stay up late at night and sleep in every morning (for him late night means 11pm, and sleeping in is 7am, lol).

I definitely agree with your statement, though I don’t fully understand the link between that and not being able to retire.

In what way is not retiring (let’s assume with decent savings, your typical 25X yearly expenses including typical ACA premium and deductible) significantly lowering the chances that a serious illness will cause bankruptcy, enough that it will make it worth to continue working? Isn’t the probability more or less the same in either case?

Clearly one cannot just save their way into self-insuring, as it’s trivial to imagine medical bills in the many millions of dollars if your insurance starts denying expensive treatments that you do need, wiping out everyone without a $50M+ net worth. Hell I had a routine 1h colonoscopy a while ago and it was a $20k bill (of which I “just” paid $4k out of pocket while the insurance paid $16k, “lucky” me), can’t imagine what an expensive surgery would cost if insurance denies it, there’s really no amount of savings that can shield you from such risk.

Is the thinking that for as long as a person is covered by an employer plan they will get better coverage than what’s available on the exchange, therefore it’s better to just never retire? This also doesn’t seem too logical.

Or is the thinking that by continuing to work one can mitigate the scenario where the insurances constantly nickle and dime you for some non-black-swan medications/procedures, causing one’s healthcare costs to inflate way above the stated maximum out of pockets, but in a way that can still be somewhat offset by the additional income? This is probably more plausible as I read stories of people taking medications that improve their quality of life at the cost of $2k+ per month, which they fully pay because the insurance decided not to cover those. Those can definitely put a dent in one’s planned budget.

I seem to have answered myself after all…

2025 will hopefully be the year I choose to retire, at 38, and $6M saved up in liquid assets (very boring index funds).

My tricks will be:

- Living modestly. I never spent more than $50-60k a year in my life even while living in Silicon Valley and traveling internationally a few times a year. I plan to keep it that way, it will probably go up a little bit if I have to pay for my own healthcare on the exchange.

- Traveling extensively but to cheap destinations and off season.

- I am also a dual citizen US/EU so if the US healthcare situation becomes too wild (e.g. ACA gets repealed) I can get universal healthcare in my home country, which is “free” (in quote because in order to get into the healthcare system there I would need to become a resident, which comes with a substantially higher tax on dividend/capital gains than US, but that’s still an infinitely better deal than the US healthcare situation).

From above:

> I well understand the problem is “me”, I would say I suffer from quite a bit of misanthropy against pretty much every coworker I ever had, and on top of that I am an extreme introvert, relationships forced upon me cause a lot of contempt.

> It's going to get worse before it gets better.

What would be a reasonable estimate of when it could start to “get better”? I find “country eating its young” to be a perfect metaphor and honestly I don’t see any hope, it’s sad to see.

I have been in the US for close to 15 years now, as a renter, and the insane rent increase driven by housing shortage is truly sour. Every year there’s a high probability that my rent will be dramatically jacked up, to the point where I have moved 11 times since I came here, in several instances directly driven by a 20% rent increase.

And I work in tech so generally can afford things due to high pay, I cannot even imagine how less fortunate professionals in other careers manage. Probably tons of roommates or accepting 2h commutes.

All this has definitely added a sense of instability to my life that certainly contributed to other downstream decisions, some serious like never having kids (not the only reason, but a factor nonetheless), and some trivial like never buying any nice furniture/tools because it’s just going to be an annoyance when I’ll have to move again in N months after the landlord says they can now get $4k on the market instead of my current $3.5k.

Fortunately I am a european citizen and most likely I see myself gravitating more and more there as I age. Europe has a lot of problems, including housing shortage in some pockets, but where I come from, which is a generally desirable urban/suburban metro, it’s easy to find affordable rentals on a 8 year contract, which makes it so much easier to plan your life and not live with the anxiety that in just 9 months a 20% increase will come your way.

The year I got the original Gameboy, came with Tetris and Gargoyle's Quest. Must have been 1991 or so, was probably the happiest Christmas of my life. Incredible how I still vividly remember that morning, more than 30 years later. I opened the gifts and then we spent the day at my cousins’ eating and playing, I was the youngest among my cousins and it was so cool hanging out with them, slightly older kids, we stayed there from morning til midnight. What I wouldn’t do to live that day again, perhaps paying more attention to the adult conversations happening at the dinner table which I completely ignored as a young kid back then.

My parents have been so good and kind to me, we were never poor but money was always tight with my dad being a small business owner with some ups and many downs, and yet they never failed to provide memorable gifts when I was a kid. I was very happy back then, but just as an adult I came to appreciate the sacrifices they must have made for me.

Anecdotally, nearly every time I’ve had a change of manager, replacing the one I originally interviewed with when joining the company, I ended up quitting in less than one year, typically because I couldn’t deal with their management style. It always seemed silly that, after working my ass off, now I had to prove myself again to a new manager. Might as well jump ship and get a good raise for it.

So no advice but you’re not alone.