FAANG Simulator

85K via independent means. not salary.

once you get to 85K whether via consulting, your own apps etc - you don't get laid off in case I wasn't clear.

85k should definitely cover your expenses. You can rent out a bedroom instead of a house. Buy a cheap car. Eat canned beans. Even in SF, it’s doable on 85k.

How much was/is your rent per month? And how many dependents?

“ In my personal experience, the jobs I have taken which paid less treated me as cheaper and more disposable. ”

That’s my experience. The more I have made in my career, the better and with more respect I got treated. As freelance I did some projects with non profit “do gooders”. They didn’t pay well and treated people horribly. On the other hand, successful companies will treat you well and pay well.

Perhaps you just didn't push it far enough: I took a 90% pay cut and am happy with it :)

Is it possible that the causation is the other way? FAANG doesn't pay well because its dispiriting and toxic, its toxic because it pays well. This attracts all sorts of behavior.

I mean, it paid well in the early-mid 2010s also and was way less toxic.

Not entirely true. I work in "boring" State government as a programmer. I constantly see juniors starting private industry jobs at close to what I make after being with my employer for 10 years straight.

However, money is not everything to me. While the salary is not truly impressive, my job has a lot of benefits. People sleep on these jobs while chasing MegaCorp clout which is cool and all, but I am just a redneck clever enough to write bad code. I don't want FAANG, and FAANG doesn't want me.

> Unless you have a family, want to travel

We have generous PTO, sick leave, bereavement leave, 6 weeks of paternity leave for mothers AND fathers, 16 holidays off, etc.. Plus, many offices are 100% remote (mine is 3/5 days a week).

> want an ample retirement fund

I have a Pension, 401k, and a 457(b) all through my employer. I am fortunate that the pension is also fully funded for over 30 years in advance. Plus, PTO rolls into sick time annual and sick time can be used to purchase service time, thus one can retire even faster than the typical 30 year timeframe.

> have complex health issues

We have great health insurance plans, and my office has been wonderful in dealing with people with very complex health issues. Way more than what I expect the private industry would do.

Guess how many people have been laid off from my office? ;)

> yeah, I'm still working on my <insert dream here> but I have 0 - 10 users

That hit pretty hard...

try doing premium themes or plugins on bigger platforms, than gravitate to your core item

solidarity; i'm right there with you.

Only if you seek them out (ski resorts and such). I've lived in both of the most expensive major inland cities (Chicago and Denver) and $85k is plenty in both, even for a small family.

The median household income in the US is like 83K, which means half of all households survive with less than that. And most households have two earners.

Even New York City has a median household income of ~80K. Half of all households in NYC survive on that.

I do not make a ton more than that, and I live in the downtown area of the largest city in my southern state. I still am able to save about 30%-40% of my gross income every year, pay my bills, etc..

I think too many people just have poor spending habits (or children).

I think they're saying that you should build a small business which nets you 85k, not find an employer that underpays you.

(Whether this makes you more resistant to being "fired" is still up for debate of course.)

If you work in industry, at a place that pays developers $85K, you are very unlikely to be part of some sort of downsizing. This is entrenched company territory and the kind of place that just goes about it's business, not trying to hang the moon or "ramp up" areas. Yeah they can be subject to wider economic influences, but at tech companies layoffs happen just because of a change in the wind while profits are breaking records.

Like there's a place near me, I don't even think they would pay $85K though. Maybe for higher positions, but closer to $70k. They are pretty much always hiring lots of IT positions. They make firetrucks and pretty much only sell them regionally, but are set with orders for like 25+ years. Their low skill positions fill up fast though.

85K via independent means. not salary.

once you get to 85K whether via consulting, your own apps etc - you don't get laid off in case I wasn't clear.

my apologies for not being clear enough.

I don't care how I "look". If a company puts me on PIP because I worked hard for 40 hours instead of 80, so be it, I'll just take severance, leave, and relax for a while. I have the luxury of doing that, and I'll prioritize my health and family over a rat race. I do believe in working hard, but I also believe in family and having pursuits to live life for outside of work.

If you're in H1B at a FAANG, you unfortunately don't have that luxury, because if you don't work 80 you may be put into PIP and forced to uproot your entire family and destroy your kids' education if you can't nail another job within 60 days. And so in groups with both H1Bs and citizens/PRs, a lot of H1Bs will work harder, out of fear, not because they actually want to, and if there is a stank ranking system, the ones who don't fear will be the ones who get PIP more easily because they respect their bodies' limits.

I was just suggesting that the game can simulate both of these modes, the second being drastically harder.

Yes, exactly this. Migrant workers, under the threat of being deported if they don't work enough, obviously can be forced to accept much worse work conditions and work-life balance.

that's a very weird way to read it.

i hope your kids are not sewing shoes instead of getting an education.

> things like employer matches in retirement accounts

seems completely reasonable to model this as income.

> health insurance contributions

If your employer provides a health insurance benefit that would otherwise cost you $X / yr, you could model that as +$X / yr income and +$X / yr expenses.

Simple FIRE calculators like that Networthify one assume that your expenses in retirement are the same as when you are working, but that's probably not true for many people, for numerous reasons: health insurance once you're not longer working, paying off a mortgage, children launching into the workforce, increasing health expenses as you age, lifestyle changes when you're not working, potentially moving to a different area with a different cost of living.

But as a 0-th order approximation, assuming expenses in retirement are the same as when you are working is a place to start when assembling a rough plan.

...and then you just get fired one day.

This seemed to work best.

Unexpected given what I know second-hand about the valley - which is to grind leetcode and keep job hopping.

I finished it the first time by just hitting "grind" until burnout got above 80% and then hitting "touch grass" until burnout got down below 30%, repeat until win. It actually feels like my current job.

I tested just "side project", "YC" and "launch", touching grass when burnout is over 80%, ignoring anything work related, trice:

RAT RACE · ACQUIRED sold the company at 25 · walked away with $6.40M · peak burnout 82%

RAT RACE · ACQUIRED sold the company at 26 · walked away with $11.37M · peak burnout 91%

RAT RACE · ACQUIRED sold the company at 26 · walked away with $8.96M · peak burnout 95%

Trying to balance grind, touch grass and side project took me 20 years before retiring with 20'ish millions after selling a hard-worked side project.

It seems that if you ignore work and do "side project" only from first month, your networth increases with the compensation when you are fired, and if you last one year (almost all runs), you can keep "side project" indefinitely.

In all seriousness, where are these stories? There are so many "entrepreneurs" vibing away, but who is getting paid? I feel like there should have been some decent exits by now but all I've found are a few lifestyle businesses and a lot of hucksters.

My experience: I feel like I could build a real product solo much more quickly than ever before, but the reality is my side-projects have been mostly futzing around with coding agents and related infrastructure - like building my own command proxy system with LLM review/classification & deterministic approval policy - for sandboxed agents to manage cloud infrastructure in controlled ways - building the builder who never builds. I see a lot of that kind of stuff on Twitter too.

Sounds like someone who has never touched grass. ;-p

The hard part is even knowing what someone would pay for. I don't know if a sales guy knows that or not.

I try to resist the urge to vibecode, but yes agree on sales

I still drive a 2007 honda fit shitbox with a TC of 500k. It is possible.

Not everyone, no, but some people do choose to avoid lifestyle creep, or at least have a lot less of it than their peers. I'm just saying it's optional and not inevitable.

But then you have to live in Idaho.

"How come Google keeps making Chrome shittier :^(" - People who say this

That was sarcasm. On the other hand, it is certainly a normal experience to have to use Chrome for reasons like this.

No it hasn't. It wasn't until money got involved that anything computers were lucrative. Before there was Airbnb there was the Internet of Couchsurfing.org, where people did things for free out of the kindness of their hearts and for fun. That world is long gone, replaced by OnlyFans and Amazon, cos we all got rent to pay. IBM was the big evil and Apple was the upstart and free and open standards and open source were gonna change the world. They didn't, thru got taken advantage of by corporate forces. If an MBA proposed open source, give away your work for free, and we'll just figure out some magical way to pay you, you'd tell them to get fucked. But because it came out of MIT and a bunch of nerds, it sounded like a good idea.

The magical way to get paid turned out to be advertising, giving us Google and Facebook and their invasions of privacy. If, instead, we'd had a culture of paying people for their time and effort, and not a bunch of freeloaders, who knows how things would look today. Proprietary and locked down, perhaps. But also maybe not?

/rant.

Look at salaries for the other 95% of human population on levels.fyi - earning $100k at 25 years is incredible privilege.

Maybe. Probably. It's hard for me to perceive sarcasm these days. I'm becoming just like the neoliberals I used to criticize who gets triggered at the slightest thing haha.

That said, I do think a lot of cynical engineers have a "Rat race" worldview and not the "Hamster wheel" one.

From my perspective, it's like if someone made a joke about genocide. My sarcasm detector switches off. This topic and this game is traumatic to me.

Also, the amount of money which is needed to retire in the game is huge! $1.7 million! I'm not even expecting to reach that at retirement. The fact that someone believes they can get this in a few years of grinding reveals a very cushy worldview...

What I would do for that kind of money...

I've been grinding like insane, nights and weekends for almost 15 years and my net worth is like $200k, 30% of it illiquid in a retirement fund. I never got a bonus, in spite of being called "the best engineer at the company" to my face by the company founder. After asking for a raise, they offered a 2% salary increase... This was a cryptocurrency company with a lot of money to spare.

If you retire at 30 with $1.7M, you’d be getting about $45-$60k/year for the rest of your life

Maybe if you live by yourself, or have someone contributing a second income, and inflation doesn’t catch up with you

Goes pretty far in Weed, for example.