These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.

If you aren't a shoo-in at FAANG and you want to make that kind of money, your best bet is to learn how to start and run a business. I don't mean try to launch a billion dollar social app that needs venture funding. I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.

Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.

Especially if you start hiring other people, your liability then increases 10 fold as now anything can happen with them (sick leave, absenteism, low performance, sabotage, etc) but you're still bound to the same deadlines you agreed with your customers or you'll get sued for damages by them.

As an employee you have some basic rights and protections from the state on the limits your employer can squeeze from you, more or less, depending on where you live. As a contractor or company however, you don't, and can be fully liable in court for your failures to deliver regardless of your personal circumstances. Unless you know what you're getting into and have the know-how, experience, or mentorship, it's not worth it in most cases.

And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.

I suppose I should have qualified my comment by saying it's if your primary aim is to maximize income.

  > I get that...
  > Sure, I get that...

I've done both. Working FAANG is way easier than running your own business. Orders of magnitude less stress. That's why some people can "rest and vest" at FAANG.

I guess you can say I could maximize further by switching to finance or starting my own business, but the amount of extra stress is just not worth it at the moment, personally.

Your liability is. Worst case scenario is you don't get hired, or you get hired, and then get fired. That the worst that can happen. FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.

Let's watch how the Crowdstrike scenario unfolds in the coming months, when they'll probably get lawsuits up the ass for the damages they caused. Get your popcorn ready.

>And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.

Sure, but not everyone can get there, the same how not everyone can become a successful football player despite so many successful examples. There's too many variables. Usually, the right connections are your most valuable asset as one man company, and not everyone has them.

A better example is simply having your business evaporate overnight while you have a building/offices to pay for, employees to pay, etc. Which happened to someone I know back in the early days of Windows NT: his servers and desktops that he built, worked under NT but then a service pack for NT 3.51 broke everything; overnight his contract with a large local hospital went away; that a few months later the next service pack fixed the issues, meant nothing to his former customers. He went from making the equivalent of $250K today to approximately zero.

The likelihood of a one-person SAAS getting sued into oblivion is pretty low, especially if you aren't providing something as fundamental as security services to banks and airlines.

Im not saying any of this is obvious, but if you are applying to work at a FAANG, I will assume you are both smart enough and ambitious enough to do a bit of research.

First, you don't really know whether that'll hold up in court until it happens.

Second, by the time you're done with the court case, you'll have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy. Not only is that stressful by itself, it's also a big distraction from running the business, and every day you are busy with the court case you'll wish you were spending time working your business. The smaller you are, the more impactful distractions are.

There are two types of people who sue:

- rational actors who have acted in good faith, exhausted all avenues of recourse, and feel like the courts are their only hope for some sort of resolution.

- irrational actors who sue for weird personal reasons, can’t be reasoned with, refuse all attempts to come to a reasonable settlement, etc.

You definitely want the first type of person as a customer.

Again, nothing is stopping anyone from suing you personally right now.

So? Worst case, the business folds and you start it again.

This is like being worried about being fired, and people telling horror stories about so-and-so who got fired. They’re fine. You’ll be fine.

The whole point of an LLC is to prevent people from going after the corporation’s owner. They have to go after the corporation itself. It’s in the name: limited liability corporation. And sure, if you end up harming someone physically then they might have a case against you, but most of us don’t run into that problem.

Must be great having infinite ideas and capital.

Nobody but scammers is this chill about their company going bankrupt.

The most you'll ever make at a job is based on one conversation you had months or even years ago. Your income will only ever increase at steps every 6 - 12 months and, in the best case, linearly and in the worst case never increasing beyond inflation.

With a business, yes your income may be stagnant or slower, but your income isn't capped, can change rapidly, and can change on a dime rather than waiting on the next review cycle or whatever.

If you have the stomach for it, a business will long-term always give better returns for your work than a job.

Precisely.

Add to that that as a regular 9-5 worker you have one role.

As a solo business owner you have several roles (engineer, marketer, customer service, designer, etc...).

Believe it or not you get over this. It’s kind of like the fear of going up on stage to give a presentation. Some people get an addictive rush, these are usually serial entrepreneurs who just love to be in charge because they have no problems with risk/stress tolerance (mostly). You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera. Hiring/firing is hard for people but you have no choice and certainly you’re not beholden to give people jobs. People are there to work, do their best at the moment, your job is to ensure them they’re looked after adequately and your door is always open to them if they have to talk to you.

Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig. Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well. The CEO will shit test you in almost everything you do and say and this is the grilling you will need, because they expect you to be capable of running things in their stead.

Some people, but not many people...

> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig

Why?

> Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company

Why?

Why take time out of your day to tiger parent strangers on HN when you can just have your own children and damage them instead?

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

More accurately, they have made enough money from a successful venture that they can afford to fail and their risk/stress is lowered. I know serial entrepreneurs who failed several times in a row. Without some form of safety net along the way (an exit, taking money off the table in a later round, simply nice cashflows they were able to bank for a few years), they all seem to burn out.

> Believe it or not you get over this.

This screams either a lack of experience or a lack of meaningful social relationships. Many people never get over this - it is incredibly risky and stressful being a solo founder.

> You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera.

Again, not true. Some people can do this and others can’t. Fundamentally, it depends on actually providing value, being aware of the value you provide and being able to quantify that. Those are three difficult skills and many people cannot acquire them.

> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.

Absolutely no. Many people should not attempt this. In fact, I’ve been doing this for around thirty years and I think the majority of people should avoid it. People with young families, credit card debt and spending problems have no business going out on their own.

> Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well.

No, people should strive to make a living, pay their bills and find something approaching happiness.

Utter horse shit. I want to earn enough to live without too many worries, and spend time with friends and family.

Being able to leave at 5 is irreplaceable

With an employer not offering remote, you can set your own rules around it. You can work from Bali, if you want and your customers are OK with it. But i agree , the small business route is certainly not for everyone.

I do work late, and over my career have absolutely pulled all nighters and weekends and been on the redeye, but that’s when I stretch or flex, and it’s simply not sustainable.

Isn't socialism great?

I don't work for free and neither should you.

If your business succeeds. But if your business doesn't, you either enter zombie mode or you find yourself in the bread line.

You can get over it if you dig the day-to-day of running a business. But not everyone digs it.

Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.

No they shouldn't because as an endeavor it just doesn't appeal to lots of people.

The "everyone should try and become good at the stuff I think is fun" tone of this response is just weird, and grossly out of touch with observations of human nature.

• When times get tough, cofounders playing chicken to see who can take the lowest salary

• Giving yourself the lowest pay to prevent income loss of your employees

• Always having to hunt for sales to maintain your survival (which is typically nebulous and subject to when they feel like signing)

• HR and always trying to figure out how to not get sued

• Losing big customers or big customers going out of business

For any one of those bullet points there’s a coulda woulda shoulda, but again, just taking your 400k from a well established company that isn’t fighting for its survival every day is not inherently inferior to the heroics and cortisol required to operate a business.

Get to work with excellent SWEs, PMs, PgMs, etc.

In startup land I was doing so much, pitches, recruiting, coding, landing page design, dev ops, pretty much the full stack.

In FAANG land I can just focus on existence proofs and then there’s a whole support structure helping that happen and bringing the product to market.

You could argue that setting up this pipeline is the goal of a startup, but it’s a LOONG road. The opportunity cost is immense. It’s immensely difficult to recruit. You have to effectively pause your life. Scary to have children with startup level uncertainty.

At a certain $$ where you can live a comfortable life, enjoy 95% of what you do day to day, get to be in an environment with top notch colleagues, it’s a tough sell to start something from scratch with all that risk.

How many products you have actually finished and worked on and polished over years if they produced something valuable in the end?

That defines the actual realised value of the business. Jumping from one product to another does not mean that all of them were constantly producing revenue or were success. It might look good in the CV but what was end result?

Mostly worked on internal products. One HUGE hit, a few moderate hits, and quite a few failures.

The calculus for projects at a large bigco are different from a startup though.

It’s not necessarily clear bottom line revenue, especially for innovation teams. Crypto, for example, bigco needs at least some folks working on it to build an understanding of the technology, market, pain points. Some of these projects are started with literally no intention of profitability, but as an explicit build-to-learn.

There’s a wide spectrum of SWE interest and capabilities. Some folks love the creativity of greenfield new product exploration. Others love the focus of crafting a perfectly scalable, maintainable system. These are really just points along a product lifecycle.

I understand myself enough and am unapologetic about getting “bored” easily, and need to be constantly working on creative things.

Others at the other end of the spectrum have a visceral reaction to that. They can’t do what I do, and I can’t do what they do.

Profitable software-based ideas are increasingly difficult to find. Thousands of people are exploring every niche and trying to start startups in them, which is great, but competition is fierce and unexplored niches are shrinking.

And of course, it's still not straightforward even if you find a relatively unexplored niche. Most people I see who have attempted startups had extensive family support or personal wealth from exits as an employee of a company that had an IPO.

I think there are probably several hundred HN readers who would be happy to tackle those problems. Boring is probably not the issue, but obscure is, assuming these problems exist. If they're difficult to discover that the problem exists, that's a challenge. Further, if the problems exist but are highly unique in each case, there may be a reason it's solved in a one-off way by Excel or scripts rather than a scalable product. The use of Excel isn't inherently ripe for disruption. There are plenty of problems to be solved that just can't be solved profitably. It would be no better than solving a problem that someone has but is unwilling to pay for.

There was (still is, though the website is now dead) a really cool website/app that a fmr Air Force soldier made called AFI SWiM[0] that extracted 'Shall, Will and Must' references from Air Force publications which blew up in popularity among the target demo. The dev recently(ish) wrote a blog post[1] how it surprised him to see the app[2] had gotten around ~20k downloads, though I am unsure if the app was always priced at $1.99 (which would be just under $40k).

I like the idea of developing a problem solver for a niche market, though finding and monetizing it definitely is pretty tough.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220601160702/https://swim.afie...

[1] https://willswire.com/blog/chat-afi/

[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/afi-explorer/id1564964107

the github repo: https://github.com/willswire/afi-swim

This guy found an underserved market opportunity, built something, got some success marketing it, and made a whopping total of $40k.

Meanwhile the FAANG guys are making that every two months, without all the risk.

Still risky, but the expected value is comparable to a stint at a salaried job IMO, once you find a decent market opportunity. Not to mention the qualitative value of self-employment, and that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs.

We can play this game all day, but the fact is somebody put a ton of work into a project and made about what they could have made in a month at a FAANG.

Pretty crappy trade off.

Not really. FAANG people have to show up to get that salary. It's not apples to apples to compare this to salary because the app was built once then continued to make money without additional work.

Salary requires constant effort and work. I will take working 60 - 80 hours for a week to make $40k over working 320 hours to make the same.

> that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs

You aren’t seriously comparing the risk of self-employment to the risk of being layed off by one of the most stable companies of the world during a downturn after a 15 year bullrun, are you?

In basically all instances:

1. These stories get a ton of upvotes because they're actually quite rare.

2. The total income to the founder is still considerably (like way considerably) less that a senior dev at a FAANG.

They say ideas are worth nothing, but not to me. If you really have some good ideas (see definition above), I would be interested in buying them at a reasonable price.

https://zzzbears.com

Pretty niche but IIRC he is doing well for himself.

I don't know if this is actually a market worth pursuing, but I do know that I paid some company $500 to fill in a form for me and help figure out the process. They probably spent an hour or two on my case.

With the increase of dual citizens, digital nomads, etc. this seems like a growing market to me.

I am not a professional, so seek and pay for professional advice, if that is what you need. I've been doing my own taxes as an American living abroad for ~a decade. If anyone is in a similar situation and has questions, feel free to pm me. Because financial/tax advice from strangers with no professional credentials on the Internet is always a good idea. :p

Which just proves the immense value of Excel and the relatively bad value proposition of custom-made software.

> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.

1. Yes, which is why it’s increasingly hard to start a business as a pure software engineer. To put it harshly, most software engineers don’t know enough about the real world out there to solve its problems. Many choose to create software for other software engineers for this reason, and that market is fierce.

2. Another issue is that only those specific businesses might have those problems. Even if you know about them, solving them might not be a good business case. Solving them must be lucrative enough to allow for a small target audience, or the problem needs to be common enough to allow for economies of scale, which brings us to back to point 1.

I’m working on one such problem in the healthcare space, as an outsider. In early stages, so we’ll see if it goes anywhere.

[0] https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pmf-framework/

And the problems were so important that somebody, anybody, stepped up to the plate with a digital solution as soon as it was barely possible.

Sometimes you have to admire that effort to a greater degree than a more technically advanced alternative.

I'm sure some of these are ripe for transition to a truly more effective approach in every way but often there is no fooling them trying to provide anything less.

And disruption itself can be the enemy in some things like this.

There is limitless opportunity outside of the webtech/adtech bullshit bubble. Go create a hardware startup, it's never been easier. It's still harder than adtech bullshit was 10 years ago, but the turnkey manufacturing industry is faaaar better than all the "hardware is hard" weekly blogspam would lead you to believe.

I haven't read this elsewhere so it may be non-validated but you shouldn't imagine customers of a product as entirely captured nor cohesive. Inside of the customer pool are going to be people who are displeased with the product for sometimes disparate reasons but not enough to find a different product because this one is "good enough".

To make this example very simple, a product may produce orange widgets. It's good enough for most people but one group wishes it made a more yellow widget while another group wishes it made a more red widget. The orange widget isn't the ideal case, it's a compromise to serve the most people.

If someone came in and made a product that produces very yellow widgets and focuses on the yellow widget market, you could serve those people very well despite being having a smaller pool.

In other words, your product doesn't need to go toe-to-toe with the orange widget product that has a revenue of $1B, you only need to pick off the yellow widget people to get a revenue of, lets say, $10M and you are eating very well.

I, like many others, hold a white-collar job in a technology company, not FAANG, with a salary between 300 and 400K per year, with lunch breaks, paid vacation days, good health insurance, and the opportunity to work from home at least 75% of the time.

At the end of my workday, which I have not found to be stressful in at least 3 years, I am fresh, hydrated, and ready to spend late afternoons, evenings, and nights pursuing my interests, taking care of the kids, and maybe learning French at last. I see guys running fairly successful local businesses, both physical and digital. Assuming you have a choice between the two paths, a brief look at the physical condition and a conversation with me and the business owner would quickly lead you to prefer one of the two paths.

I might be privileged, lucky, in an unusual situation. But the same is true for the successful local entrepreneur running a plumbing business with profits equivalent to those of experienced people working in tech.

There are real downsides to owning your own business. It’s probably been 15 years since I had a day where I didn’t check my email.

Most people are Indians, not chiefs, and I think that’s actually an evolutionary adaptation that’s built into us. Someone may want to be the best programmer they can be rather than the best at managing employees, setting business strategy, dealing with taxes and other paperwork, etc.

Totally get it.

Startups are so hit and miss. It's really really hard to make $500k a year at a startup. There's many years of zero, near zero or sub-intern salary. After that there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.

Classic businesses can get a substantial salary sooner than a startup, but do have a ceiling. If you're selling a well known need (plumbing, consulting, etc), there's competition and a ceiling at hours worked.

Having done both, a FAANG job is infinitely less effort than running a company. Also lower stress, lower risk, and immediate rewards/pay. I still have more fun starting companies though!

>there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.

Tech or not I think it usually doesn't dwarf anything but if it comes close, a little bit low or high, that's a huge milestone above failure.

In that case it might allow you to maintain readiness for an incredible bonanza which might be within reach only from beyond that point, and that can be what dwarfs the "big payout".

IOW depending on the situation, occasional big payouts that really just even things out may not be very life-changing even if they are big, but it can give you more rolls of the dice at things that can't be approached any other way.

I do better as a consultant/contractor for a client who is a previous customer from when I had my own facility. Fundamentally I used to provide the paperwork (the deliverable/invoiceable product) and supported everything needed to generate it, including any free advice which goes along to smooth the flow. Now I'm paid to help their paperwork achieve and maintain value with none of mine in the mix at all, but I'm basically doing a lot of the same stuff when I'm on site.

As a contractor aren't you now a small business operator of a different type, perhaps much smaller?

I would estimate in more of the exact same business in so many ways very few ever come close to that.

Maybe even doing some of the same things under different degrees of ownership and responsibility, and this could be a good example of way different compensation when the only difference is the underlying arrangement.

Looks like ironc can be good :)

Except, it kinda is for people that have the right background and are well suited to it. That is, the reason I think you're getting a lot of pushback is that many folks are just inherently risk averse. There are people who are smart, know how to work hard, and know that if they have a path laid out in front of them, they can succeed.

For entrepreneurs, there is simply much more variability. You can be smart, work hard, do everything right, and still fail in unexpected ways due to things outside of your control.

I don't think entrepreneurship is bad at all, but it's not surprising at all to me that people who want to go the FAANG route aren't well suited to starting their own business.

Starting a business is NP hard. At the end of the day, you have to convince people to give you money in some form and way, and that is not a guarantee. You could land on a lucrative idea, or you could do trial and error, failing every time.

Furthermore, once you have either, maintaining a FAANG job is much easier than maintaining a business.

You have to find a business that makes sense for you (you know it, you want to put up with it, etc). You then have to execute. All the while hoping that you don't get struck by lightning (something kills your business), while also hoping to get struct by lightning (you become wildly successful). God forbid you need job security (family, health care, etc.).

Contrast this to going into a job, where what you do is laid out for you, you just have to execute. With insurance. With job security.

Even as someone who has run a startup and still has the itch, it's a no brainer.

Very rare to see businesses where you're sole developer and salesperson unless you are the main SME on a niche field/technology you probably developed.

Also A LOT of FAANG is immigrants who can't start a business in the US or children of immigrants whose parents put strong pressure on them having an upper middle class job.

Anecdotally, I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of formally-educated people I've encountered in life are more allergic to this idea than the opposite.. I don't have any solid theories as to why, exactly, but it's curious nonetheless.

What sees you discount the obvious? That is, formally educated people end up in formal education because they have a proclivity towards not wanting to have to go out and get it. They want someone else to hand it to them. Which is, after all, what the "formal" part of formal education describes.

It seems like you are vastly underestimating the effort (and risk) it takes to start a successful SaaS that brings its founder $500k+ annually.

You're right about everything if you can actually start and grow that business, but you're glossing over how difficult that actually is to do, and the fact that you have to start from $0 income.

To anyone exploring starting a new business I would keep the day job and suffer until you get to a point where the business is on a good clip and you can dedicate all your time to it. Otherwise spending 20 years at FAANG and enjoying your life is really not a bad way to live, in fact its a dream to 99% of the planets population.

It’s been a LONG time since that’s happened.

Just remember that.

It's also unlimited as a gambler. That doesn't mean everyone should start buying lotto tickets.

Maybe people want to be developers, and not managers/CEOs/business owner/entrepreneurs?

They're completely different jobs. Why would you expect everyone to aspire to the same thing?

We don't look at nurses and say "its funny how so many nurses have an aversion to become a multinational pharmaceutical CEO"

I like coding. I don't want to run a business, and these are very separate skills. This is like asking why an IC doesn't want to become a people manager.

Plus running a business takes a lot of money and luck...

I can't do that as well while starting and running a company.

And you might say, "well - you'll never become a billionaire working for someone else".

That's not true.

There's plenty of CEOs (non-founders) who are billionaires.

And the chances of you running your own company and becoming a billionaire, is about the same probability as you becoming a CEO at a Fortune 500.

Being a business owner doesn't necessarily mean being the founder.

No CEO is becoming a billionaire by collecting a paycheque. They might become a billionaire by accepting the right stock offer in lieu of wages, but that makes them the business owner again.

Yes, they can and do.

  Safra Catz, $2B - CEO Oracle
  Sheryl Sandberg, $2B - Meta
  Jamie Dimon, $1B+ - CEO Chase

https://www.forbes.com/profile/safra-catz/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/18/how-shery....

https://www.businessinsider.com/jamie-dimon-career

Granted, Catz seems to have recently sold off a large stake of her ownership. But the cash proceeds of that sale still came from being the owner at one point, not from a salary. Nobody becomes a billionaire off a regular paycheque.

Hell, even FAANG software developer compensation is really only notable because the total package includes becoming an owner of the company. The wage portion isn't that much different than any other random tech company.

Otherwise, you can contact incubators like YC. If they approve your idea and grant you money, you can then easily apply for loans at banks because you've been vetted by a well known company.

After all that energy spent, you will understand the quote :

> Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.

Being an employee is still running a business. The separation you are trying to draw isn't meaningful.

That particular line of business is one of the few businesses out there with a near-guaranteed customer base, though. That's a highly attractive trait for someone operating a business. With small risk comes small reward, of course, but it is no surprise that most businesses venture in that direction.

As for myself, I can’t wait to free myself from these chains called salaried employment. (I don’t mean to offend anyone)

He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.

I think it's very easy to start a failing plumbing business. I think it far less accessible to start a plumbing business that competes with a FAANG salary.

Put another way: how many people do you know who started their own consumer-facing, bootstrapped business, of any kind and who take home $3-500,000 as CEO? My answer is, like, two and they're both lawyers who didn't start making that kind of income until their mid thirties.

Edit: It would not, at all, surprise me if even in the trades the most common path to business ownership was to take over someone else's already existing business, which would I think cut even further into this point since it would mean the most common path to entrepreneurship is optimizing employment in a small business context.

I think getting a FAANG job is difficult, but for the median 30 year old (who has around $5,000 saved up and limited or no external safety nets), starting a business as your primary source of income is a really good way to bankrupt yourself and not much else, and valorizing that path is actively harmful.

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/holy-heck-this-is-hard-8eb...

Granted, this is Indie Hackers, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the general idea still applies. Getting to $10k a month, let alone making $250k a year (so ~$20k/month) is really hard, probably about as hard as making $250k a year as an employee, maybe even harder.

What about all the guys running unsuccessful local plumbing businesses?

To me it's always been a matter of personality. As an introvert, I can't picture myself doing the kinds of social interactions required to sell a business on my own.

It’s not like nobody wants that, the scarce thing is having a good business idea unless you want to go into consulting.

> And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.

That’s kinda stretching it. Higher FAANG-level salaries are enough to reach financial independence, which is pretty much „unlimited“ territory for most normal people. On the other hand, most businesses are not hyper successful. It‘s not like becoming a millionaire entrepreneur can be taken for granted.

It’s interesting that you don’t seem to understand this. Survivorship bias or something else?

There’s just so much more responsibility resting on your shoulders. Holidays have never felt the same since I left employment in 2011.

No regrets here, just saying this path is not for everyone and not as accessible as you might think.

The one has got nothing to do with the other. Running a small business is far more sales and marketing, and if you are lucky enough to get to the point where you need to hire someone, then HR, managing suppliers and fuck me don’t get me started on fucking customers.

My base salary is $150k/yr. My cash bonus maxes out somewhere around $80k/yr, and typically falls in the $50k - 70k range. I also receive equity worth roughly $12k - $15k per year. Counting in the value of benefits, my comp package is worth roughly $280k - $300k/yr.

I am extremely well paid for the area I live in. It's very unlikely that I could make more money without moving to a different metro, getting lucky with a remote position, or going into niche contracting.

Just throwing this out there, because a $250k salary (plus bonus) is doing well even in a HCOL area.

That used to be the case where I live, just a few years ago. Now what used to be a starter home is over $400k.

One other nice thing is that instead of restricted stock you get actual money.

And generally the money will be locked up for less time than the 4 year vesting that these companies often follow.

And on top of that you can usually invest your money fee free in your own fund to help juice your returns.

The downside is that there is almost certainly going to be more stress on you and probably no where to hide if you want to just rest and vest.

Your team and company will likely be pretty small and everyone will be very aware of what everyone's contribution to the company's success.

I think you need to be a pretty unique individual to succeed in environments like that. Most people I know break down under intense pressure when shit hits the fan, even if they're wildly competent. I can only assume it's that much more intense when tons of money is at stake.

While I've done zero attempts to work at any hedge fund, I know plenty of people who both had success when wanting to join one (even though some of them were under-qualified) and people who failed (some who were over-qualified).

I'd disagree about your perceived upbringing mattering at all.

I don't know of any fund that hires technical staff like that. I mean we're here to make money, if someone can do that, no one cares what their social upbringing is, I mean like at all.

Now the school you went to matters, though it matters about as much as it would at a FAANG company.

And as to "how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, "

I would hope that all companies hire based on how someone presents themselves and would we want to work with them. Everyone should base hiring on how the candidate acts and presents themselves, that seems like an incredibly positive step, no?

> The technical pieces are pretty far behind.

Which specific fund are you referring to here. This seems very uninformed from my experience, but i'm willing to look at your evidence that hedge funds don't really value technical ability.

Perhaps if you could name those funds, we could have a talk since I know the industry very well.

"Rest and vest". What a luxury. Some of us are trying to tread water with an anvil chained to the waist. That's what I get for choosing to work for something I'm passionate about. What a world

Are you passionate about working for your current employer or passionate about your career?

I’m passionate about my career (programming/software development): I love reading the classic tech books out there (TAOCP, DDIA, etc.), I love working on side projects, sometimes I contribute to open source, etc.

On the other hand, I couldn’t care less about my employer. Not because they are bad, but I just don’t care about most of the tech companies out there. I do what I need to do to get paid, but i’m not passionate about deadlines, conversations with other engineers about subjective topics, daily standups, on call, etc.

My home hobbies resemble work within my area, but not my current job function, but I'm keenly aware my employer may try to take advantage of my other talents and do I guess the only thing that saves having an alternative hobby is that I'm so diversified that whatever my work task is I can work on an orthogonal hobby at home. It's kinda nice, I've got both really.

In my mind if I "sell out" (in terms of trading in for that sense of purpose in my work), and just work for the paycheck, then I would go for max. Work an HFT quant firm as a senior or principal engineer or research analyst. $$$. Or some other juicy gig. But I would hate myself if that became a slog and I had no time for my interests at home.

Err...4-year vesting doesn't mean the money is literally locked away until you hit 4 years' tenure. A $1m stock grant vesting over 4 years might pay $250-350k every year, depending on the vesting schedule and stock performance.

If a hedge fund pays $1m every 2 years then they're just paying more period. It's not the vesting schedule which causes the difference in comp.

No one said it did:)

My point was that a typical bonus is about 2/3's employees at the moment its granted and 1/3 held back for a year sometimes two, so you get money faster than a typical 4 year vesting schedule.

Does that clear things up?

(BTW FAANG pays bonuses too. They're 100% the employee's when they're paid)

Stock at FAANG is basically equivalent to cash. You can sell it as soon as you get it.

1) Be better than the overwhelming majority of your peers, and be noticed for this. You are quite likely to find interesting opportunities come your way. I do mean overwhelming though - small fraction of a percent.

2) Specialize in something most people can’t or won’t do. This includes difficult, obscure, and unpleasant work.

In both cases some of the biggest $ comes from independent consulting, once you’ve built up a network and a reputation for fixing a particular pain point corporations have (bill for value, of course).