You don't. I'd guess most of the developers don't. For example, my near 20 years of experience nets me a salary FAANG interns would find offensive. But in this part of the world it's "raise a family comfortably" money. In the end, it all depends on cost of living. And accepting you are not building 20 seat Lan party setup in your spare wing of the house.
My salary literally doubled just working remote/hybrid for London companies around COVID. I much prefer the lifestyle now I work for a smaller company in Canterbury and get paid less for the role. Turns out all that extra travel and overtime ended up being materially worse for my quality of life. And my job is way more fun nowadays.
The jobs are massively not the same. It's like saying the IT guy that's in charge of reimaging PCs at your municipal office is broadly doing the same job as the couple that built this lan house.
There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
There is plenty of crossover. e.g. look at the salaries of an engineer at Netflix vs one at ABC/Disney that works on their streaming platform.
Netflix is operating at a higher technical level, no doubt. But the salaries can be something like 5x higher. Maybe all industries are like that but I’m not sure they are.
It's the same shock/objection that's expressed at CEO salaries: Do we really think the engineer at Netflix who makes $1M/yr is really 10X more productive or adding 10X more value than the engineer at NoNameCo who makes $100k/yr? Or are people simply paid what each company is willing to pay them, without some kind of full-industry merit-based leveling system? In my view, pay has long since totally divorced from productivity and more closely tracks random chance of what company you ended up in, and who acquired who.
> There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
I'd love to see some data on this though I don't know how you'd measure it. I suspect a high percentage of west coast FAANG level jobs are low impact but also low complexity. I do figure people work more hours though. With scale comes new problems but also a lot of infrastructure and support around it.
It's pretty silly to use IT guy when there's loads of software devs working on complex stuff for critical infrastructure making less than 200k.
There's growing popular sentiment that being a millionaire/billionaire at all is morally repugnant and antisocial behavior that deserves to be shunned, if not punished.
If a kid graduated with comp sci degree in 2000, joined decent companies as a w2 employee, does he become "repugnant" and "deserves to be shunned if not punished" the moment his net worth crosses 1m, which may happen within a few years of graduation?
Or does he need to "marinade" a few years as a millionaire before we roll out the guillotine?
If he joined a worse company (or slacked and didn't get promoted) and hadn't become a millionaire, does he avoid the repugnancy and punishment?
What if he did make the money but blew on stupidity, does that also avoid that classification?
It's not surprising given the author's background. What I don't get is the part right before about not being able to afford a family-sized house in Palo Alto. Guessing the answer is yeah, they could afford it, but they don't want to pay that much for something still not very large.
There is no argument from which this can be minimized. Even in an incredibly rich country like the US this is an enormous expense. You're looking at this from the top of a field that is already at the top of the economic pyramid which is in turn at the top of a global economic pyramid.
This is excess on a scale that is essentially laughable for the entire human race, minus some statistically insignificant population.
So 75k is both objectively massive, and not.
I won't argue "privilege" but it seems like both people in the couple have been working for a long time and took equity bets that paid off.
Another way to look at it, in many tech jobs 75k could be a bonus (additional to salary an equity)