FIRE is obviously nice. I do think "bank the extra" is significantly more attainable, while providing a lot of extra security.

1. He doesn't have to change his spending habits at all. He just needs to direct the extra income into a saving account, maybe check on it one a month/quarter/year and move it someplace like CDs, Bonds, or ETFs.

2. His goal is to continue to work. Having a healthy savings account can keep you secure while looking for another job.

FIRE is not because you wish to not work, but so that you can still live a decent life if you want to work but cannot find employment. I have read many trying anecdotes lately of engineers who are very capable who cannot succeed against the current hiring gauntlets. What good is a desire to contribute and perform meaningful work if you can't make it through the hiring circus? That is what you're derisking against. The labor market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Relevant recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35514464

This. "Bank extra and make sure you have savings" is way more reasonable than the "aim to retire by 35" FIRE cult. Out of a sample size of 4, 75% of the people I know who have done "FIRE" regret it. (The one who doesn't comes from a wealthy family who bought him a house right after university, so the sacrifices he made are a lot less.) Among the 3, the common theme was realizing they wasted the best years of their life solely focused on maximizing their money instead of enjoying their youth. Two became severely depressed alcoholics. The other went back to work as a FTE 6 months after "retiring".

It's a lot more reasonable to have a goal of, say, having 2 years' of life expenses saved up in case you want to take a faux-sabbatical mid-career. If you're in tech in the US, this is really not hard if you aren't spending extremely lavishly.

This. My plan is being financially independent enough to take several months of breaks in between jobs and having the time to look for environments I really enjoy working in.

Even with the benefit of hindsight--and admittedly ignoring some periods when I wasn't really happy where I was--given a somewhat arbitrarily large amount of money in the bank, maybe I'd have taken a couple sabbaticals but I'm not sure that, in retrospect, I'd really have been happy retiring much before my late 50s.

FIRE has so much MMM and other baggage associated with it, I prefer to avoid the term. What is true is that, as you get late career, it's probably simultaneously more difficult to land a new job, starting something brand new may be less appealing, and you may be in a position to not work full-time as an employee even if the move isn't quite on your own terms.

Personally, I've been in the position for about 5 years now where I could have ended up mostly retiring if that's what was in the cards. And it's a very liberating feeling even if you don't have to or choose not to exercise it. Makes it far more of a non-event (for you personally) when layoffs come knocking.

Rates of pay are so high in tech that I wonder if there will come a crisis when many people take early retirement. (Obviously I'm not saying this is a bad thing)

The amount of new grads and people coming in from other trades because they want a piece of the cake is high enough to keep supporting the flywheel. It would be interesting to see median age of engineers at tech companies, here it's definitely well under 35.

Anecdotally, I see some people in their 40s or early 50s who made very serious money and worked really hard (founders, CEOs, and the like) end up doing some of the on-the-side type of work that gets thrown at people in that position (boards, "advisors," and the like). But I don't actually see a huge number of late career regular employees (even fairly well-compensated ones) retiring way early.

What’s FIRE? This is an impossible to find acronym.

Financial Independence/Retire Early

Tip for searching acronyms: put the word “acronym” in the query. Works for google and gpt.

Financially Independent Retired Early