Why would you want to become a wage slave if you've already built something that people want (thus can monetize it yourself)?

HN moment.

Software jobs, especially at the kinds of FAANG companies largely being discussed here, are quite a stretch for the term "wageslave."

Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, even those who've tried it before.

Golden handcuffs if you will :)

Building is the easy part.

Using the word "wageslave" to describe 300k TC office workers is out of touch at best and downright offensive at worst.

I do think it's still true in my experience that someone with the the capabilities to build useful things on their own tend to not stay very long at these giant companies, unless for specific visa reasons

depends entirely on the person. The startup life isn't for everyone, especially people with families that value stability and life balance over the idea of millions.

ah, yes. The American Dream of living in a 50 year old shitbox fixer that costs $2M in the suburbs of Cupertino.

If you can make that much remote out in Nebraska then sure, fine.

There are people doing a lot worse. But when doing much better looks like that, what even is the point?

Living in Nebraska when you have the means to live in civilization is a punishment. Why would someone choose to live in a place where the nearest restaurant is a Denny’s 45 mins away?

Quiet and peaceful, cleaner air, you can play loud music and stomp around without upsetting neighbors, and for many people most of their time is spent on a computer anyway.

The quality of my life is not defined by stomping around or playing loud music. It’s having access to and making use of amenities. What the hell good is money to me if I have no goods and services to spend it on?

Maybe most of your time is spent on a computer.

The quality of my life is not defined by how close I am to fast food diners or other frivolous goods and services.

Neither is mine, which is why I live in a place that has amazing restaurants with cuisines from all around the world. There's nothing frivolous about food or any other good or service that enhances one's quality of life.

Air quality is better in San Francisco than Omaha by the way. If you want peace and quiet, you have world class nature less than an hour’s drive away instead of the endless corn fields flat as a pancakes for hours in any direction.

do you seriously think that tenderloin, Oakland, richmond, hunter's point, bay view is civilization?

Do you really think your extreme examples are the average experience outside of Nebraska?

Well these are more affordable places in sf, not everyone is techie millionaire, you know.

and Nebraska has nice places too, especially if you have a family.

Try to raise a family with 5 kids in sf, and compare to Omaha. I would pick Omaha 10 out of 10 times, if I was not a millionaire

>Try to raise a family with 5 kids

What am I, a farmer? I would pick not doing that 10 out of 10 times regardless of how much money I had.

so we can agree that people can have their own preferences in lifestyle and critique of other people's lifestyle is not mature behavior

Let’s see where this conversation started.

>ah, yes. The American Dream of living in a 50 year old shitbox fixer that costs $2M in the suburbs of Cupertino.

So you’re right, folks living outside of metropolitan areas need to work on their insecurities and learn to be nicer to people that prioritize other things in life.

Insecurity?

More like well-justified feeling of intellectual superiority, of being able to afford 5000 sq ft home with few acres of land, and raise a family with 5 kids on a single income, and not having kids wade their way through poop and needles on the way to school, not having to smell urine and marijuana on the streets of neighborhood

Lincoln and Omaha would like a word

people choose to live in bay area not because its housing situation, but despite of it.

mainly because cutting edge R&D type technology has been developed in the area and alternatives to SV have not developed yet. its not even pay - I would say bay area pay is bad, because of cost of living & taxation.

But opportunities for growth are unmatched in bay area

The point is you can't adequately judge whether a job counts as "wageslave" just from the salary. A $300K job where houses cost $2M is like a $30K job where houses cost $200K.

you are more than right, it is actually objectively worse.

because $300K will demand much much more than 30k job.

300k job leads to stress, anxiety, performance calibrations, mental breakdowns, overwork, competition, lack of job security etc.

30k job could be very relaxed, could be part-time gig where you work few hours in a week.

so work-life balance is really tilted worse for higher paying jobs

I mean, not necessarily. A 300k job at a tech company may be less stressful than e.g. a 150k job at a non tech company with a toxic culture.

To be clear, it can be true, there are lots of stressful high paying jobs, my point is that it's not necessarily true.

I know low paid people with stressful jobs and highly paid people with less stress.

This is incorrect. If my income and expenses both increase by 10x, my savings increase by 10x. After just a few years of saving, I have the option of moving somewhere cheaper and living like a king.

It's not like your savings and investments are adjusted for the cost of living when you move.

In the extreme case, you can earn as much as possible and accumulate enough to live on indefinitely in a cheap country. This is obviously better than just earning a low salary in the cheap country for the same amount of time.

if your income 10x and you are on the wage - then that means you are either will have to work 10x more hours - or work 10x more intensively/efficiently, which leads to its own burnout and issues.

main point being is that if your income doubles, your savings rate will double, but your work related stress will double, and arguably your health (mental and physical) will deteriorate at 2x faster rate

That’s not how any of this works.

> But when doing much better looks like that, what even is the point?

Cupertino is an hour away Santa Cruz beaches. 3 hours away from skiing (or boating) at lake tahoe. 1 hour away from one of the best NBA teams (GSW). 30 minutes away from Stanford. 1 hour away from Berkeley. Some of the best average temperatures in the country.

Maybe they live in a "shitbox fixer", maybe they don't.

You might consider that people like and care about those other properties though.

> Cupertino is ...

a lot of hour drives away from everything? London or Tokyo it is not.

> Maybe they live in a "shitbox fixer", maybe they don't.

I was being rather generous at $2M on a $300k salary. Let's just assume the spouse makes that much too. Where do you place the odds of getting a nice house at, in that area? Of a similar quality that would run around $200-400k in the rest of the country. It's the suburbs. You're going to be inside your home more than you would in a city.

> You might consider that people like and care about those other properties though.

The point is $300k in SV isn't living large. You save more for retirement or to move out. Great. But you still have to leave to realize that benefit. You're just planning for some tomorrow that usually never comes for most people.

> You're just planning for some tomorrow that usually never comes for most people.

That's odd, my impression is that a lot of people go to the Bay, save a lot, then leave.

Do we have any statistics on this?

Most new Apple hires are not in Cupertino. It’s “full”.

Seems everyday on Blind there's a few posts from mid 30s folks reporting ~$3M NW and wondering if it's enough to retire on.

>downright offensive at worst

People are so easily offended these days.

Having said that, if you work for a company and you get fired and blacklisted, you still don't eat. If you work for a wage, you HAVE to work for somebody or you starve. If you work for somebody, that somebody has a lot of sway over how your life looks. Better be good at kissin' ass.

Also, if you don't think the US healthcare industry will take every penny of your life's earnings upon your eventual and inevitable deterioration, you're fooling yourself.

FWIW, I'm a wage slave too.

You’re a wage slave when you work for yourself too, probably even more so. You can’t even completely take a week or two off in most cases. Your work eats your entire life.

>You’re a wage slave when you work for yourself too, probably even more so.

It certainly can be like that especially early on. Hopefully you would grow enough to hire good people to manage the business. If you work for somebody though, that will never happen.

>It certainly can be like that especially early on.

All the slavery with none of the wage.

>If you work for somebody though, that will never happen.

The alternative to starting a business that you'll hope will be self-sustaining and still earn you a respectable living is to work for the highest bidder, invest, and become financially independent. Odds of the latter are much higher for the average software engineer than the former.

There’s also quite a few jobs where programmers can automate away a good portion of their work

So the goal is to go from wageslave to wageslave owner?

> If you work for a wage, you HAVE to work for somebody or you starve.

You really don't. There is no way you can starve in the USA unless you do it on purpose.

5 million households in the USA constantly have poor food security. About double that had intermittently poor food security. I do not think they are doing it on purpose.

And if they went to any hospital starving they would get fed.

Please note the literal use of the word 'starve'.

Huh, its like calling couch potato is offensive to someone is offensive who watch TV and sit in couch all day because their TV is 77" OLED, couch is full grain leather and beer artisanal.

If someone with 300K+ TC gets offended by this term, playing world's smallest violin for those snowflakes would be most appropriate.

Offensive as in “offensive to real wage slaves”

It’s more about the people making 30k a year putting up fencing and barely scraping by watching those 300k a year SWEs complain about how they’re wage slaves.

Running your own business kinda sucks. I did it and failed and it was extremely painful. Now I’m building my dream product working for a philanthropist who pays my wages. SO MUCH easier than doing it myself.

Your hilarious perspective on highly paid FAANG jobs aside: because now that you’ve made it and demonstrated there is a target market it’s trivial for the billion dollar company to make their own version and eat your breakfast. If they’re offering you the chance to join them as they do so it’s very often in your interest to do it.

> you've already built something that people want (thus can monetize it yourself)

The part in brackets isn't something to hand wave about. Depends a lot on how you want to spend your time, also.

If you care about achieving a particular mission, you could view joining a large funded organization as an opportunity to achieve that mission with higher likelihood or speed.

For example, if you had an idea about planting trees via drones and a big company said "come to our company and we can get this launched at scale as early as 2026". Then you think about how long it would take to do it on your own and you'd still have to convince investors and hire people and stuff.

If at the end of the day, what you care about is planting more trees quickly, you should probably join that big company. (of course there are risks too, where they cancel the project or divert its direction).

And also, not every startup found cares about achieving some grandiose mission. Some just want to get rich which is totally fine.

Decoupling an income from the time spend on work.

Something I've noticed over the past 5 or so years is a "hobby project" is increasingly becoming the standard. Your GitHub portfolio is almost as important as your resumé itself in many cases. It starts the conversation and grabs attention with potential employers, but doesn't act in lieu of a technical evaluation. Almost every competitive applicant at the intern level has some tool or webapp that they've built out extensively.

Do you actually have any evidence for this? While having zero personal projects is probably a red flag, in my last job search I saw almost no clicks on links to projects. From personal experience, most hiring managers are so busy they barely even read the resume. They are definitely not going to comb through someone's github submissions.

This has been my experience on the hiring side too. Nowadays almost all resumes have a link to GitHub, but 80%+ of the time the accounts have been dead for months/years. My favorite was a candidate whose GitHub was totally empty - they had just created an account, done nothing on it, and still included it in their resume!!

That’s… what I was afraid of.

I’m hiring too, but few of my applicants include a GH link. I’ve never seen a GL link, much less Gitea, etc.

And mind you, I’m looking. Hard. I’ll often Google the person to see if I can find a GH account for them. I hit rarely, and it’s weird.

Today one of my applicants had a GH profile and a README, a couple dozen projects in various stages of abandonment, etc, and I was deliriously happy.

I’m not very experienced in hiring (this is the first opening that I’ve written the JD for, reviewed the applications, wrote the tech interview questions, etc), but we’re clearly doing something wrong. We have a few great applicants (mostly from here and Reddit) and a whole lot of low-effort, low-value noise.

All my GH contributions have been to private/corporate work. sigh yet another barrier. All my contributions before that were before github existed. Since then, I don't know what to work on in public as it's not actually that obvious where to find interesting problems when web is not one's domain. But I guess that's the perils of being an older programmer.

True -- many hrs are too busy to look at projects, but from talking to peers/colleagues I can't think of more than a few people in my space that don't have at least something pinned on their gh. Many of them do this for the sole reason of having something to "stand out" to potential employers. I imagine it varies based on the companies to which you're applying -- smaller companies tended to care a lot, larger ones hardly even asked about my resumé.