You're in like, 0.1% of programmers financially. I know living in certain bubbles it feels like everyone makes that kind of money, but it's absolutely not. It's like a lottery winner telling people that if they plan to work over 50 they are fools.

By freelancing you can save nice nest egg in most places. I did that for 11 years in Europe and now I work because I want to, not because I must. Disclaimer: not consulting anymore, I moved back to startup grind once more because I feel more connected to the work than what you do as a consultant.

Freelancing is another bubble I think.

I don’t think most developers have the skills necessary to freelance and/or most enterprises are not setup to work with freelancers.

I don't feel like being my own boss. Shrug emoji

Even if you make half that, which is a common offer all over America, you can retire early.

Americans are their own little bubble again - I'd wager that most of the world's programmers don't live in US. Globally your average programmer will be someone writing utterly boring code making same salary as a teacher, maybe slightly above that if lucky. Happy to be proven wrong, but the whole "If you aren't making 6 figures as a programmer you failed at life" meme needs to go away - it's a tiny tiny sliver of all programmers that actually manage to achieve that.

Retiring early is more about expenses than income. If you can't retire early with $100k income, you probably can't do it with $300k either.

Most people can't do it, because their expenses grow to match their income. They want bigger and better everything, and they always find new "mandatory" expenses. Especially if they have kids.

My spouse and I make just a touch over the GP, combined of course. Our mortgage is 1.3k/month, and our daycare costs are 3k/month. In a year darcaye goes down by half, and 2 years after that we’re going to have money coming out our ears.

I am fortunate my spouse was on board with this plan, which was mine. I’m 38, spouse is 36, for reference. Assuming we have college saved for, I don’t want to work a day past 55 if I can manage it.

I probably dragged things out a year or three past where I prudently could have. Not sure if I made the right call or not. COVID messed up a lot of things (and obviously sadly killed a lot of people) and I might have made different decisions on a more normal timeline.

With age, your ability to spend money greatly diminishes. Even driving to expensive restaurants is tiresome. The need to impress other people goes away, and rocking chair on the porch doesn't cost much. I'm struggling to spend 1/5 of my investment income. And the kids have forbidden me from giving them more money because they want to 'make it themselves'.

Did You factor kids in?

I'm sure it's my FAANG bias, but 0.1%? I would have guessed 5%.

Programmers haven't always made this much.

During the .com boom (1990's) an intermediate programmer would easily command $100k USD/year in salary. Many made millions on stocks. Later how many programmer millionaires did the big tech companies make? 10's of thousands?

25 years ago. Adjusted to today that's ~190k USD in salary. Add equity, bonus, ESPP etc. There's ups and downs but I think there are lots of US software jobs that pay this today.

And a lot of those programmers in the .com boom ended up with stock that was worth zilch and a ton of people ended up leaving the industry in the 2001 or so period. I was incredibly luck to get laid off a couple weeks after 9/11 and to get another tech-adjacent job about a month later based on a lunch I had with someone I knew a few days after I was laid off. That was not a common experience in that period.

(Mind you, that wasn't a great stretch for me in terms of compensation. But a later job made up for it at least by my standards.)

There's always a range of experiences. Most of the people I know did ok through the .com bust and are still in tech. Some people had millions on paper and didn't sell and held on to it and not only was it worth zilch they also owed taxes but many really made millions. Pretty much anyone that had a job in FAANG or similar companies did really well from 2001 to today - a lot of people. Tech grew like crazy and took a lot of people with it for the ride.

Certainly the last 15 years in particular have been very good for a lot of people in tech even if they didn't hit a big jackpot in FAANG or wherever. I had a pretty ordinary tech industry job in that period and it set me up better than my whole prior career did.

But they have, plus or minus 40% adjusted for inflation. Soul sucking corporate jobs have always paid well.

There are way, way, way more jobs that make 300k+ in our industry than there ever have been.

It's not that these jobs have never existed, it's that they are in greater quantities.

40% is a big fraction

How much do you need to accumulate before you retire?

I'm guessing retiring just means working on your own things with enough runway til you drop dead.

At my current rate of spend, about $3M-3.5M. (Spending 100k/year)

I’m working to bring down the spend rate, but even if I don’t I should be good well before 50. I’m saving/investing about 160k/year, plus or minus. Some of the money saved is pre tax in 401k and some isn’t, so it’s not exactly dollar for dollar equivalent.