This is the only website where you can say a friend is making 250k people act like it's not a big deal
I guess lawyers and doctors make this amount of money too, but programming is the only profession you can learn with just a used laptop and a Starbucks internet connection.
And then still expect to hit a minimum of 100K within 3 years of installing Visual Studio. Even if you're a college dropout.
We are talking about FAANG salaries here. I have friends at Meta and Google who make 600k+. Similar experience level to mine.
The problem with 250k is that you can probably get a maximum of $1M mortgage with that. Can you buy a decent average house in Cupertino for $1M? Now imagine you have 3 kids and you like to take a nice family vacation twice a year. So with an average house in SV you will end up spending almost all of that 250k, good luck saving for college.
If I ever have kids, I'd probably tell them to go to community college like I did .
Even at community college, I was meeting students from Sweden, China, etc. Even went out with a K-pop supermodel once. You can attend college in California, at a community college for about $1,000 a year. Everything included.
Then go to UC Berkeley, where at most it's going to be $20,000 a year for 2 years, that's only a total of $42,000 to get a degree from one of the best schools in the world.
Now I imagine, let's say my first girlfriend finds my number, we end up having the twins that she wanted. And then our twins are super geniuses who get into Harvard.
Then maybe 250k isn't enough, it's weird though because I would think that anything over 200k is doing absurdly well.
Plus if you only need to go into work one or two days a week, just drive from Sacramento..
Barely making ends meet on 250k in SV is just part of the problem. Another part is what kind of people surround you. If all your friends make much less than 250k, then sure, 250k sounds like a good deal. But if you make 250k but all your friends (who are no smarter than you) make at least double that, then you start feeling like maybe you should too. Making 250k in SV feels like the center of middle class. Not even upper middle class. Not happy with public school education? Want your kids to go to nice private schools? Sorry, can't afford it (assuming ~2.5k/mo per kid). But your friends at Google can. Want to drive ModelX like they do? That's going to be tough with all those bills you're already paying. Yeah, you can send your kids to community college - to save money - while your friends don't have to. And again, my friends are not geniuses. They are not executives. Not successful business owners. They didn't get lucky in any way, they just applied to work at big tech, and now work there as regular software engineers. Doing the same thing I do at a startup. We are social animals, and no matter what you tell yourself, if we don't measure up to our peers we feel like losers.
