Silly Twitter fight aside, the key piece of advice that us regular non-rich folk should take away is this:
"Your first goal after university should be to build yourself a safety net."
Once you have $10k in the bank, you can start taking risks just like those privileged kids that are starting all the startups with their unfair advantages.
Best of all for us, we work in software, where socking away your first ten thousand dollars happens automatically after landing an entry level dev gig, provided you don't go out of your way to blow your entire outlandish salary on silly possessions.
> we work in software, where socking away your first ten thousand dollars happens automatically after landing an entry level dev gig, provided you don't go out of your way to blow your entire outlandish salary on silly possessions.
This is shockingly out of touch with reality, just like PG's original tweet.
There are plenty of people with CS degrees who can't find a job, and plenty more who have jobs that barely pay enough to cover their expenses.
Spend some time reading through something like the CSCareerQuestions subreddit if you want to get a glimpse of life outside your bubble.
> There are plenty of people with CS degrees who can't find a job, and plenty more who have jobs that barely pay enough to cover their expenses.
If anything, this comment is out of touch with reality as it stands for most software developers in the US.
The median salary for a software developer in the US is over $100k. In Silicon Valley MSAs it's even higher of course.
The median income for similar careers like computer programmer is also very high even if it's less than $100k and those careers cover far fewer people anyway.
Average starting salary for CS undergrads today is $57,000. He did say "entry level dev gig".
If you live alone in a major city, have student loans, and don't have great healthcare benefits from your employer, you'd be lucky to save much of anything on that salary. Banking $10k is a pipe dream.
I made $70k / year for the past 7 years (finally got a raise at the start of this year), so ages 23 - 30. My work health insurance covered me, but not my wife, for most of that. We had our first daughter a week after I turned 27 and twins a week after I turned 29.
MY wife worked at a coffee shop until we had our daughter. Making around $20k / year.
In that time, we grew our net worth to $250k.
That's not a lot by some standards, but it is a hell of a lot more than most people our age have. Even people in similar income brackets as us. All it takes is living below your means.
At UMD, a good but normal state school, that figure is a little above $85k.
I would be surprised if the $57k figure was accurate for people living in major cities.
I would also be surprised if the average CS graduate is competitive enough for roles in major cities. The most desirable roles are only going to be realistic for the most qualified candidates.
I think that a more charitable interpretation of my comment would be that it's referring to the US considering the currency, the reference to MSAs, and the demographics of HN.
The median salary for a software developer is over $100k.
In the US, or certain parts of the US, perhaps. In most of the world, software developers often don't make that much as employees even at the peak of their career. Maybe you'd reach it in a big city like London, as a very senior developer, working for a big company, but even then it would be exceptional. For most developers not in a US tech hub, getting to that income level or beyond is going to require going independent at some point.
I believe that this is missing a lot of nuances. Just because you have a safety net doesn’t automatically make you more risk-averse.
Going to a relatively poor school where teachers were literally getting beat up and then heading to Berkeley it was sort of a shock psychological. Furthermore, having to pay myself through college with no social safety net was one thing but the feelings of being an outsider, having constant imposter syndrome to having a good job, and feeling somewhat removed from other founders in that regard sticks with you.
It is also hard to really think about startup and yourself when you may be the lifeline for your parents if they need money. A safe job does provides that. This may be the biggest challenge I had to overcome to going on my own. When a person from a comfortable upbringing decides to strike on their own they are really not beholden to others, someone who is poorer has a whole social net that they may have to consider before going out. Furthermore, try getting a loan with no one else underwriting you, it is next to impossible.
So the answer is, no, having $10k in the bank doesn’t automatically make you more likely to start a company because there is both a psychological and sociological aspect of poverty that lingers long after one has left it.
Make that $100k+. It sounds like a lot, but it's a maximum of 2 years savings for someone on a low risk, high pay track. It's not the end of the world to be 2 years "behind".
Indeed. But those are the same people getting those $150k entry-level salaries from companies in the Bay Area.
Even after paying down $50k/year in debt one would be hard pressed to spend the rest of that without saving anything.
You spend your college years sharing a house with 5 roommates, driving an $800 car and living on Costco pallets of canned chili. Keep that up for another few years after school while pulling down a dev salary and you'll be out of debt reasonably fast.
Sadly, most people don't do that, and match their choice of new apartment and new car to exactly equal their new income. That's a shame, but it's also why I gave the advice I did above.
This is exactly faulty set of assumptions being challenged here.
Not everyone gets that $150K offer, and that's increasingly true the further you are from a healthy white middle-class male.
Not everyone wants to move to the Bay Area and unless you're a friendless orphan the further that move is, the more travel expenses you're taking on.
Not everyone has family who are completely self-sufficient and will never need help. (Speaking personally from the “parents have never helped with rent; have helped parents with rent” club)
Not everyone can find 5 roommates they're comfortable with, an $800 car at all much less one that runs perfectly with no maintenance costs as you're assuming. In reality, most people buy newer cars because it's better to have a fixed bill than deal with the missed work and random thousand-dollar service bills which you tend to get with $800 cars.
Not everyone's health is compatible with living on canned chili and even if you don't have any long-term issues, you'll probably want to get some basic nutrition before you develop some.
If this actually worked for you, great. All we're saying is that you should be less quick to forget that other people had it harder. I think that's especially true because when I think about the people who over-spent, they were never starting poor — they grew up comfortable and never had to worry about true disaster.
I started at $63k a year. My student loan payments were $1,200 a month. Apartments in my area started at $1,500 a month. Insurance is important to me for my health, and 401k for retirement. Would be nice if that cheap car I got would stop breaking down and failing emissions inspections... Gee, would be nice to not wake up on the floor because your crappy air mattress lost all the air in it during the night. There's no TV to watch because I didn't have one, so the list of basic things to buy is growing.
The reality is, not everyone lives in California. Entry level salaries have certainly increased since I graduated, but they're still not $100k+. Advanced payments are hard to make when you're just getting started and have nothing to stand on.
I'm not arguing that it's not possible, I'm only arguing that your imagination of how much money the average jr developer has to splash is not realistic.
It's probably not the best practice to base arguments on outliers or anomalies. Yes, these numbers may be true for the Bay Area but almost certainly not the norm. The argument unravels quickly if applied to other markets.
Some people have family to support. Eating all the canned chili in the world is not going to bring down your parents' medical bills.
Your advice may work well for you, which is fine, but bakes in a lot of assumptions about social class, which is what we were just trying to avoid. To be young and debt-free and responsibility-free coming out of university is not everyone's lot.
Our terrible health insurance situation makes potential spending any given month very bumpy. $10k should be enough to keep a single, frugal person in an OK situation for a good chunk of a year, at least, but could just as well be blown inside 24hrs by one slip on some ice or any number of other ER-worthy problems, and isn't enough to cover a healthcare plan that removes much of that uncertainty for any length of time while also paying rent and buying food.
if you're living in a tent eating rice and beans and getting your wifi from google fi 10k will last a very long time. I'm not being facetious, a friend went this route.
$10k barely covers the premiums + deductible for a health insurance plan on the individual market, or god forbid, COBRA. A safety net should cover expenses if you lose your job, which means losing your health insurance.
Feel free to adjust your numbers if you like. Personally, I have a hard time spending that much in a year.
The idea, though, is to save up enough that you don't need to think about losing your job as an existential threat. That's an easily attainable goal for a software guy, and it puts you in a nice position in a lot of ways.
You are defining a "safety net" that tacitly assumes a privileged middle class life, which makes the problem artificially simple.
For someone that genuinely comes from an impoverished background, creating a safety net can be substantially more complicated because it involves considerably more than just having a bit of money saved. Many poor people have no family whatsoever in any meaningful sense, which makes building a "safety net" more complicated -- there is more to a safety net than money. Most poor people have the social class equivalent of "technical debt" which requires a lot of time and money to eliminate, which is something most people from a middle class background are oblivious to because they've never had to worry about it.
Poor people are not middle class people without money. There is a ton of other baggage correlated with being poor that they have to contend with.
He is referring to people with CS degrees, not lower class people with no life skills. If you made it through college and got a degree, you're basically on track to be middle class.
"Your first goal after university should be to build yourself a safety net."
Once you have $10k in the bank, you can start taking risks just like those privileged kids that are starting all the startups with their unfair advantages.
Best of all for us, we work in software, where socking away your first ten thousand dollars happens automatically after landing an entry level dev gig, provided you don't go out of your way to blow your entire outlandish salary on silly possessions.