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PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane
If you don't have kids, why wouldn't your spouse work (assuming they are in good health)?

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baquerd
Jul 2, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

PT6A posted:

If you don't have kids, why wouldn't your spouse work (assuming they are in good health)?

If you're actually wealthy, home and estate management can easily be a full time job. If you just have high income, it's kinda dumb.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

baquerd posted:

If you're actually wealthy, home and estate management can easily be a full time job. If you just have high income, it's kinda dumb.

If you're actually wealthy, why would either you or your spouse work? :v:

Hot Dog Day #82
Jul 5, 2003

Soiled Meat
I became fairly well off (I'm part of the upper 2%, probably going to end up in the top 1 within a few years) by marrying a rich girl I met on the internet. It has worked out pretty well for me, if I do say so myself!

potatoducks
Jan 26, 2006
Wow, not even in the 1% yet? I'm sorry.

Hot Dog Day #82
Jul 5, 2003

Soiled Meat

potatoducks posted:

Wow, not even in the 1% yet? I'm sorry.

We all have our crosses to bear :(.

potatoducks
Jan 26, 2006
Have you guys tried bootstrapping harder? That's what I had to do in my poverty days.

photomikey
Dec 30, 2012
I was born poor, worked my way through college, I am 4% now. Aiming higher.

Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene

photomikey posted:

I was born poor, worked my way through college, I am 4% now. Aiming higher.

I'm not innocent of bragging in this thread, but the point is to provide a narrative and advice. Not to brag. Bragging is OK. But at least try to make it instructive.

photomikey
Dec 30, 2012
Might have been after a couple of drinks. It's been a rough week in photomikey-ville. You're right. My bad.

JIZZ DENOUEMENT
Oct 3, 2012

STRIKE!
Investing, frugal saving, and the other means of generating wealth from capital are all fine and good. But those strategies only matter if you have a lot of capital. To get that egg started; enter a profession with high compensation. Finance, Business, Management, and Medicine.

goatsestretchgoals
Jun 4, 2011

JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:

Investing, frugal saving, and the other means of generating wealth from capital are all fine and good. But those strategies only matter if you have a lot of capital. To get that egg started; enter a profession with high compensation. Finance, Business, Management, and Medicine.

Step 1: Go back in time and get a medical degree.

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

goatsestretchgoals posted:

Step 1: Go back in time and get a medical degree.

Step 2, find that more and more doctors are being replaced/underpaid.

Step 3. Market time travel.

JIZZ DENOUEMENT
Oct 3, 2012

STRIKE!
Yah radiologists are first on the chopping block iirc.

If I could do it over again I would just be a programmer or go into IB. Work super hard for 4-7 years. Buy a house and rent it. Continue until I bought a second house to rent. Then pivot into a chill job.

JIZZ DENOUEMENT
Oct 3, 2012

STRIKE!
It sucks but the answer is really:

1. Enter a field with high compensation

2. Be born into it

Johnny Five-Jaces
Jan 21, 2009


OP, I have a series of instructional videos about investing in Magic: the Gathering, a Richard Garfield collectible card game for children. Please let me know where to send the links.

Duck and Cover
Apr 6, 2007

Johnny Five-Jaces posted:

OP, I have a series of instructional videos about investing in Magic: the Gathering, a Richard Garfield collectible card game for children. Please let me know where to send the links.

Hmm? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTp-iVOtTrKau0skmfZlo5Q He does pokemon too!

working mom
Jul 8, 2015

$16k/month on patreon :wtc:

Ytlaya
Nov 13, 2005

JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:

If I could do it over again I would just be a programmer or go into IB. Work super hard for 4-7 years. Buy a house and rent it. Continue until I bought a second house to rent. Then pivot into a chill job.

Programming is good for having a reliable income stream, but you don't really make great money unless you're actually talented at it. I'm a programmer and will never make close to six figures because i'm an exceedingly mediocre (if not outright bad) one and am incapable of improving beyond my current point. If you do have talent, though, it's probably the easiest way to make good (but not ridiculous) money.

That being said, I think more people should at least attempt to learn to program. Many people think of programming as being similar to math/science, but it really isn't most of the time. It feels like it uses a completely different skill set. It seems more like some mixture of architecture and construction or something. It's more about building a bunch of knowledge/experience* and being able to stick building blocks together properly.


*This is my biggest issue. I am utterly incapable of building experience. I have been working as a programmer for 7 years and have not improved at all after the first ~2 years or so. It's like information just doesn't stay in my head, no matter how simple. Despite having programmed in the same language for such a long time, I still have to Google things as ridiculously basic as the syntax for "how to get the keys of a dictionary". Years ago (before becoming a programmer) I was actually diagnosed with some sort of learning/cognitive disorder related to my ability to recall information, but there's no way to treat it and the doctor wasn't concerned because I was able to do well enough in my college classes (since classes just consisted of temporarily learning new things and didn't require you to hold onto past knowledge).

Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Feb 24, 2017

AreWeDrunkYet
Jul 8, 2006

There are software engineers (aside from H1Bs) getting paid less than six figures? :raise:

fake edit: Google sez $100k is almost exactly the median salary, so yeah, I guess about half of them are. But that group has to be overrepresented by aforementioned H1Bs and kids right out of college. It's an arbitrary line, but shouldn't be a tough barrier to crack with a few years experience.

baquerd
Jul 2, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

There are software engineers (aside from H1Bs) getting paid less than six figures? :raise:

fake edit: Google sez $100k is almost exactly the median salary, so yeah, I guess about half of them are. But that group has to be overrepresented by aforementioned H1Bs and kids right out of college. It's an arbitrary line, but shouldn't be a tough barrier to crack with a few years experience.

In some parts of flyover country it can certainly be hard to crack 100k. At Google though, if you get in and are moderately successful, 300k total comp isn't even that ambitious.

Ytlaya
Nov 13, 2005

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

There are software engineers (aside from H1Bs) getting paid less than six figures? :raise:

fake edit: Google sez $100k is almost exactly the median salary, so yeah, I guess about half of them are. But that group has to be overrepresented by aforementioned H1Bs and kids right out of college. It's an arbitrary line, but shouldn't be a tough barrier to crack with a few years experience.

Does the label "software engineer" actually cover all programmers? I feel like that only represents a specific type of programming job.

I work in academia (though as an employee) and develop both the back-end and front-end for a web application biologists use to do stuff like gene mapping, correlations, etc and make just $35k (though I'm in a pretty cheap city, but it's still probably at the super low end in terms of programmer salaries). To be fair I could probably make more, but I'm aware of the fact that I'm a pretty lovely programmer (at least compared with the other programmers I know*) and would feel bad asking for a raise.

*Granted, all the other programmers I know work at Google or start-ups in NYC/Silicon Valley making way over six figures, so my sample isn't exactly representative of the average programmer. But I definitely know that I'm not good.

Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Feb 24, 2017

Veyrall
Apr 23, 2010

The greatest poet this
side of the cyberpocalypse
Incidentally, can anyone tell me if genetic engineering is a good field to get into? I've been considering going back to college and am wondering if it's a good field.

Ytlaya
Nov 13, 2005

Veyrall posted:

Incidentally, can anyone tell me if genetic engineering is a good field to get into? I've been considering going back to college and am wondering if it's a good field.

From my tangentially-related job working with academic geneticists (so probably quite different from working in industry), it seems to me like if you're good at it you could reliably get some sort of job, but:

1. It would almost certainly require a graduate degree, so if you don't already have a bachelor's degree that would let you apply for a masters/phd in a relevant field (molecular biology, genetics, computational biology/bioinformatics, whatever) you'd be looking at a lot of time/money.
2. You could probably make more money in other fields requiring a similar level of scientific/technical skill/knowledge (though I personally think this is one the more interesting and exciting scientific fields to get into right now).

edit: Just to clarify further, I know jack poo poo about the biotechnology side of things and am solely involved with just data analysis.

Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Feb 24, 2017

Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene
Biological sciences are usually among the lowest paid sciences, so I'd probably steer clear if you want to make money. Plus, if you want to keep working (since a lot of jobs end up being essentially contract work) you'd want to move to a major biotech hub like SF or Boston where the comparatively low pay scale hurts you even more.

zonacat
Jan 13, 2005

Burt Sexual posted:

Don't spend so much time in school, don't watch anime, stop playing video games.

Everybody is ignoring you but this is completely the right answer. Get out of school get a job with some kind of path, work your rear end off and figure out what skills it takes to get a better job on the path, learn those instead of being a gently caress off, repeat.

I mean if you want to be like 100 million dollars wealthy then yeah take some risks and gamble and hope you get lucky, but if you just want to have an easy ish life do this and by the time you are mid 30s or so you should be making good money and not killing yourself.

4-5 years of college is the time to be a losrr that doesn't do poo poo all day. If you don't figure your poo poo out quick after that you will end up in a mediocre cycle and once you get into that it seems hard as hell to get out.


Also whoever said network is spot on also. All the executives I work with who make a hell of a lot more than me have 100 people they could call for a job if they wanted to tomorrow, and 100 other people they can call for help to make them look good at this job.

Holyshoot
May 6, 2010
When you guys say read everyday what exactly are you reading?

photomikey
Dec 30, 2012
Anything in the nonfiction side of the library. Business books are great, but anything that interests you is good.

THE BIG DOG DADDY
Oct 16, 2013

Rasheed was, with Aliases, the top 7 PvPers in Bone Krew.


No one talks about this.
Hang out with rich friends as much as possible, shun your poor friends. eventually it'll turn into an opportunity for nepotism

photomikey
Dec 30, 2012
I run a business, I hire and fire. I would gladly fire my best friend in order to hire you, a stranger, if your throughput was 0.5% better.

There is nepotism in certain situations. There is nothing you can do about that. Focus on what you can do in the other 99% of situations, which is be better than everybody else.

Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene

Holyshoot posted:

When you guys say read everyday what exactly are you reading?

Depends on how you want to win.

Read what your boss reads if you want to go the boot black route. Worked for me and I'm out earning most of the pseudo-champions in this thread.

Higher risk would be "technical poo poo in your field plus successful people in your field who actually succeeded". The latter seems like fluff but expertise is no promise of success so even if they are worthless garbage people, roll your eyes and do the "totally obvious stuff you are already doing, GOD MOM CAN'T YOU SEE I'M A PEOPLE PERSON!"

I'm not actually smart and I don't have a common touch. But I've learned how to fake both. Life is a learned skill.

photomikey
Dec 30, 2012

Shbobdb posted:

I'm not actually smart and I don't have a common touch. But I've learned how to fake both. Life is a learned skill.
This.

metztli
Mar 19, 2006
Which lead to the obvious photoshop, making me suspect that their ad agencies or creative types must be aware of what goes on at SA

Ytlaya posted:

Does the label "software engineer" actually cover all programmers? I feel like that only represents a specific type of programming job.

I work in academia (though as an employee) and develop both the back-end and front-end for a web application biologists use to do stuff like gene mapping, correlations, etc and make just $35k (though I'm in a pretty cheap city, but it's still probably at the super low end in terms of programmer salaries). To be fair I could probably make more, but I'm aware of the fact that I'm a pretty lovely programmer (at least compared with the other programmers I know*) and would feel bad asking for a raise.

*Granted, all the other programmers I know work at Google or start-ups in NYC/Silicon Valley making way over six figures, so my sample isn't exactly representative of the average programmer. But I definitely know that I'm not good.

I'm a mediocre developer with no STEM background at all, entirely self-taught, and I make > $100k with a bit under 4 years experience, in the mid-west. Ask for a raise, you're probably a hell of a lot better than you think you are.

Edit: Regarding the topic, other than starting a business and having good luck and timing, I would say look for ways to make your money work for you with little attention on your part (saving/investing) or look for other ways to passively make money. A smallish project I did for fun 6 years ago or so and put maybe 200 hours into initially and now maybe 2-4 hours a month into for maintenance, generates ~$7500 a year for me. Really though, most of the things I work on for fun and try to monetize are way smaller scale - something might only make me $5/$10 a month in profit, but if I don't have to do anything to keep it coming in indefinitely, I won't turn my nose up at it. And who knows, maybe one of them will hit it big. :shrug:

metztli fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Mar 7, 2017

baquerd
Jul 2, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

metztli posted:

I'm a mediocre developer with no STEM background at all, entirely self-taught, and I make > $100k with a bit under 4 years experience, in the mid-west. Ask for a raise, you're probably a hell of a lot better than you think you are.

I literally just posted this in another thread. Unless you are utter crap as a developer, 9/10 times you need better interview skills, not actual directly relevant skills.

metztli
Mar 19, 2006
Which lead to the obvious photoshop, making me suspect that their ad agencies or creative types must be aware of what goes on at SA

baquerd posted:

I literally just posted this in another thread. Unless you are utter crap as a developer, 9/10 times you need better interview skills, not actual directly relevant skills.

God yeah, that. I'm fair-to-middling as a dev - adequate at the technical parts of interviews - but I'm great at the soft skills stuff, and I'm freaky good at interviews. Too many devs eschew the interpersonal skills as being not worth it, but I will tell you, they translate to money and lots of opportunities.

Imaduck
Apr 16, 2007

the magnetorotational instability turns me on

Ytlaya posted:

Does the label "software engineer" actually cover all programmers? I feel like that only represents a specific type of programming job.

I work in academia (though as an employee) and develop both the back-end and front-end for a web application biologists use to do stuff like gene mapping, correlations, etc and make just $35k (though I'm in a pretty cheap city, but it's still probably at the super low end in terms of programmer salaries). To be fair I could probably make more, but I'm aware of the fact that I'm a pretty lovely programmer (at least compared with the other programmers I know*) and would feel bad asking for a raise.

*Granted, all the other programmers I know work at Google or start-ups in NYC/Silicon Valley making way over six figures, so my sample isn't exactly representative of the average programmer. But I definitely know that I'm not good.
Don't work in academia. They will underpay you. I don't care where you live or how crappy a programmer you are, $35k is absurdly low.

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.

Ytlaya posted:

Does the label "software engineer" actually cover all programmers? I feel like that only represents a specific type of programming job.

I work in academia (though as an employee) and develop both the back-end and front-end for a web application biologists use to do stuff like gene mapping, correlations, etc and make just $35k (though I'm in a pretty cheap city, but it's still probably at the super low end in terms of programmer salaries). To be fair I could probably make more, but I'm aware of the fact that I'm a pretty lovely programmer (at least compared with the other programmers I know*) and would feel bad asking for a raise.

*Granted, all the other programmers I know work at Google or start-ups in NYC/Silicon Valley making way over six figures, so my sample isn't exactly representative of the average programmer. But I definitely know that I'm not good.

You have a job using one of the world's most valuable skillsets in an extremely specialized subfield, but you're making about what an apprentice carpenter makes.

edit: I was meaner about this than I meant to be. You're being taken advantage of, stand up for yourself.

fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Mar 7, 2017

N. Senada
May 17, 2011

My kidneys are busted
Ytlaya, you should legit start looking around for other opportunities and see if you can find another job. If you like what you do, use that as leverage to get a pay increase. If they say no, go to that other job. Take care of you.

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silence_kit
Jul 14, 2011

by the sex ghost

Josef bugman posted:

Step 2, find that more and more doctors are being replaced/underpaid.

Is this actually a big deal, or is it only a big deal if I calibrate myself to American doctor levels of pay and job security? Almost every job other than doctor has worse job security and salaries when you control for management responsibility.

Getting into medical school in the US basically guarantees you a very well-paying job for life. I can't think of any other professions which work like that. Re-writing the regulations to slightly de-cartelize medicine in an attempt to lower the cost of health care for Americans won't be the death of the medical field. Doctors will still do incredibly well because they possess very important skills, and they have a powerful political lobby which looks out for their interests.

silence_kit fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Mar 10, 2017

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