What does it take to get rich?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > What does it take to get rich?

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

oliveoil posted:

What does it take?

I work at a top tech company and I like to think I could get someone on track to self-teach themselves how to code at a level to succeed at Facebook, LinkedIn, and other similar companies while gradually gaining the experience to get hired.

Is this just naive? It does seem to me that anyone who is healthy and not challenged by dependent children or otherwise required to invest their free time in other people could go from zero to making $150k per year or more within 2-3 years without college.

To learn to code at a level to succeed at LinkedIn or Facebook is pretty easy. Which is exactly why it's so hard to get hired at those kinds of companies - they're awash in a sea of more experienced college-trained applicants than they know what to do with, so they really have no reason whatsoever to waste their time on trying to evaluate the skills of someone with no relevant education or experience. In particular, over half of Facebook's workforce and over a quarter of Google's graduated from the top 10 colleges in America . It's not just about coding skills; Stanford is right there churning out more than enough decent coders for them. Self-taught coders don't have a chance at top tech companies these days unless they already have a decade of experience under their belt. And only a few companies offer those $150k starting salaries you're so excited for; the median pay for all software engineers in the Bay Area is only around $140k, and that includes experienced programmers who've been employed for some years.

The tech market is also surprisingly localized. Those 150k starting salaries with rapid raises are pretty much unique to NYC and the Bay Area, and drop off pretty sharply with regional population density. If you're not in or near a major city, even a college-educated programmer's starting salary is going to be five digits rather than six, with raises that barely keep up with inflation. And the excessive cost of living in the top metro areas means that saving up money in the country and using it to move to the high-paying urban areas is fiscally impractical.

It may seem like there's no reason everyone can't do it, but these are opportunities that are limited to a very small portion of the workforce. If it seems easy to you, that's because there's a lot of filtering that goes on long before you even get to the parts that are ostensibly competitive and skill-based.

oliveoil posted:

D&D has so many depressing pessimists though and I need to have them poke holes in my thought process and ideas. E g., I think if we make healthcare and housing as common as oxygen then we'll be fine. So why doesn't someone aim for that? Because everyone with real money is too conservative and wants to chase unprofitable social fart app start-ups so they can do a legal pump and dump on innocent savers' index funds and the larger unsuspecting public.

This is just the same old "capitalism is only having issues because for some completely unknowable reason, all of the rich turned out to be bad people, and everything would be working great if the billionaires were actually good people instead" trope, mixed with a bit of libertarian fantasy. The reason healthcare and housing aren't as common as oxygen is that if one capitalist starts voluntarily selling those things at cheap prices in a market that's only lightly regulated, another capitalist will buy it all up and start reselling it at a profitable price, until the "good" capitalist has run out of money they're willing to spend on it and the "bad" capitalist has made a huge profit from it. The fundamentally competitive nature of capitalism, as well as its tendency toward the accumulation of wealth and power, means that those who put profit second will ultimately be gobbled up by those who put profit first. Even when billionaire charity does happen, it's directed according to the preconceptions and interests of the billionaire, without regard for what society really needs. The only way to truly turn their wealth toward the benefit of society is to take outside control of it via government, using regulations and taxes to carefully limit and steer where their money is spent.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 17:27

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 18:30

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

sean10mm posted:

If you're starting from nothing, join the US military and risk death/maiming/psychosis so you can take full advantage of the benefits and get an education on the government's dime and the creepy admiration of the kind of older people who make hiring decisions after you've completed the minimum term of service. If everything breaks your way you'll be mostly intact and in the upper middle class in like 10 years, assuming you don't get yourself or others pregnant or become clinically depressed or an addict or something. From there just look at what Pete Buttigieg did and copy that.

Absolutely nobody should do this.

Veterans' benefits alone aren't going to get you into Harvard and Oxford. Pete Buttigieg went to one of the top Catholic private prep schools in the nation. He's another case of well-off parents giving a big boost to their kid's early opportunities, opening up career paths that would have been closed to most.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 00:51

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Cicero posted:

Yeah I more or less agree. I just disagree with the notion that these jobs -- as a group -- are that elite. They're, like, moderately elite, from the perspective of a person who's already gainfully employed as a programmer, anyway. These companies often start out very selective, I have no doubt that early on, having gone to Stanford was a massive benefit to getting into Google. But Google and Amazon etc. are loving huge now, that level of selectiveness is long dead.

Given that over 90% of Google's technical workforce is either white or Asian, and over 70% are men, it sure does seem like they're selective enough to exclude skilled programmers based on arbitrary measures unrelated to coding abilities.

The "hiring is purely skill-based, everyone can do it if they try" narrative is a nice one, and it's easy to look at the hiring processes and the technical culture and conclude that it's a meritocracy. But pull your head away from the paperwork and you'll see a sea of white and Asian faces. The idea that tech is a pure meritocracy, open to everyone, has some serious credibility problems. And while the tech companies are quite eager to place the blame for that elsewhere, I don't see any credible reason to think that the "pipeline problem" is any less fake than the "programmer shortage" is.

Cicero posted:

Look at the data posted earlier. I don't actually trust the absolute percentages, but the trend I definitely trust, and you can see that Facebook had twice the percentage of employees from top tier universities compared to Google. Is it that Facebook pays that much better and can afford to be much more selective, or whatever it is you're suggesting? No, it's that they're younger and smaller (especially when that article was written).

You can just look at which universities Google has actively recruited at to confirm this, which has greatly broadened over time.

Sure, if by "top tier" you mean "top 10". If you draw the line for "top tier" elsewhere, the divide is a lot smaller, with Google hiring only 70% of their workforce from top 100 universities (as opposed to Facebook's 90%). I don't think the absolute numbers are super reliable either, but the sheer general magnitude is enough to throw water on the idea that it's offering plenty o opportunities to self-taught programmers with no degree or credentials besides maybe an online code camp! Especially when you compare it to the more engineering-focused companies in that data, which appear to place substantially less weight on which school you went to.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 16:22

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Dexterous Spider posted:

On a logical note all the financially stable people (because rich is a gimmick word), that I know and have talked to, tossed me some solid tips. May as well share a few.

1. Invest now and dont try to play the markets. The younger you invest, the more money you have later on. Its a long game but pays out.

2. Assets and liabilities.
A. Assets are things you buy, that make you money. A work car, college, IRAs, Hedge Funds.
B. Liabilities are everything else that cost money and do not make you a return to your investment, like Netflix (unless you only use it to learn), hookers, and cocaine. (Although some will argue that cocaine *can* be an investment, it is just a risky one.).

Finding that balance changes lives.

This is a really long-winded way of saying "start out already having a bunch of money, and spend as much of it as possible on things that turn money into more money".

# ¿ Nov 11, 2019 17:48

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Eh, he's right, at least for certain values of "bedroom": values that pretty much stop at "room that contains a bed".

For example, look at this homey find for just $750/mo!
https://www.trulia.com/rental/4075026128-3345-Seymour-Ave-B-Bronx-NY-10469

Or how about this lovely palace, a steal at just $900/mo?
https://www.trulia.com/rental/4073663539-1654-Popham-Ave-3K-Bronx-NY-10453

And let's not forget this spectacular number at just $800/mo!
https://www.trulia.com/rental/4064540634-Multi-Family-Home-Bronx-NY-10466

I can't get the pictures on these pages to upload to imgur or SA from my phone for some reason, but each and every one of you will be missing out if you don't check out the photos of these stupendous deals!

Note that in cases like these, you're not getting a whole apartment - you're just getting these single bedrooms, and everything else (bathrooms, kitchen, etc) is shared with everyone else the slumlord has rented those closets-turned-bedrooms to!

# ¿ Jan 13, 2020 17:45

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 18:30

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Shbobdb posted:

I was fortunate because I found a bedroom that was quite spacious. And it was in Tremont right by the 4 and D so I could basically get anywhere I wanted (plus easy bus access to Inwood). People would always talk about how far it was, but it wasn't any more time on the subway than "respectable" areas like Inwood or Astoria.

The topic isn't "how to live comfortably" it's "how to get rich" which involves a massive amount of hustle and finding a way to live substantially below your means in a city where you can leverage yourself for advancement. NYC is a city that doesn't tolerate mediocrity, so you've got to figure out what makes you good and do it fast. In a city like Indy you can float on comfortable mediocrity forever. Both have their virtues, but if you want a shot at a net worth that is self-sustainably rich, one will get you there and the other won't.

If you got rich, I'm pretty sure it had more to do with making $200k a year than it did with saving $150/mo on rent. No amount of nickel-and-diming is going to turn a $20k/yr income into never having to work again.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2020 19:09

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > What does it take to get rich?