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.

From there, renting a poo poo studio in a major city would let them save about 50% of their post-tax income and they'd be on their way to the mythical Financial Independence/Early Retirement (FIRE).

Would you consider $150k starting and like 6-10% or more in annual raises to make you rich? Would getting there in 2-3 years count as getting rich quick for you?

Can you think of anything faster that can also be distilled down to a sequence of simple steps that can be quickly explained? Or is even this too optimistic? I can describe the steps as I seem them to go from zero to highly-paid software engineer if it helps.