I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op.
I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.
There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.
My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.
> I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours.
Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it moves to "you have a team in India to sync with weekly"... then "we need to work with team XYZ on this bigger project who's in China"... then "we're opening a satellite office in London and will need you on calls to them, too." And one day, you look up and your calendar has daily meetings from 5AM to 11PM. I won't miss this when I retire.
You’re being sarcastic, but I think you’d be surprised at how often you can say no to managers or even VPs and the c-suite and … have nothing happen to you.
I didn’t realize this until I was 32.
Obviously some companies will actually punish you. You might get fired from your Amazon or Microsoft job, for instance.
But typically what happens is the work just gets offloaded to another yes-man.
And the funny thing with promotions is most orgs don’t reward work volume. Nobody will remember that you took 11pm meetings or did that one unpleasant migration nobody wanted to do anyways.
If workers making far less than you, with far more to lose, can organize in their workplace, then you can too.
Open up signal, talk to your coworkers, and find some solidarity.
Now is far better than never, and you might feel less alienated at the end of it.
> but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America
I actually think it’s easier to cut back vs chasing some magic high networth before retirement.
The average salary in Costa Rica is only 1200$ a month. Meaning if you live an average life there you might be able to retire with 240k. Assuming 6% yields per year.
Agreed. I'm quite content living a rather simple lifestyle, owning very few new things, doing almost of the maintenance on my belongings myself. The "magic number" was really more about giving myself permission than anything else.
The one thing you do have to factor for, though, is what happens if you don't keep your health. The thing that kept me in tech a little longer than I hoped to be there was a parent with long-term care needs. I could live a happy life on ~$2k a month, but it took five times that just to keep my mom alive the last few years of her life.
Living that cheaply does require adopting the lifestyle. But cooking at home or eating a casado from the local soda instead of a US-style restaurant meal sounds preferable to me anyway.
Sorry about your family’s experience with the Healthcare Industrial Complex.
It’s really designed to drain every last dime.
As bleak as it sounds I made sure to take a long vacation last year at the spur of the moment. Tomorrow isn’t promised and you might save for a retirement that you never see.
I hope to do this every time I’m laid off or otherwise with an abundance of free time
Like all things, there's a balance between spending everything now and planning for the future.
I always tell my kids that they won't inherit much cash, but they're having a great time with all of the vacations and fun equipment we have.
We will have enough money to retire and live for 30-35 years at most, frugally, and 15-20 if we really go nuts. I'll be dead waaaaayyyy before that, so it'll be up to my spouse to piss away the cash.
After seeing how fast my family wasted the proceeds of an estate that took 60 years to build, I don't think leaving a large amount of money is a great idea.
A certain someone just didn't want to work, and while that's fine if you invest the money and move to Vietnam, it won't sustain you if you want to stay in America.
I'm sure your spouse would rather party with you today vs having no you and a lot of money. Can you retire today ?
Don't wanna spoil your dream, but have you actually lived in Latin America? Cost of living might not be what you think. I also have the feeling that foreigners don't really understand the crime situation. Of course, its a big regions with some variation.
I've not lived there but I've spent significant time in a handful of places there. I think a lot of people have cost-of-living shock because they try to live a US lifestyle in a place where import costs vastly outweigh any savings on local goods.
My reason for wanting to move comes more from culture and place than cost of living. That said, I do expect my cost of living to be lower, because my cost of living is artificially high where I live today; I could probably cut it in half by moving domestically in the same state.
Crime is a legitimate concern, but it's highly variable across the vast expanse of Latin America. There are very safe places to live across the region, but you need to do your research.
Re: cost of living, I'm thinking more about things like housing and utilities.
Where I live (BC), power costs around CAD 0.085/kWh. In my home state in Brazil, the cost is CAD 0.25/kWh - 3 times higher. Natural gas is 20 times more expensive, although you'll only be using it for cooking. Basically any consumer good is as expensive or more expensive. Inflation is higher, credit is much more expensive. Housing is significantly cheaper than in large US/CA metros, but isn't exactly cheap: a nice apartment in my city rents goes for about 1500 CAD.
Like you said, its a big region. I don't know much about the rest of Latin America, but from the conversations I've had with people from other countries, they say yeah, we're on the same boat. Crime is also increasingly metastasizing as a problem in previously safer regions (Uruguay, Argentina, Equador).
This is exactly the kind of calculus I hope everyone does. For example, I can't say I'm jealous of much else about the cost of living in BC, but my electricity rates in North Carolina are more than double yours, much closer to Brazil's. Everywhere's a little different. My biggest expenses (taxes, housing, and health care) will probably go down in most of the places I'd consider moving to, but some things (like transportation, and consumer goods as you mention) I would expect to go up, especially since I spend less in those categories than most people I know to begin with.
> I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it
This line really hurts! I made my first website in 1999 and my first online business in 2010, and I've never had a real vacation without emails since then.
However, in my 40s, as self-employed, I've never paid myself a six-figure salary either. So perhaps I need to reconsider my plans for the rest of my life.
Folks who do what I do don't seem to have much of an online water cooler, aside from some National Co-op Grocer forums which are restricted access. Do check out ncg.coop though.
That said, I'll take the word of encouragement that maybe a blog would be interesting. You can do some really fun things at smaller businesses because it's fine if it doesn't scale. I can actually save us money by 3D printing or laser cutting things myself, and have done some fun projects around that. A lot of the tech projects I do are pretty much solo endeavors, which is challenging but also rewarding - that self-hosted project you tried out at home will almost certainly be robust enough for work. I'm one of two people here who write code at all, so I get to make pretty much all of the architectural decisions myself, and even a shitty Bash script is probably still 10x better than whatever process existed before. I also manage our product and marketing teams (did I mention it's a small business, lol?), which means I get to shape our message and values, and even be our taste-tester-in-chief.
Sounds like you found peace. Good for you brother/sister.
What are your responsibilities at the co-op? I thought the idea was that people would work a few hours to get access to the product, but you said you work full-time.
Most grocery co-ops these days are staffed almost entirely with normal W-2 employees, the one standout exception being Park Slope in NYC which requires you to work a shift in the store to be able to shop there. The other ~170 co-op grocers in the US don't use this model, and in fact, don't require you to be a member to shop there at all. The co-op I work at is a little different in that it's a hybrid model, jointly owned by shoppers and workers, whereas most grocery co-ops are exclusively shopper-owned.
I run a lot of administrative functions that don't fit neatly elsewhere: POS, web, marketing, member services, community outreach, pricing, purchasing, product selection, vendor management, etc., but because I came from a tech background I also was gifted a lot of digital transformation and operations projects, which is fine because I enjoy that kind of work too. I've got a two pizza team helping me, although one would need to be vegetarian and the other gluten free. :) Ours is a fairly large co-op, with four retail locations and a wholesale operation. The median number of retail locations for food co-ops is generally one, so in many ways we behave more like a chain than most co-ops (although still small enough that locations run pretty independently).
I think we need to unionize, across companies. We need to be able to block stuff like this, and to be able to demand that you can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI (bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China). We also need to be able to hold our leadership to some kind of code of ethics. I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.
This is a flawed argument, the current system gets rid of good performers all the time, and we have evidence of wage suppression, so employees don't get to negotiate on fair terms. You just get stuck in your pay band.
I agree it would be a good counter-factual, but I think the differences would be more around industry stability. Particularly, I think the ability for employees to push back against historical threats like off-shoring would have made the industry more appealing to younger people looking for something stable, and prevented this weird cycle of labor shortages causing salaries to explode, unqualified candidates pivoting to the industry using low cost training solutions (bootcamps, shitty masters programs), then companies failing to deliver on initiatives because the people they hired are poorly trained.
If we had 30 years of steady growth in CS education, then we'd have more experts in the field, doing a better job at executing. And it would likely cost companies less in wages as well. There are many industries where incredibly talented people make fairly modest salaries while producing world-changing products.
Sure, but when I went to university (2008ish), the local major university had cut their CS program entirely due to lack of enrollment. So that's likely measuring tough-to-peak growth.
Also, statistics usually merge all computer and technology related majors into a single bucket.
> IMO the ability for individual employees to negotiate for themselves is a positive?
I keep hearing this, but FAANGs don't allow individual negotiations. You are banded, like you would be at a union.
Also you're assuming that unions would be able to, or want to block the firing of bad performers. Since the bad performers would also hurt the bottom line, and therefore your pay.
Unionisation might hurt the startup as it would stop certain levels of exploitation (ie not being able to ask people to work for free in exchange for shares that will be worth nothing.)
Even Non-FAANGs have banded, bounded comp. I remember discussing a compensation increase at a smallish, medium sized company, and was given the usual "The book says the comp for your role is between $X and $Y, and you're at $Y." They even showed me The Book! Like, ok so you're just willing to lose me over this stupid book then? (Narrator: There were willing to) I dipped over to FAANG for a pretty nice increase. I guess FAANG uses a different book...
It's just a larger book, yes. No matter how much value you deliver the most important value is that you are Smaller than the Big Guy, and at google he makes a lot more money.
A union is merely a group of people who agree to work together for a shared benefit. That doesn't mean that there cannot be individual negotiation, nor does it mean you can't get rid of bad performers. There is no reason why it would need to hurt the startup ecosystem either.
If the tech workers wanted those things they could make it so, but they already could have made those things so already and didn't so...
Take the National Basketball Players Association as an example. They represent NBA players and collectively bargained for a minimum wage, benefits, and processes to address grievances with management. NBA players aren't all paid the same, and they don't have identical terms in their contracts. The union sets the floor.
For a more down to earth example, my graduate school student union also only negotiated the floor of pay and benefits. The compensation for graduate students varied easily by 50% over this floor, even students in the same department.
Yes, but that does not preclude layering individual bargaining on top. The collective bargain could simply be something like "you may not track employees", while still leaving each individual employee to negotiate the compensation they seek. If the workers would rather be completely hands-off they could defer all negotiations to a negotiator, but, again, the workers make up the rules. It's whatever they want.
It would be a hard model to pick up and move over and just drop into place. The trades that have union halls for carpenters, electricians, etc., aren't normally working in anything as unstable or dynamic as tech startups. If I try and think back to how things were thirty years ago I don't think it really applies. Unions are for big shop floors where bosses could fire you on a dime and replace you and then you're SOL. Skills in high demand 30 years meant fine, you could just go work somewhere else just as easily. Who expects to be in the same place for 35 years anyways?
The funny thing most Americans don't realize about 996 in China is that the Chinese, while very hard workers, don't work the same way as Americans do. For example lunch is expected to be good (and taken pretty seriously) and followed by an in office nap. This is not some secret thing either but typically encouraged by the company (most office works will have blankets, pillows, eye masks etc at their desk).
Even the Chinese don't believe you can grind at your desk non-stop for 12 hours.
Don't get me wrong, 996 is awful, but the American re-imagining of it is even worse.
OP is just using "union" as a way of articulating that he's extremely unhappy with current corporate behavior, and also that he wants there to be some sort of at-scale, easy-ish way to correct that behavior.
> or it would make it impossible for the most toxic (non-criminal) team members to be fired.
The issue at present is that everyone is being laid off. If we accept this anti-union trope, let's t least accept that it is strictly better than the current situation where no job is safe.
In my native country unions have crippled the job market and most of my peers don’t see any benefit from them, we actually hate them for the most part.
Unions are just another way to find a single solution that fits everyone and we all know how that turns out. They’re just be another bureaucratic institution for corrupt politicians.
> In my native country unions have crippled the job market
We have to think about this critically. If there were no unions, do you believe there would be more jobs for everyone? If so, what is happening to those jobs? What is happening to the demand that would support those jobs? I'm missing some of the logic here, so want to understand better.
Right, let's do absolutely nothing so we can fire Joe, who's been underperforming for the last two quarters (because of healthcare issues, life affordability, lack of direction, burnout, etc).
My single minded focus is getting my finances in order so I don't need to work in this industry (financial independence) past 50. It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the open contempt for employees from the top down with no end in sight. Once you reach 50 it's just luck of the draw whether or not you are in the annual culling of the senior folks.
There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.
Another way to look at it is that naked emperors and snake tongues are leaving a LOT of passion and talent on the table. And customers (we all are, to someone) are similarly yearning for some basic progress, too. How did we get so good at failing to make anything out of that? How can we change it?
And there is no money cushion anyone [0] can leave to future generations that could offset just leaving it to the worst of the worst, the "synergy" of the insane running the asylum with no counter efforts, like pulling all cooling rods in a reactor.
In that story the sorcerer saves the day. There is no such person in our story, and no group that play its role, and if we don't step up -- all of us, all of "them", everybody -- everything will be "awash", and nobody will "win" anything worth talking about, not on any timescales beyond what I would consider very short term.
Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.
Maybe the opposite at Apple? I was told by another engineer (paraphrasing), "They can't lay you off past age 50 without expecting an age-discrimination lawsuit. They'd prefer to give you nothing to do and you leave on your own."
Any review that's not a hard metric can be gamed to be about anything the reviewer cares about.
They don't like your age and prefer some fresh face to pull with no family alnighters and work for half the money? The performance review will show you as lacking motivation or some such shit.
And any review that's based on hard metrics, can be manipulated by the reviewer just as well.
There was a part of me who dreamed of doing simple entry-level jobs instead of working in tech, so I got a part-time job cleaning hospital ER rooms on the weekends. Everything has been fine for the most part, but it has been made clear to me how easy it is to get fired at entry-level jobs. The pay is really pretty dismal and the stability really isn't there. Overall the experience has made me a lot more inclined to not leave money on the table. If there are things I can do to earn more and make my life more comfortable I just do them now.
From what I've observed, the big problem with working in tech is that you have all of the responsibility but none of the authority or autonomy. By comparison, in most service sector jobs you have no authority or autonomy but also little responsibility. In other engineering disciplines you have a lot of responsibility but also much more authority and autonomy.
In my experience, unless you are working with items which can kill people (medical, military) there is no responsibility. Developers can deploy any broken build with little consequences.
> the big problem with working in tech is that you have all of the responsibility but none of the authority or autonomy
Very apt description of "Big Tech". That's why I decided to leave as well. This combination just creates a lot of stress and it was negatively impacting my health.
That makes no sense. They didnt provide any specific reasons they dont like the tech industry. All of their reasons can be applied to just about any industry lmao. The core issue is and always will be capitalism
I see all this complaining from people in big tech nowadays, but I can't help but wonder, why act like the industry is just big tech?
There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.
A lot of those companies are located in the middle of nowhere or don't make enough for you to live in a city. If you are a minority in America, living outside of a city represents a MASSIVE hit to quality of life.
I work at one such research lab, right next to a very big city, with the ability to commute from said city. Similarly there are several in California, located near universities etc.
A large proportion of those smaller companies just cargo cult the practices of the big organizations, so you end up with the same kinds of frustration with the bonus of being paid much less.
Your call, of course. But when in your situation, I looked at when my youngest was to head off to college (when the nest would be empty) and I marked my calendar. To your point, while the rest would empty when I was at the age of 57, it didn't seem like I would need to continue to accumulate the spoils of a software engineer when I had the 529's, the 401k by that point [1].
And so at the appointed time, I walked away.
(My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.)
[1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)
About a decade or so ago, I started to see people I used to work with working at Home Depot and Costco. It struck me as odd seeing these brilliant developers stocking shelves and providing advice on sanded vs. unsanded grout.
The more I spoke with, the more I realized that they were there entirely by choice. Most were given packages to "retire", but they were still in their 50s and their spouses hadn't retired yet, hence the job. All of them loved the physical work, interaction, and especially leaving work at work at the end of the day. They seemed relaxed and genuinely happy.
If you end up at Home Depot, chances are you'll really enjoy the work, plus I think they were still using an AS/400 the last time I peeked at their displays!
Haha, strangely enough that's also my post-retirement plan. Just dip over to Home Depot. And, I also know ex-tech workers who made the same move once they had enough to retire. Wonder what it is about that particular store that's appealing.
Today is my last day at my current employer. After some time off, I'm considering several different options. I have enough saved that retirement is probably doable, although last time I took extended time off I got bored much quicker than I expected. I'm also considering retraining for a different field but that seems kinda daunting, and no certain bet either. I was thinking of doing some open source contributions to test the waters on whether I really want to give up software dev or not. I might do part time work just for something to do and for decent health care. Luckily working in tech has been very lucrative, so there are plenty of options on the table.
I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.
I retired last year at 38. I live off 4% of my investments and I get to travel around to different countries every 6 months.
The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.
When I was younger (50ish now) I could juggle full time work with side projects but I just can't now, especially with family demands. Full time work is pretty much burning me out. I'm close to leaving and starting a mobile food cart.
When I do get out I'll definitely miss the salary. I'll miss lunch with the other devs. Miss the walks with other devs around the building. Theres something special about folks in engineering. When I'm serving up lunch and overhear some folks talking SDLC I'll smile and reminisce. But its not for me any more. I'm the gray hat now and have no desire to write code for someone elses fortune. Good luck getting out!
I'm younger than you, and probably haven't been working in tech as long, but I've been having similar thoughts. No kids, so I'm maxing retirement accounts, saving as much as I can, and trying to start my own small software company for niche applications.
Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.
I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing...
I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).
Ha, if I had $10M, i'd be way gone. Pretty sure I could live my lifestyle for the next 30 years on that. I could live it on $5M, pretty easily. But where I'm at, I'm at the fringe, even if I have to move to Canada for healthcare when I'm old. And I'm saying this from having a house paid-off (where the taxes went up something like 40% last year -- and I'm guessing will keep going up?).
I'm not convinced living in the US that all the financial planning algs that big finance institutions are using and going to hold up in the future, and curious how it works for a whole generation. But time will tell. So far the cycle always corrects itself. I'm especially curious how it works when there's going to be a lot more early to mid-50s employees being forced into retirement, who are going to be living a long time, yet.
I'm especially paranoid about my prospects of retirement if the market dives 50%. It's happened in the past, and plenty of old hacker news articles about how it really screwed up people's retirement plans. Look back at Stock market returns for some tech companies from 2000 - 2014. That's a big span to fill.... ( I think I read somewhere that the market return for 2000 - 2010 was just over 1% year, someone should fact check that, though).
A lot of people wouldn't know what to do without a job. Always going for more $$ is a way to save yourself from having to discover what you really want to do with your life.
Same here, I just need to figure out what I realistically want to do. Health care is the primary requirement; enough money to get by and not hit my retirement accounts is a relatively close second.
I agree, health care is primary. I see a lot of people on the FIRE forums who are young and haven’t really looked into what insurance can cost in the years leading up to Medicare eligibility age. It’s the best argument for working until close up 60.
Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
Nowadays insurance costs upto 5000$/month with high deductibles and plenty of bureaucracy and paperwork.
I have decided to not get any insurance and negociate directly with healthcare provider (They almost all give you huge discount if you pay cash so they don't have to deal with the insurance backdoor deals). If you FIRE anyways, you should really consider medical tourism and do major procedure abroad.
Everyone is afraid of a catastrophic 1M$ one time event. I get that.
But if you end up paying 50k$/year in insurance cost for 30 years that you could have invested and compounded instead, do you really need insurance? For that one-off event that you could have saved for instead?
I guess my view is that I'm also ok to have a 0.1% to go bankrupt over this. We all got brainwashed into getting insurance at absolutely any costs. It is clear to me that it is not worth it at the current price.
In my case, I need to get a head MRI every 6-12 months for the rest of my life, and regular oncology visits forever. I'm still going to investigate the feasibility of going without insurance; the possible ER visit is what really has me worried.
Those are pretty high, I'd want to know more about circumstances and I would be skeptical without knowing more. It can certainly be expensive, but the overall average for unsubsidized ACA plans is about 6000/year.
My wife has a small business and she does not pay anywhere even approaching 40K for a pretty much bog standard policy for a ~50 year old woman. She does not go through the ACA marketplace, she gets a group policy through the company she uses for payroll.
> but the overall average for unsubsidized ACA plans is about 6000/year.
That gives you a bronze plan with a really high deductible and out of pocket. Basically you will be paying the inflated insurance prices and mostly not reach the deductible.
> she gets a group policy through the company she uses for payroll.
That's why she pays less though. they are poolling people together through that company. (healthy and unhealthy)
The concern isn't really about the cost of one-off procedures (which ARE ridiculous and potentially financially bankrupting in the USA), but the low burn of everyday office visits and specialists. $50 office visit here, $250 specialist visit there, $1000 in blood tests there... Without any chronic health problems, my family's out of pocket $5-10K a year or so with insurance. Without insurance (or on a crappier plan), it'd be even worse.
It really depends. I went without insurance for a couple years. I was able to bring every single price with the provider directly. As soon as I told them I wanted to pay cash in advance they had discount and other incentives.
In the end I paid less than even the inflated copay I would have had to pay with insurance. (And I had a lot of procedure and visit that year).
There is a good chance your 5-10k$ of copay would become 2-3k$ without insurance (Copay are absolutely inflated based on catalog prices that insurance negociate in the background).
I'm pretty much there right now too. I'm not quite 40, but I want out
Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out
Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something
I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI.
However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.
The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.
I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.
Hello! I am in the same boat. Got a kid under 10 too. But I have no regrets yet. The time off was priceless and we never know what tomorrow will hold. My dad was dead when I was 11 so I never planned on playing it safe to try to retire early or even on time.
Does it make a profit? I looked into it but the startup and running costs means I would have to sell more than 100 pretty expensive coffees per day just to break even.
Yes. Margins are high in coffee. We serve a high quality product that customers feel is priced in the value range and we are at like 70-80% blended gross margin. There are plenty of busy shops at >80%.
It takes time to ramp up, but 100 orders a day is nothing. We do more than that in an inexpensive suburban strip mall. You can easily get into the hundreds in a high traffic location.
The key is to develop a base of regulars. Even a couple hundred of them is enough to keep the lights on.
We are open from 7:30-3 and do about $50k/mo. Work is like being at a party all day and cleaning up at the end. It’s the same people all the time so you’re basically hanging out and chatting with them all day.
I have so many questions. What was your initial startup investment? How did you pick the location to set this up in? What did your business plan look like? How many employees did you start with? How long did it take you to make a profit? Were you a coffee connoisseur before you got into the business? How do you select your beans? How did you do your marketing? I would love if you would answer these questions.
Alternatively, how did you figure all of this out when you first started out? Who did you go to so I can find a local analog here.
I didn't know anything about coffee, but I do have an MBA and held leadership positions before this so I wasn't completely clueless.
It took between $150k and $200k to start up. We had to demolish and rebuild an existing retail space. We also spent a lot on our equipment. You can definitely do it for less.
We picked a location near our house because we were tired of leaving our city to get good coffee. It's in a fairly busy shopping center with a supermarket.
We did the best we could with our business plan. It was wrong though - both good and bad.
We were pretty much cash flow positive by the second or third month. There were a few occasions where we had to put in a little extra cash during the first several months though. We were maybe 7 months in the last time we did. We turned a profit our second year. It's not easy though. You struggle to survive for at least 12-18 months.
We started with 3 employees. We still have 2 of them and the other went off to college. We have more now, but it's mostly part timers with the original 2 picking up most of the hours. We extended our hours since we first opened and we were open 360 days last year.
We selected our beans like idiots because we didn't know any better, but it turned out to be awesome. Normal people hook up with a local roaster. We went to Costa Rica to meet farmers. We visited a bunch of places and ended up with a direct trade agreement. We started importing green coffee in bulk and roasting it locally in small batches.
For marketing, we make silly social media videos and run ads on Google and Meta. We also did some local news stuff in the beginning. We do the typical local SEO stuff, get great reviews, etc. We are the highest rated shop in the area so a lot of people find us that way. We do some influencer marketing - a lot of bang for your buck there. We also offer a great loyalty program - nearly 60% of our revenue goes through that.
We have SMS opt-in from thousands of customers so it's easy to blast out a quick promo and shake the money tree on a slow day. Offering double points can turn things around quickly.
A surprising number of people will provide an email address or phone number on their first visit. I'll keep track of those first timers and load them into a retargeting campaign on Meta if they go a few weeks without coming back. I spent $16 doing that this month and got $940 in revenue from those customers.
Ultimately, the most important thing is to make sure everyone leaves happy. We work hard so that people leave happier than when they came in. Mistakes are made too. When you're making a couple hundred drinks a day and doing food orders, you're bound to screw something up. All our employees have the authority to give discounts, refunds or comp items. They keep an eye on people when they get their order. If it looks like they don't like it, our staff will be proactive about it. It was hard in the beginning when we were scraping by and giving away a drink because somebody didn't like what they ordered, but it pays off in the long run. You must have solid repeat customers to stay in business.
You can usually find a local roaster who will help show you the ropes. Often, they are the local channel partners you go through to buy your espresso equipment anyway. If you call up La Marzocco, Sanremo or Simonelli, they will put you in touch with some people. Local chamber of commerce meetings are good too. You can also meet other coffee shop owners in the area. I'm friendly with a couple owners of places that are far enough away that we don't compete with each other.
I know someone who was a DBA and became an electrician and now retired after about 10 years doing that. By all accounts he loved it, spent his days doing odd jobs for old people while chatting with them over many cups of tea. However (here in the UK) you do have to obtain and keep up with certification.
Idk I calculated through my financial needs after retirement for 13 years (67-80) which would be around 400k€ and calculated through my savings I'll accumulate until then, if I keep up my current saving rate. I'll end up saving around 270k€ so ultimately I decided fuck it, Ill just take jobs where I can live comfortably right now and hope for the best in retirement. I take jobs that are fun to me. I have 37 years until retirement and will never be able to afford a house or whatever so I can switch industries whenever I feel like doing so.
Man, do I feel this, but my situation is a little different in that we are similar ages but my kids are (nearly) all adults. I've put enough in 529s that both of them will be able to graduate without any debt, something that I feel will give them a huge advantage in life.
I dream, often, of working somewhere where the problems are simple and the work is rewarding. I will likely end up retiring before that happens, and then spend my time volunteering and gardening.
I have similar feelings. When I started working at my first job, we were trying to make our enterprise product so easy to use it would be like 'a piece of software you'd buy on a CD at the supermarket.' (this was the late 1990s). We really did spend time on polish that made the product better and easier to use (it was sold as a product, with optional support), and I loved re-writing bits of UI and refactoring on my own time to make it great. But over the decades that followed, the new features became subscription based, and metrics were introduced, and were gamed...
Now I'm quite cynical about the industry. I'm 54, and the company I work for is about to announce a restructure. I'd consider doing something else for a similar last few working years too, but I'm not sure what else I'm good at!
It's been obvious for a long time that if you get a tech salary you should be saving for financial independence, meaning saving aggressively (above 50%) and investing that in a low fee tracker fund. Like planting a fruit tree, the best time to start was a decade ago and the second best time is now.
If I can get a few more good years in the stock market and save and invest as much as possible I could probably be done in 5 years and not have to work anymore or just work till I’m fired.
I’ve been searching. I can’t find anything else that pays even remotely close to tech. It’s a sea of $40-60k jobs with a lot of work at the ground level.
Every CxO on the planet is foaming at the mouth now, because they see AI as the way they can finally cast tech into that sea of $40-60k jobs. I knew a (jerk) founder who would openly grumble about how expensive tech talent was and how "one day, when tech cools off, you guys are going all to be paid like the guys on the manufacturing floor..." Typically they're not so mask-off but I bet a lot of them think like that.
If anything AI is going to get rid of the lower tier tech jobs. There will be much fewer but they will pay 7 figs. Basically you replace 10 devs with one super dev and a fleet of agents.
This talking point is common but really a non issue. At Google for instance, executive pay makes up less than 0.3% of operating expenses compared to 30% of that being for non executive compensation. You can’t pay for a damn thing by taking that down to 0.2% or whatever you’re asking for.
I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites.
It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.
Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.
All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.
I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.
I began pursuing a biology degree on the side maybe 3 years ago so I can do that kind of work. Several of my professors are involved with projects that have recently lost funding due to NIH cuts and can't retain their engineering support. It hasn't been encouraging.
I'm out in 2 years, late 30's and a decade in IT/Sec, run a security team now.
Going into something like nursing - union gig, a relationship with AI and tracking I'm comfortable with, walking around money, a job I can show my kids that is about service vs. the inhumane aspects of tech, a career that scales despite technology of the next 20 years (or at least my best estimate of these risks).
End of the day, writing on the wall is clear as day
- Automation of a professional class is coming, just like in trading from '90s-2000s. It's ugly, the pros will deny it until the end, but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts. Engineers are up, financial analysts are up, jr lawyers are up... that is a scary future, I don't need to wait for 5 years for thought leaders to catch up to this.
- Labor rights and labor conflict are always a thing, it has been fair that SWEs exempted themselves from caring about it pre-AI, but post-AI I'd buckle up. If you're an engineer that has dug into AI heavily, and understand how the nature of your job for the next 5-10 yrs has changed, then you should be thinking about your relative labor advantage. Is it still a cake 500k/yr job if you're tracked every 30 minutes? Give me a break.
Fwiw, this tracking shows up at Big Corp and should be expected - Fortune 500s, likely FAANGs, and other spots with top-line insider threat risk. There are specific vendors worth seeing if they are installed via the MDMs or local processes.
Past that, most IT/Sec teams can do it with existing tools, but it's often down the line after getting capable detection/response for real security issues, insider threat, and then monitoring a workforce if so desired.
Leaving tech altogether and working for dystopian companies like Meta are just two choices in a broad band of possibilities. You could also go work for yourself.
What if you were a brilliant young engineer and you wanted to work for a growing company that is being run by sophisticated business leaders who are financially successful enough, and who respect and value their employees so highly that they can afford not to do any of this degrading employee tracking at all?
Well I wouldn't consider myself particularly sophisticated, but I run just such a business myself.
So... no! It's not too late!
You can absolutely do that. But you'll have to network hard and find those people.
It's not impossible, and you may have to work some of those less-desirable jobs in the process. I have a theory that you'll actually find more of those companies as AI proliferates because the work that a single good engineer can do is being scaled very quickly.
Working in tech until you are able to do it is sage advice, but getting employers on board is difficult. Usually being able to do it is a prerequisite to begin working in tech in their eyes.
As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less.
Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.
A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.
