Skip to content

Comment on Heirs to Old Money Plunge Into Techparent

Comments

Counterpoint: I'm only working on something other than my own ideas because I don't have the capital/savings backing to just chuck down a few hundred to incorporate and start raising capital, all the while paying rent and buying food.

I ask this honestly because you seem like a sharp guy and I'm genuinely curious: what's stopping you from working a dev job for 6-12 months, saving 2-3k/month of a 8-10k/month paycheck, and then starting your own thing when you have 6-12 months of personal runway in the bank?

I re-iterate that this is not meant to be snarky, but I meet several people who express this idea and many of them seem to be stuck in local optima that can be easily escaped with a little persistence.

Edit: a bit of nuance. I know most people in the world can't easily get 8-10k/mo salaries. But talented developers in the US (or willing to work remotely) can. I don't mean to be insensitive to people with more constrained opportunities.

>a bit of nuance. I know most people in the world can't easily get 8-10k/mo salaries. But talented developers in the US (or willing to work remotely) can.

No, we can't, if we don't live in Silicon Valley. I would call myself "talented", but the highest salary offer I've ever received was $87k/year. The lowest was around $72k/year. The average was around $80k/year.

Mind, most of these offers sounded better once you factored in things like stock options, working for a start-up, or really nice health insurance with stock options, but still. Outside of Silicon Valley, it's not at all routine to earn $120k/year as a programmer, even a reasonably good one.

EDIT: and I don't live in some Hicksville, either. I live in Massachusetts.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.