Programmers Should Plan for Lower Pay?
This article is basically just asking people to live responsibly, which is something everyone should understand intuitively.<p>This person appears to be spending half of their income on charitable donations every year, though, which is admirable but not a smart financial decision. (They&#x27;ve spent one million dollars on it! A million! With a standard savings rate, just throwing that into a bank account would ensure that you could just live off of the <i>interest</i> from that for the rest of your life in some countries.)<p>I&#x27;m not saying that you should be a scrooge with your dollars, but there&#x27;s a reasonable amount to give and there&#x27;s an amount that (while great!) means you should expect consequences from it.<p>Even if you&#x27;re making far below FAANG rates, just by living within your means you&#x27;ll be able to have a year or two&#x27;s worth of padding saved up (especially if you&#x27;re willing to move to a less expensive area while the theoretical crash happens) in no time at all.<p>To post an anecdote from a Hacker News comment:<p><i>Saw this happen in Houston in 2014. Engineers that had started their careers just after the housing crisis bounced back were sitting cozy on their 150k&#x2F;year (in Houston that&#x27;s gobs) roles, not really putting much into savings because &quot;there&#x27;s always Wells to drill.&quot;<p>When prices dropped from 90$ to 44$ a barrel, I saw candidates do some pretty stupid shit. Nuked the [remainder] of their savings on a new f150 was a classic drama played out over 2 weeks that my whole team was involved trying to talk him down in. Others had to move in with their parents, take roles in deer Park that were something like 2.5hr commutes one way, drop everything for a Saudi role and move out there... Their freedom of choice was essentially yanked away.<p>The only one that seemed to be handling it well was a fresh 3 years in engineer. No girlfriend, kids, house, and buckets of savings. He moved to Vietnam and weathered the storm on a beach, taking tiny sips of his savings.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19281509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19281509</a><p>If you&#x27;re living within your means, you have nothing at all to worry about. It&#x27;s really not that hard, and it&#x27;ll save you a lot of stress when push comes to shove.<p>Edit: Changed a word because it came off too hostile. The line I changed is quoted by &#x27;saagarjha below, if you&#x27;re curious about what it originally said.