My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
I do not understand why articles like these consistently score poorly on HN? Of course it’s all based on luck, but that doesn’t make it an uninteresting read. I admire the diligence of the author, and how well they played the lucky cards they were given.<p>I am frequently in awe when reading technical articles on HN, with people advancing the state of the art in some technology. Those people also are incredibly lucky, because they were born with massive talents that, through sacrifices and education, they transformed into life achievements.<p>As an average software engineer I was not lucky enough to be born with cognitive skills that will ever allow me to reach those technical highs, but that is not a reason to crap on it saying “Just luck! Just genetic&#x2F;environmental luck!”.<p>Similarly, I don’t typically read from others: “It’s easy for you to rewrite the Linux kernel in JavaScript over a weekend, your work is just luck because you were born a genius in a developed country so all your achievements need to be discounted and you have no merits!”.<p>I suspect when it comes to compensation talk people tend on average to get more bitter than they should otherwise be.<p>Maybe I take this to heart because I made significant sacrifices to immigrate to the US and, while I was immensely lucky to succeed in the endeavor, most people I know would have never taken those uncomfortable steps (leaving family behind in a different country, sacrifice personal space by frugal living in a HCOL area as opposed to a LCOL area with a house and backyard for the kids, …), yet they will happily “complain” that my compensation is much higher than theirs, and that there is no merit to it, rather than simply admitting that they willingly chose a different path in life, but they could have chased my same opportunities with largely the same financial outcome.<p>If I was reading this article and I was not a tech worker in the US but interested in getting those compensations, my first reaction would be “damn, let me research what are the options for legal immigration to the US and let me start down a path that has good odds of me landing a tech job over there within 5-10 years”. It would not be “let me complain on HN how the country I am a forever-prisoner in has a 90% effective tax rate so that I feel good about my situation”.