Item — HN Reader

This really hits home for me.

I once had a conversation with a very, very experienced developer who ran a local meetup and was discussing salary options at a new job. He balked when I told them what I asked for, and replied:

"Just because you grew up as poor as me doesn't mean you should fear wealth. If it makes you feel that guilty take the shit and donate it to charity."

And its really true.

My first engineering job I made almost 3x what my mother ever made in a year over her entire life's highest salary.

I was a college dropout that was enthusiastic and knew enough to be functional.

It really is a strange, new thing to come from nothing and all of a sudden be able to go out to eat at an Applebee's without worrying about your finances for a month.

Edit: The first thing I did after collecting my first 'engineering paycheck' was go out to Applebees and get an appetizer, a drink, AND an entree, and then proceed to not worry about it.

4 comments

My father was a high school director. It was a 900-student school for lowerclass jobs, with... well, many lowerclass situations with students who hadn't necessarily ever touched a phone, in the 80s. Part of the job was managing financial resources and deciding of his own salary. He decided to lower it, because he didn't feel like he needed that much. And he decided to apply it retroactively upon two years. He gave money back to his school. I wonder whether I'm plain selfish for thinking he would have had better credit taking the money (even to give it to charities) than returning money to a public institution. But I find the gesture admirable.

Reminds me of this story http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/15/494134464/...

You might say some people have a good heart, personally I think they are simply suckers and being taken advantage of is just a matter of time.

> It really is a strange, new thing to come from nothing and all of a sudden be able to go out to eat at an Applebee's without worrying about your finances for a month.

This. I come from a background where ordering pizza was a special event. We weren't poor poor, but we had to be careful.

I'm getting more used to eating out and getting takeout, but I still read the menu right-to-left (prices first) even though 99% of the time it really doesn't matter.

Maybe someday I'll stop feeling guilty for not ordering the cheapest thing on the menu. Took me 2 years to get used to appetizers.

It's a weird feeling to walk out of a store with a bag full of stuff and realize you have no idea how much any of it cost. Whenever that happens I think of that minor scandal when the nation found out the Clintons(?) didn't know the price of a gallon of milk.

I see not having to know prices as one of the best perks of being decently well off. I've had to count every penny when I was younger, and look for cheaper alternatives, and defer purchases, and it made money one of the big stressful things in my life.

Eventually arning enough that I could stop thinking about it other than checking my balance now and again was far more liberating than any of the subsequent improvements in my finances.

So much this.

But I would like to add to it. Not only is it emotionally liberating to be better off, but it actually frees you up practically as well. Like you said: count pennies, look for cheap alternatives, defer purchases. If I wanted to buy something when I was younger, I would save money for a year, then spend hours/days/weeks comparing prices, waiting for deals, etc. This lingered deep in me, and I had a hard time shaking it as an adult. It's only recently that I can decide to buy something, have a quick look at what's good and where it's cheapest, and then buy it.

I never want to go the other direction and purely equate time with money, but to some extent any of the meaningless time I spent worrying about money I now can make money, and when I don't feel like it, I can have time off, without worrying.

Sorry for the rant, but what I really wanted to get to is: Having money means having time and energy to learn more ~= making more money.

IMHO this article is obviously true.

I remember a quote about the best part of wealth being that you never feel like you need to cheat another person.

I can't google the source of it (you get some really weird results about rich men cheating, or being cheated on) but it always stuck with me as something to be grateful for every day.

Obviously, some rich people however, never got the memo.

Seriously. Probably the biggest mentality shift I had was when I stopped looking at receipts/prices. At this point, the only prices I ever pay attention to are travel ones (hotels/airfare).

No, no, no. Bill Clinton got the grocery prices correct when asked in 1992. There was folklore that George HW Bush didn't know how much milk cost, but that was not confirmed. See http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=89861 https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/110131351/

Speaking of ordering a pizza, I remember visiting a very cheap pizza place in my home town. It was during a year I earned around $200k, and the pizza over there was around $4 (whole pizza, not just a piece).

While I was waiting in line, an elderly couple entered. It looked like it was a big event for them - average earnings in Poland are around $10k/yr, for them it was probably a half of that.

They looked at the prices, I think they asked about something cheaper, or sth.. I don't remember the details, but I remember them leaving because it seemed it was too expensive for them.

If I had more wit, I would just buy them dinner, and make up some kind of a story of me celebrating or sth, so it wouldn't look like a charity. I didn't, because I seriously didn't know how to react...

Some other time, I remember getting into an argument with a bum a Warsaw city center. Bums in Warsaw are much cleaner than the ones in SF or in States in general. I don't know why...

Anyway, I had a good day, so I told him I will buy him a warm sandwich. He followed me to the shop, and I told him to pick the biggest and best one he wants (biggest one being $5 vs. $2 smallest, again, pocket change in US).

The guy was literally unable to make any kind of a choice. The lady at the counter asked him for a kind of meat, and he couldn't choose which one he wanted. My bet was that he was unused to a situation of abundance of anything...

Anyway, he finally managed to make the choice, with my help. I remember how grateful he was. He ended by shaking my hand, and saying something about having a dark past, being a part of SB (kind of like polish KGB) and doing a ton of bad things to people before 1989...

That's some of my recent memories. I still remember reading menus from right to left, and I try to buy people food whenever I can, and whenever it won't make things awkward...

This is a throw away account. I'm writing this because I'm the embodiment of poor and the embodiment of lack of social mobility.

As a child of divorce, I lived in affluent suburbia. However, everything was devoted to keeping the house and to food. There was next to nothing for anything else. I had three jobs going through high school. When I was in school I was told that I couldn't qualify for financial aid because of how much money my father made. His life was dedicated to revenge on my mother and he spent HUGE swaths of money to avoid paying $200/month in child support. Getting money from him for tuition or getting him to sign on the student loan forms was an impossibility. Ironically, I had none of the advantages of being poor.

Graduating average was going to be 96%. They kicked me out at the last minute almost. Truancy. I had the flu for a couple of days. Doctor's note required. The father trying to make my mother's life a living hell by yelling everyday at school administrators did not help either. Nothing in my life was stranger than having a school administrator that I had never previously interacted with tell me that they want to kick me out of the school simply to make life easier for themselves.

Finding employment in 'my field' had not been easy. Usually I worked at mind numbing non-WDS Windows 7 deployments for a one or two month stint. I have not been able to ever get work 'in my field' that paid over $20,000 USD per year. I've had employment where I was programming at minimum wage and the clients were billed $3000 USD per day for my work. Respectfully negotiating was of course fruitless in this situation. I've been in this sort of situation several times. The worst people seem to find me and take advantage. Usually, pay to billing factors are between 5-10.

I started to not want to interact with employers in person. I started making my living making making Android Apps for clients on RFQ sites until 2014. I was getting paid from $50 to $400 per app or app framework. One client took one project and now has over 100 million users across a dozen similar apps. I was hoping I could start to charge more but that never seemed to happen. The best thing that happened was that I had people halfway around the world constantly hounding me to work at what was essentially still minimum wage.

I am lucky because I took an early interest in Bitcoin. I'm willingly hiding in the lowest caste of society. I'm trying to work on myself. I'd like to be treated like a human being one day by an employer, when I am ready.

I'm not writing this to ask for help. I'm writing this to say that the stigma of being at the bottom is very very real. And while it, at least for me, has predominatly been an internal battle of asserting self-worth, there are definitely people who saw the precarious situation that I was in and use it for their advantage. Or to revel in being cruel.

I mean this respectfully, but have you tried to do some introspection?

If you actually have the skills you claim, there is huge money to be made in hiring you as a programmer making $40k/year. Your background really should not be such a determining factor: I have clients who have literally never met me and have only the vaguest idea of who I am. It's all about making compelling work and demanding compensation for it.

If you think this is impossible, I would happily be that guy and pay you $40/hr (which is under market but a hell of a lot more than $20k a year) to work on client projects.

Im not sure where you guys are from, but the average Android developer salary is like $90K a year https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/android-developer-salary-...

Speaking as a relatively new parent, what your father did is unfathomable to me.

It sounds like you got great skills, but need to be connected to someone who just doesn't take advantage of them. Were you working on Kerbal Space Program? Those devs surely got a raw deal too. Sadly the world is full of people caring only for themselves. But there are exceptions, and hopefully it'll be your turn to come across some of them soon.

I was going to say, can you do your own project? But it can be very hard to get started with that, finding the right idea etc. (At least it is for me.)

At any rate, essentially, just wanted to wish you all the best for the future.

Thanks.

Yes, I've a couple projects. A couple are more popular than others. My own stuff has about two million total users. But for about the last four months, I've been working exclusively on creating some (combinatorial) design theory algorithms.

2 million users, that's fantastic work - and the algo stuff sounds like a page turner in the making as well. Keep at it, and please don't ever discount your own worth.

(Not that I'm massively successful myself or anything. In fact, I'm currently unemployed and seeking .net roles, after redundancy; facing difficulties with this as I have only just under 1y of .net xp even as I've done development for 20. Refreshing / learning new skills on SOLID, DDD, CQRS, EventSourcing, etc, and trying to keep chin up. I have faith and refuse to go back to my old tools that are just about dead anyway, even though there's the odd contract coming up. Love C# and .net.)

What was your old tools?

Ordering appetizers still occupy some sort of taking advantage of me immune response. At 60℅ muting of that.