Conversation

This question's gauche, but: given the prevalence of $400k++ comp packages for ~30-year-olds in Big Tech, why aren't there lots more "gentle[wo]man scholars"? i.e. people quitting to do non-remunerative creative projects I can think of some, but shouldn't there be thousands?

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Dr. Loh

@steveloh722

Jan 28

Burn rate eats up 400k pretty quickly especially in cities like LA and Bay Area

Rich

@Duderichy

Jan 28

Half to taxes, ~230 after maybe, $50k rent / mortgage, hmmm. Maybe $50k discretionary? But yeah, 50% savings rate still takes a long time to build up. Especially if you’ve only been making that much for a few years and made much less before.

Rich

@Duderichy

Jan 28

Given this is a recent phenomenon and the type of person who goes to save that much money isn’t probably going to be the type of person to talk about it much

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Jan 28

This is a good point. Maybe I'm being too optimistic. Let's see… lots of great group houses in SF for $1,500/mo. Say we cut discretionary to $2,500/mo. That's $182k/yr leftover. You'd need ~$1.2M annuity to maintain that lifestyle; that'd take ~6 years.