I would work, not for my current employer (or any employer) but for myself. I would setup a one-man LLC or similar and build products I'm proud of. If some of them work out and bring money, good! If not, also good.
Also, I wouldn't work 40h/week on it. More like ~10h/week. I would take it very slow, focusing on the parts that I enjoy the most (like deciding the font of the website for my product, or deciding the dir. structure of my backend, or thinking about that algorithm for days or weeks until I got it right).
I don't like tech companies. I work for one because they pay good. I love my career nevertheless and I become better at it in my free time (that's another reason tech companies pay me good money, because I'm good at it... but I couldn't care less about their products; I pass their interviews with a fake facade)
That’s the most refreshing take I have read on a public forum. I am really glad there are people like that. I have met a few people like that over my professional career and either coincidentally or not, they have been among the most competent and most pleasant to work with engineers. This is opposite view of the lunacy that LinkedIn is right now.
This comment feels almost as if I had written it myself.
Nope, I would probably even quit at 250K of savings. Take some time off, then maybe learn pixel art / design , and spend 2 years to make a game or SaaS to get around 2k income per month for 2 years and then repeat the cycle. The initial money secures basic housing and bills, and the small monthly income is good enough for me.
No. Gonna dive 100% into my hobby xv6 OS project which I'm already working on.
I don't need $10M, 1 or 2 is good enough. I'm going to pay back all debts, rent a cabin (last checked about 127 CAD per night) for a few weeks and bring my son with me for a few nights. I'm also going to buy a telescope. 4-6 hours of kernel hacking at day, and 2-3 hours of stargazing during the night. Heaven!
What I enjoy: the programming, the messing with large systems and solving challenging problems.
What I don't enjoy: the politics, the meetings, the ineptitude of colleagues (nobody hired in the last 10 years seems qualified to do their job), the infrastructure rot and misconfigurations.
I arrived at yes, for the same reason. There are plenty of open source and community projects you could through your time at, but with none of the obligations.
Unfortunately my wife has a terminal illness, and while $10m would be quite a lot, when facing the bills of ALS without proper health insurance, that could run out very quickly. With $10m, I'd work, but do all of the things that I don't have the guts to ask for now: Go fully remote all the time (something that I'll likely have to do within the next few years to be a partial caretaker). When the bad times come, which they will, if I had $10m in the bank I'd walk away from the job and focus entirely on being the most present father that I can be.
Over the last couple years of her illness, I've become the sole caretaker of our young kids, and it's changed me dramatically. Being a parent can be exhausting, and I've always loved it, but I also loved logging into work and doing productive things, contributing to (what I thought were) important software projects, and working with my colleagues. I always loved the camaraderie of the work place and my colleagues. That's shifted entirely in the last 2 years. Other than the paycheck to maintain my kids' quality of life, other than the health insurance that we're now inextricably tethered to (something that I never had an appreciation for as a young, relatively healthy single or married-but-no-kids person), I just don't care about anything at work other than doing what I have to do to maintain those things.
Sorry to read about your wife's illness. It's such a pity that "having to work to maintain quality of life" has taken away the joy of work, even when your colleagues are comrades.
As for me, the principal reason for working is that camaraderie. I find 'establishing things together' more valuable and rewarding than the progress or productivity on itself. The for knowledge workers above-average paycheck feels like a luxury.
Without a shadow of a doubt. 10 mil is more than a 100 years at my current salary rate, and I live quite comfortably.
10 mil means I can take care of my family, and significantly upgrade our standard of living, and sustain this for the remainder of our lives. We can spend our time doing things we actually enjoy doing.
I love my job. Don't get me wrong. But the fact that my job means I can eat plays a very significant part in me loving it in the first place. When the need to survive is removed, I think that love will evaporate.
How is that dissonance? The best you can hope for, in order, are: 1) not having to work, for whatever reason, and having personally meaningful interests with which to fill your time; (two-way-tie) 2a) not having to work, 2b) having to work and having a job you love that means something to you; 3) everything else.
We require sustenance and shelter and sanitation and a few other things. Those require resources, one way or another. If one has to perform some activity in order to acquire the resources necessary to those needs, then one might as well do something one enjoys, if one can.
I absolutely LOVE my job (WFH systems programming in a challenging space (cross domain)), have the best team (my boss, the owner, is a friend from way back in another cyber co; my closest colleague is a great friend from off-roading; my other colleagues are all great people, with fantastic younger team members who break every cliché and trope about their generations; etc., etc.).
And if $10,000,000 showed up in my bank account tomorrow, I would wind down my work as smoothly and quickly as possible, to not leave them hanging, carry on consulting occasionally for them, when needed, and spend a year working on my house and Jeep and learning category theory and walking the dogs and watching as many football matches as I could (heck, with that money, maybe I even would spend the $50/month to get FA Cup games on top of what I already have).
Once the house was to my - and my GF's liking - and once the Jeep was again the beast it once was, and a bit more (portals!!!), well, there would be still be football to watch and math to learn and dogs to walk. Maybe we'd move somewhere we could foster many, many dogs? Ah, the mind reels.
I might even upgrade my phone or monitors.... (I'm a cheap bastard. The dead pixels on the phone screen are a PITA, but they only really impact Quordle.)
No. My labor is transactional. The rest of my time is leisure.
Same reason why I have no interest in working weekends. Is the CEO going to come by my house on Saturday and mow my lawn? Wait, HR said we were family...
$10M in the bank is very different for a family of 4 staying in VHCOL (Bay Area/ Manhattan) vs single person staying in Bangkok. The answer to this question depends on a lot on that versus job satisfaction etc.
Not sure why people like the bay area so much. Move someplace else and retire. Most anywhere in the US is going to be dramatically cheaper.
Buy a summer place on a lake in the Midwest for under 200k. Get a winter place somewhere warmer, since the weather must be what people like about CA. We have tons of retirees doing this with well under $10M.
The weather here is flawless, the culture is adequate (it's not top-tier, but it beats most low cost of living areas), the food is fantastic thanks to immediate access to most of the country's fresh produce. There's deserts, mountains, and the ocean all immediately available for day trips, and most of all, jobs here pay twice as much as they do anywhere else. Sure, the CoL is twice as high, but unless you're living paycheck to paycheck and spend 100% of your income locally, that means more money in our pockets.
Yep. It also depends on types of goals you have and stage of life.
I can safely say as someone who FIRE’d in his early 30’s that it doesn’t matter how much money you have because women are very adverse to a man who isn’t working. Mind you, I am quite physically ugly and so my experience is not that of everyone’s. It might be that for men who are of average and above looks that it doesn’t matter as much but for the women I encountered it mattered a lot that I wasn’t working. It didn’t matter how much money I had made. I was spending on a lavish lifestyle in manhattan as well. I gave up on pursuing a family life due to poor genetic basis, chose to be single back in the Bay Area, and go back to work since there’s nothing else to do. All my goals were revolved around family and building a life for a family. No point in those goals if you’re alone.
Would I keep showing up to the job I had in 2015? Yes, not forever, but at least for a time. It was enjoyable socially and practicing the craft is enjoyable. At jobs like that, the ability to enjoy the craft outweighed the downsides of having to manage a job/career.
Would I keep showing up to the most recent job I had? Or seek out a job in what the market has become, or take a job in what the field has become? And what has become of the craft? Absolutely not. I retired with much less money than $10m, my living expenses are low.
I work independently as consultor/solo dev (https://www.elmalabarista.com) for years now, so with that much money (even 1 million) I just be set for life!.
But I actually love my job (programming) and do it in my spare time (after program for work!) and like to join others to learn (as I have done for https://spacetimedb.com/).
Will probably dedicate the time for my dream of build a FoxPro-alternative, and pretty certain will love it for more than a decade, so if anyone wanna help get funds I all hears!
No. For me, work pays my bills and funds my (modest) lifestyle. With $10 million in the bank (or invested wisely), I won't need to work. I could continue to live my life the way I do and not have to worry about the ridiculousness of the corporate world.
Probably so. I'm in academia as a teacher and as a researcher. I like teaching and I like research. If I were "rich" I'd probably do both things with a much clearer state of mind.
Absolutely not show up. With the current level of expense I would live off of it for about 10 generations. But now I think I would push them up a little bit, so more like five.
I have the job I want. I work remotely. I “retired my wife” when she was 44 8 years into our marriage in 2020 (I was 45) so we could travel and she could pursue her passions. There is really nothing I want to do that work stops me from doing. We travel, we have done the year long “digital nomad” thing, I can go home and spend time with my aging parents and our adult kids (my stepsons) for an extended time.
My other hobbies is I’m a gym rat and just hang out with friends and my wife.
I work in consulting so I never get bored working on the same problem. I’m a staff consultant so the company I work for really gives me almost complete autonomy. I get assigned a project and for the most part I get to lead the projects the way I want.
Investors are not investing in small startups much, perhaps due to high interest rates.
Now is a great time to invest in small startups applying ML to realworld problems, and will result in a lot of useful new tech being built.
Id make a lot of small bets on early stage startups of this kind - and perhaps top up when they get a POC and at MVP / early traction stage.
It would almost be worth buying a building in Danang Vietnam, and hosting small teams for 3m at a time to get more bang for your buck - ie. rent arbitrage / quadruple the effective runway due to low cost of living.
I might not stay in my current job, but I'd certainly want at least a part time job. Something external to impose schedule, where my capabilities are needed (or at least useful to others) is important to my mental health.
On one hand I really like my job and get treated well and like being part of something bigger than myself. On the other hand it would be attractive to spend more time working on some ideas I have.
I would quit my job and start my own freelance consulting business. No doubt my employer would hire me and I could escape the internal bureaucracy I have to deal with. Probably do part time as well.
I have a cushy job, especially when I compare it to how many other people earn money, but it's still a job rather than a passion. The social aspect is all well and good, but much (but not all) of it in a company is actually quite fake.
This is a good question. Many of us work out of blind habit or to support a lifestyle we didn't consciously choose. Asking this question can lead to freedom, no matter how much money you have and no matter whether you work or not, because its a question that leads to living deliberately. Which I am all for. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
I just mean people are just not excited about tech as they used to be.
I would expect, out of all the sites on the Internet, that people would say something like trying to lead some initiative that they never had the courage to do so before leaving the company if given no opportunity for the love of the industry.
Most of my neighbors who have well more than $10M in the bank (Tesla stock, houses, cash, etc.) and they all work because they enjoy it. The younger neighbors quit and just sit around doing nothing but collecting rent money from houses.
But of course, the only constant in life is that things will change. It isn't that surprising I suppose.
I program for fun on my own time, I'm absolutely passionate about technology. What I'm not passionate about is spending 40 hours a week increasing shareholder value or making some capitalist asshole more rich and powerful than they already are.
I get to solve interesting problems at a large scale with minimal politics or BS with legitimate unlimited PTO so I'd probably stick around. Eventually I might do my own startup or consulting business or some such. I find joy in solving interesting problems with real impact which is difficult outside some type of job. Thats due to my personality more than anything but it is what it is. The job is not the passion but the problems are.
I do, and I don’t. Not for lack of trying, but a (non-exec) job is usually full of people who are not in that situation and it creates all sorts of awkwardness I’d rather not deal with. For example, I was out at a team dinner one time and someone asked me where I lived and when I’d bought my place, and they replied with “so you’re rich then,” and I had nothing to say to that except feel awkward.
Also when shit hits the fan layoff-wise management tries to use fear as leverage, which just causes me to quit, leaving my teammates in the lurch. (I’m reminded that Warren Buffett said they don’t try to manage most of the business mangers under them, because many of them are independently wealthy and that would take away their desire to keep showing up. That’s probably why execs are insulated from these dramas too.)
Lastly, if you work with vapid people as I did, they will low-key judge you by your possessions while flaunting theirs, and that’s just nonsense I don’t need in my life.
That being said, I don’t mind working, just not “for money alone,” if that makes sense.
Hell no. I would mess with my stuff, no AI, no bullshit, just fun programming. But I would also do things for myself: better health, better food, better socialization.
Probably as an Eng manager because I remember Eng managers did jack shit. I’d just flex on the rest by showing up in my Ferrari. What are they gonna do? Fire me?
I’d rather have an engineering manager who does nothing rather than one who wastes everyone’s time and runs around trying to get credit for everything under the sun while throwing people under the bus if anything goes sideways.
Once you move beyond a mid level developer [1], line level managers are more or less useless in my experience. They don’t control raises, promotions, budgets or strategies.
I worked at two companies before I got into consulting where I was recruited to lead major hairy initiatives, the conditions of employment for both was that I wanted to report to the director/cto - someone who controlled budgets.
[1] no matter what your title is, if you are just pulling well defined tasks off the board, you’re a mid level developer.
I would still do a job, but it would be something that is important to me.
And $10M would require some up-front management and ongoing maintenance to develop an index-tracked revenue stream from it. I mean, aside from an initial disbursement meant to wipe out harmful debts and get a few small toys, the vast majority of that $10M would go towards being productive revenue-generating assets. No, not from the backs of other members of the working class like rental homes, but via stocks that generate dividends.
For one, I would likely adopt one or more open-source projects that have people struggling to be maintainers, and to fund them in some manner via the dividend income. Kind of like a “you no longer have to worry about food and shelter needs anymore” type of support.
It’s not like I would be able to support oodles of projects like this, but a choice project or three that is vital to the entire tech ecosystem and which desperately needs to remain independent of corporate influence… yeah. I already know of a few.
> And $10M would require some up-front management and ongoing maintenance to develop an index-tracked revenue stream from it.
Buy $5M of VOO and $5M of VTEB or BND. Send dividends to your bank account. When your bank account is over the FDIC limit, buy more of whichever fund has less $. Dividend yield on VOO is about 1%, bond fund is about 3%, approximately $200k/year from dividends, but if that's not enough, sell from the fund with more $ as needed. If you go with VTEB (tax exempt bonds), you'll have a very low federal tax with $50k of mostly qualified dividends and $150k of mostly tax exempt interest; if you go with BND, you're still only looking at about 20% effective tax rate Single, or 15% married filing joint.
Probably check with your insurer and get an umbrella policy for $5M+ cause they're cheap and you don't want to get a judgement and lose out on the easy life.
Send me a check for about $10k a year as a reminder of how much work I did for you right here in the open :P (j/k, I'm not a financial advisor, I can't take compensation for this). You could do something fancier like optimizing the tax-exempt vs regular bonds or think about your preferred stock/bond ratio or exotic investment options to enrich the advisors, but $10M is enough that anything safe (80:20 to 20:80) will work unless you overspend, and it's not enough that getting a little more return is going to let you keep a private jet (better to charter anyway).
On the OP's question. I kept working while I was having fun and then worked on cleanly transitioning things out so I could feel good about leaving without loose ends. I went back to work part time in order to insure domestic tranquility. :P You can do a lot with computers without a job/company/product, but IMHO, optimizing things is more fun when you have a lot of users and you can see the results, so that kind of leads towards working at least a bit, even if you don't have to.
I always find it hilarious that people on HN think that there is something morally wrong with being a landlord like everyone should be a homeowner no matter what the circumstances are. Should college students buy homes? Someone who may not want to live some place for a long time?
I believe that unless one manages to regress to our primal animal state the brain has a need to think about something in order not to think about self and the possible dark existential stuff which should absolutely be ignored and avoided.
In this scenario the best possible way to occupy the brain is to set goals and build discipline towards reaching such goals.
Even pleasurable stuff like music or social connection or even I'd go as far as sex might seem 'not work' on day-1 after you fire yourself after receving the 10mil cheque
But On day 60 after leaving work with 10m
1) the 'fucking around' on the fretboard becomes 'practicing scales for at least 30 mins'
2) the hanging out at the bar becomes 'organizing parties in a way to maximize social fun with games etc'
3) the 'ONS from the club' becomes 'trying to find an escort with girl-next-door look who'd also offer Pornstar sex service and greek sex service'
Every human endevour of any kind has an S-curve type shape where after a while if you want to progress and get novelty from higher experiences you must apply IQ and discipline and so it becomes a 'work'
Leonardo Da Vinci after having signed off all the accomplishments that we know basically turned wedding planner and party organizer in Milan , I suppose orgy organizer too but don't quote me on that, and guess what? After 60 days or so it became a 'job' for him to put the pieces together in a way to reach an amazing social result.
Same with today marriages, happiest day of her life? It's the most work of her life too to get those 8 hours or whatever is the party lenght exactly right
In The Prophet (1923), Kahlil Gibran writes On Work: "Work is love made visible." This is the kind of work you're talking about.
However, the OP question is "would you still show up to work?" This kind of work is usually for a for-profit company owned by capitalists, with their time controlled by their employer, and their effort disconnected from its impact (the alienation of the worker, per Marx).
It makes total sense that someone would stop "showing up to [someone else's] work" and start developing their own independent work ethic towards their own goals. These two types of "work" are not the same, even if we generally use the same word to describe them.
> > It makes total sense that someone would stop "showing up to [someone else's] work" and start developing their own independent work ethic towards their own goals. These two types of "work" are not the same, even if we generally use the same word to describe them.
I'd say that as far as the extraction of brain juices they become exactly the same after a while and maybe the only difference is a smirk when asked about and replying "it beats working" or "it's a tough job but someone has to do it"
Nah I've been fucking around on fretboards for 20 years and it's still fun. And at no point did i have some moron manager making me fill out progress reports about it.
Doing things you find fulfilling is nothing remotely like working for a profit driven enterprise, unless you choose to make it that way.
And I think people who do continue, are engaging in a sociopathic mental illness, that is the primary cause of income inequality, and authoritarian hierarchies in general.
Some people just feel driven to dominate others...
How do you know people wouldn't quit their jobs and then take that $10M to start a sweatshop?
I'm way more concerned about the latter than the former. Work is just work; leveraging capital to exploit people is the sociopathy you're talking about.
If you live in a modern 1st world country and have a family, at least 1 child or some old relatives and at least minimal ambition to eat good food and have okay level of life - 10M is not much at all.
It’ll get you okayish to allright property (depending on the region), will cover all basic expenses and (if you don’t have anyone with serious illness or financial problems) some non basic ones. For up to 10 years max.
Then what?
If you want to hear people’s passions I suggest using vague “F U money” term instead of a pretty small specific number.
I mean, $10m comes out to $400k in year at the 4% rule which is top 2-3% income in the US. And top 1% in Europe. I guess being in the top 1% is barely scraping by nowadays.
Absolutely ridiculous. $1M/year is TEN TIMES what i spend for a gorgeous apartment and all the entertainment and food i can manage in Chicago. I could last 100 years on $10M. Well, maybe 80 when you factor healthcare :)
I would work, not for my current employer (or any employer) but for myself. I would setup a one-man LLC or similar and build products I'm proud of. If some of them work out and bring money, good! If not, also good.
Also, I wouldn't work 40h/week on it. More like ~10h/week. I would take it very slow, focusing on the parts that I enjoy the most (like deciding the font of the website for my product, or deciding the dir. structure of my backend, or thinking about that algorithm for days or weeks until I got it right).
I don't like tech companies. I work for one because they pay good. I love my career nevertheless and I become better at it in my free time (that's another reason tech companies pay me good money, because I'm good at it... but I couldn't care less about their products; I pass their interviews with a fake facade)
That’s the most refreshing take I have read on a public forum. I am really glad there are people like that. I have met a few people like that over my professional career and either coincidentally or not, they have been among the most competent and most pleasant to work with engineers. This is opposite view of the lunacy that LinkedIn is right now.
This comment feels almost as if I had written it myself.
Nope, I would probably even quit at 250K of savings. Take some time off, then maybe learn pixel art / design , and spend 2 years to make a game or SaaS to get around 2k income per month for 2 years and then repeat the cycle. The initial money secures basic housing and bills, and the small monthly income is good enough for me.
No. Gonna dive 100% into my hobby xv6 OS project which I'm already working on.
I don't need $10M, 1 or 2 is good enough. I'm going to pay back all debts, rent a cabin (last checked about 127 CAD per night) for a few weeks and bring my son with me for a few nights. I'm also going to buy a telescope. 4-6 hours of kernel hacking at day, and 2-3 hours of stargazing during the night. Heaven!
It took me awhile, but I arrived at "no".
What I enjoy: the programming, the messing with large systems and solving challenging problems.
What I don't enjoy: the politics, the meetings, the ineptitude of colleagues (nobody hired in the last 10 years seems qualified to do their job), the infrastructure rot and misconfigurations.
I arrived at yes, for the same reason. There are plenty of open source and community projects you could through your time at, but with none of the obligations.
Unfortunately my wife has a terminal illness, and while $10m would be quite a lot, when facing the bills of ALS without proper health insurance, that could run out very quickly. With $10m, I'd work, but do all of the things that I don't have the guts to ask for now: Go fully remote all the time (something that I'll likely have to do within the next few years to be a partial caretaker). When the bad times come, which they will, if I had $10m in the bank I'd walk away from the job and focus entirely on being the most present father that I can be.
Over the last couple years of her illness, I've become the sole caretaker of our young kids, and it's changed me dramatically. Being a parent can be exhausting, and I've always loved it, but I also loved logging into work and doing productive things, contributing to (what I thought were) important software projects, and working with my colleagues. I always loved the camaraderie of the work place and my colleagues. That's shifted entirely in the last 2 years. Other than the paycheck to maintain my kids' quality of life, other than the health insurance that we're now inextricably tethered to (something that I never had an appreciation for as a young, relatively healthy single or married-but-no-kids person), I just don't care about anything at work other than doing what I have to do to maintain those things.
Sorry to read about your wife's illness. It's such a pity that "having to work to maintain quality of life" has taken away the joy of work, even when your colleagues are comrades.
As for me, the principal reason for working is that camaraderie. I find 'establishing things together' more valuable and rewarding than the progress or productivity on itself. The for knowledge workers above-average paycheck feels like a luxury.
Without a shadow of a doubt. 10 mil is more than a 100 years at my current salary rate, and I live quite comfortably.
10 mil means I can take care of my family, and significantly upgrade our standard of living, and sustain this for the remainder of our lives. We can spend our time doing things we actually enjoy doing.
I love my job. Don't get me wrong. But the fact that my job means I can eat plays a very significant part in me loving it in the first place. When the need to survive is removed, I think that love will evaporate.
How is that dissonance? The best you can hope for, in order, are: 1) not having to work, for whatever reason, and having personally meaningful interests with which to fill your time; (two-way-tie) 2a) not having to work, 2b) having to work and having a job you love that means something to you; 3) everything else.
We require sustenance and shelter and sanitation and a few other things. Those require resources, one way or another. If one has to perform some activity in order to acquire the resources necessary to those needs, then one might as well do something one enjoys, if one can.
I absolutely LOVE my job (WFH systems programming in a challenging space (cross domain)), have the best team (my boss, the owner, is a friend from way back in another cyber co; my closest colleague is a great friend from off-roading; my other colleagues are all great people, with fantastic younger team members who break every cliché and trope about their generations; etc., etc.).
And if $10,000,000 showed up in my bank account tomorrow, I would wind down my work as smoothly and quickly as possible, to not leave them hanging, carry on consulting occasionally for them, when needed, and spend a year working on my house and Jeep and learning category theory and walking the dogs and watching as many football matches as I could (heck, with that money, maybe I even would spend the $50/month to get FA Cup games on top of what I already have).
Once the house was to my - and my GF's liking - and once the Jeep was again the beast it once was, and a bit more (portals!!!), well, there would be still be football to watch and math to learn and dogs to walk. Maybe we'd move somewhere we could foster many, many dogs? Ah, the mind reels.
I might even upgrade my phone or monitors.... (I'm a cheap bastard. The dead pixels on the phone screen are a PITA, but they only really impact Quordle.)
If I had $1M in the bank I would leave (probably to start my own thing, but maybe to volunteer or even just take a risk on a new job).
No, I wouldn’t show up to work. I could invest it conservatively and live off of that forever.
However… I don’t know what I’d do in the time that I would normally work. I’m working on retiring early so I need to figure that out.
No. My labor is transactional. The rest of my time is leisure.
Same reason why I have no interest in working weekends. Is the CEO going to come by my house on Saturday and mow my lawn? Wait, HR said we were family...
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the legendary Office Space scene yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu2HhlTEHMc
$10M in the bank is very different for a family of 4 staying in VHCOL (Bay Area/ Manhattan) vs single person staying in Bangkok. The answer to this question depends on a lot on that versus job satisfaction etc.
Not sure why people like the bay area so much. Move someplace else and retire. Most anywhere in the US is going to be dramatically cheaper.
Buy a summer place on a lake in the Midwest for under 200k. Get a winter place somewhere warmer, since the weather must be what people like about CA. We have tons of retirees doing this with well under $10M.
The weather here is flawless, the culture is adequate (it's not top-tier, but it beats most low cost of living areas), the food is fantastic thanks to immediate access to most of the country's fresh produce. There's deserts, mountains, and the ocean all immediately available for day trips, and most of all, jobs here pay twice as much as they do anywhere else. Sure, the CoL is twice as high, but unless you're living paycheck to paycheck and spend 100% of your income locally, that means more money in our pockets.
Then don’t stay in Manhattan or SF Bay? SF is always a dreary place and NYC is a bit much in the winter
But even so, just going by the 4% rule, that’s still $400K a year. The median household income in SF Bay is $130J
Yep. It also depends on types of goals you have and stage of life.
I can safely say as someone who FIRE’d in his early 30’s that it doesn’t matter how much money you have because women are very adverse to a man who isn’t working. Mind you, I am quite physically ugly and so my experience is not that of everyone’s. It might be that for men who are of average and above looks that it doesn’t matter as much but for the women I encountered it mattered a lot that I wasn’t working. It didn’t matter how much money I had made. I was spending on a lavish lifestyle in manhattan as well. I gave up on pursuing a family life due to poor genetic basis, chose to be single back in the Bay Area, and go back to work since there’s nothing else to do. All my goals were revolved around family and building a life for a family. No point in those goals if you’re alone.
Would I keep showing up to the job I had in 2015? Yes, not forever, but at least for a time. It was enjoyable socially and practicing the craft is enjoyable. At jobs like that, the ability to enjoy the craft outweighed the downsides of having to manage a job/career.
Would I keep showing up to the most recent job I had? Or seek out a job in what the market has become, or take a job in what the field has become? And what has become of the craft? Absolutely not. I retired with much less money than $10m, my living expenses are low.
I work independently as consultor/solo dev (https://www.elmalabarista.com) for years now, so with that much money (even 1 million) I just be set for life!.
But I actually love my job (programming) and do it in my spare time (after program for work!) and like to join others to learn (as I have done for https://spacetimedb.com/).
Will probably dedicate the time for my dream of build a FoxPro-alternative, and pretty certain will love it for more than a decade, so if anyone wanna help get funds I all hears!
No. For me, work pays my bills and funds my (modest) lifestyle. With $10 million in the bank (or invested wisely), I won't need to work. I could continue to live my life the way I do and not have to worry about the ridiculousness of the corporate world.
Probably so. I'm in academia as a teacher and as a researcher. I like teaching and I like research. If I were "rich" I'd probably do both things with a much clearer state of mind.
Absolutely not show up. With the current level of expense I would live off of it for about 10 generations. But now I think I would push them up a little bit, so more like five.
I might keep working doing what I do now.
I have the job I want. I work remotely. I “retired my wife” when she was 44 8 years into our marriage in 2020 (I was 45) so we could travel and she could pursue her passions. There is really nothing I want to do that work stops me from doing. We travel, we have done the year long “digital nomad” thing, I can go home and spend time with my aging parents and our adult kids (my stepsons) for an extended time.
My other hobbies is I’m a gym rat and just hang out with friends and my wife.
I work in consulting so I never get bored working on the same problem. I’m a staff consultant so the company I work for really gives me almost complete autonomy. I get assigned a project and for the most part I get to lead the projects the way I want.
Investors are not investing in small startups much, perhaps due to high interest rates.
Now is a great time to invest in small startups applying ML to realworld problems, and will result in a lot of useful new tech being built.
Id make a lot of small bets on early stage startups of this kind - and perhaps top up when they get a POC and at MVP / early traction stage.
It would almost be worth buying a building in Danang Vietnam, and hosting small teams for 3m at a time to get more bang for your buck - ie. rent arbitrage / quadruple the effective runway due to low cost of living.
Absolutely not. I'd be doing more enjoyable and meaningful projects instead.
I might not stay in my current job, but I'd certainly want at least a part time job. Something external to impose schedule, where my capabilities are needed (or at least useful to others) is important to my mental health.
Not an easy question to answer.
On one hand I really like my job and get treated well and like being part of something bigger than myself. On the other hand it would be attractive to spend more time working on some ideas I have.
I would quit my job and start my own freelance consulting business. No doubt my employer would hire me and I could escape the internal bureaucracy I have to deal with. Probably do part time as well.
You need $10M in bank to do that? Sounds like you should just do this. What's holding you back?
No.
I have a cushy job, especially when I compare it to how many other people earn money, but it's still a job rather than a passion. The social aspect is all well and good, but much (but not all) of it in a company is actually quite fake.
I would not show up, I'd sell the business, and work on more fun projects.
I have written code for 40years, self-taught from 6502 to C++ and now Node.js, and I have always loved it.
Not to the current job. I'd still want to use same skills, but I'd probably find some PhDs to assist for free.
Yes. That said, I work for myself at home in a job that takes only a few hours a day.
The money would affect that in the sense that the additional assets and guaranteed income would allow more investing in my business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545404
hell no. i quit tech with a lot less because life is too short.
This is a good question. Many of us work out of blind habit or to support a lifestyle we didn't consciously choose. Asking this question can lead to freedom, no matter how much money you have and no matter whether you work or not, because its a question that leads to living deliberately. Which I am all for. https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
All these "NO" answers haha... makes sense why there are record layoffs and zombie/dead startups.
I think Claude Code will save many small businesses.
"Nobody wants to work anymore"[0] is a trope as old as industrialization itself.
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/w3si8l/nobody_wan...
A trope is a trope because it is commonly true for long periods of time. This proves nothing.
Cycles exist, and there can be periods of time where there is true passion in an industry followed by lack thereof.
A boom and bust economic system guarantees that there will always be times where a ton of "normies" enter tech who just want a paycheck during booms.
Is it really that surprising that a vast majority of people don't work a job that is not better than doing whatever they want whenever they want?
What do you mean? The layoffs have nothing to do with people loving their jobs or being loyal to their employers.
I just mean people are just not excited about tech as they used to be.
I would expect, out of all the sites on the Internet, that people would say something like trying to lead some initiative that they never had the courage to do so before leaving the company if given no opportunity for the love of the industry.
Most of my neighbors who have well more than $10M in the bank (Tesla stock, houses, cash, etc.) and they all work because they enjoy it. The younger neighbors quit and just sit around doing nothing but collecting rent money from houses.
But of course, the only constant in life is that things will change. It isn't that surprising I suppose.
This thread is about jobs. If I had $10M in the bank I would be developing something I had equity in instead of enriching others.
If you ever hang out in the nonprofit sector you will notice that a lot of these underpaid workers are independently wealthy as well.
I program for fun on my own time, I'm absolutely passionate about technology. What I'm not passionate about is spending 40 hours a week increasing shareholder value or making some capitalist asshole more rich and powerful than they already are.
I get to solve interesting problems at a large scale with minimal politics or BS with legitimate unlimited PTO so I'd probably stick around. Eventually I might do my own startup or consulting business or some such. I find joy in solving interesting problems with real impact which is difficult outside some type of job. Thats due to my personality more than anything but it is what it is. The job is not the passion but the problems are.
I do, and I don’t. Not for lack of trying, but a (non-exec) job is usually full of people who are not in that situation and it creates all sorts of awkwardness I’d rather not deal with. For example, I was out at a team dinner one time and someone asked me where I lived and when I’d bought my place, and they replied with “so you’re rich then,” and I had nothing to say to that except feel awkward.
Also when shit hits the fan layoff-wise management tries to use fear as leverage, which just causes me to quit, leaving my teammates in the lurch. (I’m reminded that Warren Buffett said they don’t try to manage most of the business mangers under them, because many of them are independently wealthy and that would take away their desire to keep showing up. That’s probably why execs are insulated from these dramas too.)
Lastly, if you work with vapid people as I did, they will low-key judge you by your possessions while flaunting theirs, and that’s just nonsense I don’t need in my life.
That being said, I don’t mind working, just not “for money alone,” if that makes sense.
send me $10m and then i'll let you know
I mean duh? At the very least wouldnt one just show upt to their job for the "non work related" activities? Or work becomes your "passive income"?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: maybe I would wrap up a few outstanding projects and then retire?
Hell no. I would mess with my stuff, no AI, no bullshit, just fun programming. But I would also do things for myself: better health, better food, better socialization.
Probably as an Eng manager because I remember Eng managers did jack shit. I’d just flex on the rest by showing up in my Ferrari. What are they gonna do? Fire me?
I’d rather have an engineering manager who does nothing rather than one who wastes everyone’s time and runs around trying to get credit for everything under the sun while throwing people under the bus if anything goes sideways.
I’ve had over a dozen managers and they were useless. Every few quarters there’d be a re org as the company grew and we would shuffle teams.
It was a mess and the common point was a useless Eng manager who never remembered shit and usually contributed jack shit.
But I had one cool manager who was old and rich. He was cool and harmlessly incompetent.
Once you move beyond a mid level developer [1], line level managers are more or less useless in my experience. They don’t control raises, promotions, budgets or strategies.
I worked at two companies before I got into consulting where I was recruited to lead major hairy initiatives, the conditions of employment for both was that I wanted to report to the director/cto - someone who controlled budgets.
[1] no matter what your title is, if you are just pulling well defined tasks off the board, you’re a mid level developer.
I would still do a job, but it would be something that is important to me.
And $10M would require some up-front management and ongoing maintenance to develop an index-tracked revenue stream from it. I mean, aside from an initial disbursement meant to wipe out harmful debts and get a few small toys, the vast majority of that $10M would go towards being productive revenue-generating assets. No, not from the backs of other members of the working class like rental homes, but via stocks that generate dividends.
For one, I would likely adopt one or more open-source projects that have people struggling to be maintainers, and to fund them in some manner via the dividend income. Kind of like a “you no longer have to worry about food and shelter needs anymore” type of support.
It’s not like I would be able to support oodles of projects like this, but a choice project or three that is vital to the entire tech ecosystem and which desperately needs to remain independent of corporate influence… yeah. I already know of a few.
> And $10M would require some up-front management and ongoing maintenance to develop an index-tracked revenue stream from it.
Buy $5M of VOO and $5M of VTEB or BND. Send dividends to your bank account. When your bank account is over the FDIC limit, buy more of whichever fund has less $. Dividend yield on VOO is about 1%, bond fund is about 3%, approximately $200k/year from dividends, but if that's not enough, sell from the fund with more $ as needed. If you go with VTEB (tax exempt bonds), you'll have a very low federal tax with $50k of mostly qualified dividends and $150k of mostly tax exempt interest; if you go with BND, you're still only looking at about 20% effective tax rate Single, or 15% married filing joint.
Probably check with your insurer and get an umbrella policy for $5M+ cause they're cheap and you don't want to get a judgement and lose out on the easy life.
Send me a check for about $10k a year as a reminder of how much work I did for you right here in the open :P (j/k, I'm not a financial advisor, I can't take compensation for this). You could do something fancier like optimizing the tax-exempt vs regular bonds or think about your preferred stock/bond ratio or exotic investment options to enrich the advisors, but $10M is enough that anything safe (80:20 to 20:80) will work unless you overspend, and it's not enough that getting a little more return is going to let you keep a private jet (better to charter anyway).
On the OP's question. I kept working while I was having fun and then worked on cleanly transitioning things out so I could feel good about leaving without loose ends. I went back to work part time in order to insure domestic tranquility. :P You can do a lot with computers without a job/company/product, but IMHO, optimizing things is more fun when you have a lot of users and you can see the results, so that kind of leads towards working at least a bit, even if you don't have to.
I always find it hilarious that people on HN think that there is something morally wrong with being a landlord like everyone should be a homeowner no matter what the circumstances are. Should college students buy homes? Someone who may not want to live some place for a long time?
no
I believe that unless one manages to regress to our primal animal state the brain has a need to think about something in order not to think about self and the possible dark existential stuff which should absolutely be ignored and avoided.
In this scenario the best possible way to occupy the brain is to set goals and build discipline towards reaching such goals.
Even pleasurable stuff like music or social connection or even I'd go as far as sex might seem 'not work' on day-1 after you fire yourself after receving the 10mil cheque
But On day 60 after leaving work with 10m
1) the 'fucking around' on the fretboard becomes 'practicing scales for at least 30 mins'
2) the hanging out at the bar becomes 'organizing parties in a way to maximize social fun with games etc'
3) the 'ONS from the club' becomes 'trying to find an escort with girl-next-door look who'd also offer Pornstar sex service and greek sex service'
Every human endevour of any kind has an S-curve type shape where after a while if you want to progress and get novelty from higher experiences you must apply IQ and discipline and so it becomes a 'work'
Leonardo Da Vinci after having signed off all the accomplishments that we know basically turned wedding planner and party organizer in Milan , I suppose orgy organizer too but don't quote me on that, and guess what? After 60 days or so it became a 'job' for him to put the pieces together in a way to reach an amazing social result.
Same with today marriages, happiest day of her life? It's the most work of her life too to get those 8 hours or whatever is the party lenght exactly right
There are two kinds of work being conflated here.
In The Prophet (1923), Kahlil Gibran writes On Work: "Work is love made visible." This is the kind of work you're talking about.
However, the OP question is "would you still show up to work?" This kind of work is usually for a for-profit company owned by capitalists, with their time controlled by their employer, and their effort disconnected from its impact (the alienation of the worker, per Marx).
It makes total sense that someone would stop "showing up to [someone else's] work" and start developing their own independent work ethic towards their own goals. These two types of "work" are not the same, even if we generally use the same word to describe them.
> > It makes total sense that someone would stop "showing up to [someone else's] work" and start developing their own independent work ethic towards their own goals. These two types of "work" are not the same, even if we generally use the same word to describe them.
I'd say that as far as the extraction of brain juices they become exactly the same after a while and maybe the only difference is a smirk when asked about and replying "it beats working" or "it's a tough job but someone has to do it"
Nah I've been fucking around on fretboards for 20 years and it's still fun. And at no point did i have some moron manager making me fill out progress reports about it.
Doing things you find fulfilling is nothing remotely like working for a profit driven enterprise, unless you choose to make it that way.
No fuckin way, i don't like my job, and in fact i rather dislike the entire programming career.
I'm about an inch away from quitting my job today with no backup. The impossibility of finding a new way to pay rent is the only thing stopping me.
If i knew any way on earth for me to make as much as i do programming doing something else, i would.
No, capital NO.
And I think people who do continue, are engaging in a sociopathic mental illness, that is the primary cause of income inequality, and authoritarian hierarchies in general.
Some people just feel driven to dominate others...
Working as a programmer is dominating others?
How do you know people wouldn't quit their jobs and then take that $10M to start a sweatshop?
I'm way more concerned about the latter than the former. Work is just work; leveraging capital to exploit people is the sociopathy you're talking about.
So, you know a lot of "programmers" with $10M in the bank?
If you live in a modern 1st world country and have a family, at least 1 child or some old relatives and at least minimal ambition to eat good food and have okay level of life - 10M is not much at all.
It’ll get you okayish to allright property (depending on the region), will cover all basic expenses and (if you don’t have anyone with serious illness or financial problems) some non basic ones. For up to 10 years max.
Then what?
If you want to hear people’s passions I suggest using vague “F U money” term instead of a pretty small specific number.
This makes no sense. By this logic, anyone spending less than 1M per year only has an "okayish" lifestyle.
I mean, $10m comes out to $400k in year at the 4% rule which is top 2-3% income in the US. And top 1% in Europe. I guess being in the top 1% is barely scraping by nowadays.
10 million earning 4% is 400k per year. That's a good bay area salary.
Absolutely ridiculous. $1M/year is TEN TIMES what i spend for a gorgeous apartment and all the entertainment and food i can manage in Chicago. I could last 100 years on $10M. Well, maybe 80 when you factor healthcare :)
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