alt Hacker NewsYou do not understand compounding growth.
You could have looked up the numbers for indices yourself, but here you go -
S&P500 -> ~4 million
NDXT (top 100 tech) -> ~14 million.
> just save 100k out of your 170k comp
Yes, that was my starting salary, and that's almost exactly what I saved.
This calculation assumes your salary is somewhat constant and maxed out as the person I was responding to claimed, but in my experience you can expect your tech salary to double every ~5-6 years.
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I calculated saving $100K out of $170K gross some pre tax and most post tax is living off of around $1800 a month.
And again, expecting your salary to double every six or seven years is not realistic for most developers.
Most developers making around $120K in 2013, aren’t making $480K now.
$170K as a starting salary, scratch that, as any salary, is already way beyond the average SWE salary.
Your math seems way off?
NDXT went from ~2300 in 2015 to ~12500 in 2025. That's ~5.5x return. So even if you had your whole 1M saving in 2015, you'd only have 5.5M now. No idea how you get nearly 3x that?
And it's way worse if you take the actual scenario which is 100k added every year instead of starting with the 1M.
S&P500 is worse yet, at about 3.5x total return if you had the whole million at the start.