Personal Accountant
We make a lot of money relative to most others in the world. I plotted out a very conservative estimate of savings for age 30-65. If I live off of base salary and don't touch stock except for down payments, vacations, kids college, emergencies, etc, I'm still left with millions of dollars *without taking into account stock growth or annual raises*. Assuming a pretty conservative promotion schedule of SDE III in 5 years, Principal 10 years after that, and Sr. Principal 15 years after that. Does anyone have a personal accountant to help manage money? How much do they cost? What do they provide? I probably shouldn't just leave all my stock as AMZN forever. At some point I'll need to diversify.
You need a personal financial manager/advisor , but not an accountant. Some of those will do your budget and taxes too.
Oh!! That's more what I meant. Yeah, that.
Just sell AMZN and buy Vanguard retirement target funds (depending on planned retirement age), skip the advisors.
Mrbaccounting.com 100%
If you are an SDE, you can’t count on being employed as an SDE in 15+ years. Look around and see how many old SDEs you can spot.
I think this line of thinking is a bit flawed. I'd argue that the market for developers has been greater in the last 5 or so years than at any time. You don't see many older people going back to school to get a CS degree that also did the interview prep work. That's why you don't see many older engineers. Not nearly as many got the necessary skills 20 years ago. I can totally count on it because I keep up with the times. I'm always taking MOOCs on new fields out of interest. I also personally know a 53 year old L8 engineer, one in his 40s, and a number of L7s in their late 30s and 40s. I even knew a new hire SDET II in his late 40s. Amazon won't fire me for being old.
Thats more so because demand for engineers has been rapidly increasing until this point. You don’t see a lot of older engineers since the number of people who have been doing this for a long time is so small. Also a large number of the older devs were lucky enough to make large sums of money off their stocks so they’ve retired early. A lot of the older devs I’ve known over the years were only working because they found their early retirement boring.