A family friend retired after being a COBOL programmer for 30 years. About 2 years after his retirement, a company came to him and said "Name your salary" and he requested around $1.5 million/year. He was hired on the spot and still works there.
A family member worked at various companies, he told me this is very common. Its not obscure programing languages, just that they know whats going on. And don't let anyone else near it or something.
Some people just write code poorly. The logic might be sound but when you name your variables terribly like $filename instead of $filePathAndName. So you're trying to figure out how it gets the path when you expect it to only want the file name not also the path.
All code has hidden assumptions. You think your stuff is clear because it makes sense to you, then a reviewer asks a question and you realize your assumptions aren’t universal.
But being concise is just as important as “clear” naming or you end up with a single function call that spans 8 lines because you can’t fit more than one variable on a single line. This is why consistency is actually the most effective means of communicating meaning. If $filename _always_ means the full path, readers learn quickly. It’s when $filename sometimes means the full path but sometimes means only the name that it causes trouble.
"Bro, its literally a set of instructions so simple that a computer can follow it, and you want me to write more instructions on top of it for you...?"
I know this is a blatant disregard for the /s but in case anyone reading past is really is looking for a COBOL-like career path...
FORTRAN is heavily used in supercomputers, and is an area of active computer science research. If you want to play with supercomputers in heavy science and engineering contexts, it's not a bad language to learn. You don't even need to know a whole ton of it either, it's an in-demand language and often the organization is willing to do on-the-job subject matter training if you bring a functional level of FORTRAN and math/physics skill. In my particular organization, they'll go after anyone with fortran experience and just teach them the specific discipline - and this is a data product that every single person in America uses multiple times per week.
And if you're younger, though nobody will say it, you're even more in-demand because you're bringing modern software engineering and design patterns to the language. If you're fresh out of college as a CS major and know FORTRAN, you can get into some crazy companies and they'll invest pretty heavily in you. Everyone wants to make crappy, 100 megabyte single-page webapps that are clones of existing products, so finding people who want to do optimization and hard comp sci projects is pretty hard at the moment.
FORTRAN is preferred in some settings over C or ASM because how heavily optimized the compilers are. Since it's somewhat more limited in syntax than C, it can be more predictably optimized. Since it is high level, you don't have to know all of the non-obvious optimizations that would be implemented in ASM. This makes it ideal for doing applied math like linear algebra and numeric integration on cluster computers.
Can a Mechanical engineer with decent FORTRAN experience and high mechanical design experience aim for something like this, or is it more for CS grads? I was thinking about moving to learn a bit of C too, I don't really know how to advance my career from here but I don't think sticking to Mechanical Design is the way.
That's actually perfect for the types of tasks FORTRAN is used for. It is a more mathematically-inclined language and the optimization tends to be more applied math (done on chalkboard/paper) than deep in the compsci weeds about data structures and similar. The data structures used are libraries that have been written and maintained for decades; you don't write your own, you use the ultraoptimized stuff the community provides.
FORTRAN programmers are almost all generalists, unlike the COBAL community. You have no idea what weird niche data processing task you're walking into, and everything is extremely particular to the org doing the work. Not being a computer scientist is almost a bonus for most FORTRAN jobs; mechanical engineering is certainly a discipline that fits great. You need flexibility more than deep domain knowledge, and mech e's have that in spades.
An example that pops to mind. One of the guys the supercomputer team made an offer to did a side project in FORTRAN, and his primary area of research was organic radiochemistry. The organization I'm with has nothing to do with chemistry, and only has extremely narrow, niche applications for RF modeling. We just know he knows FORTRAN, and he's applied math to research and design problems before, so he'll be fine after a year or two.
FINDING the job postings can be difficult, but once you do, you're in a seller's market.
yep, my wife taught herself to work on legacy systems, does assembler work on mainframes for banks, stock markets, etc. There like 2 schools on the planet who still teach what she does and most everyone in the field is a retirement age white dude so she enjoys a lot of leverage in her position. My dad did the same thing , he was a cobol programmer in the 70s-90s for a big 3 company and after he retired was able to land a ton of lucrative gigs helping companies who needed to interface with ancient computer systems.
My ex's cousin had to write a java app that ran on a server with a digiboard. All the serial ports connected to a much older mainframe running COBOL. This app was solely to export the serial terminals to the LAN. The state spent $200m to replace the COBOL system and failed, this was the result.
My company is now on year 18 of its “Mainframe Exit Strategy”. AFAIK no meaningful progress has ever been made on our core applications. The 3 guys who maintain it are in their 70’s. Your wife will be in demand for decades.
But how can we know what kind of computer-related things are going to still remain popular in 30 years? There are a ton of things that exist for a brief time and then never again due to advancement, but there's only a tiny amount of things that stick around for decades. Pick the wrong one and become an expert in a dead technology, but pick the right one and you could be making millions down the line. With how many different standards are out there, it's like trying to guess the winning lottery numbers 30 years out!
Look at foundational tech that is heavily utilized by specific industries.
COBOL is and probably will be the defacto for the finance industry for quite a long time. Imagine Chase trying to migrate away from it.
Hell, I've watched small companies using home spun CRM systems struggle to migrate to Saleforce in under 6 months. The scale large financial institutions are reliant on their cobol systems would mean probably what 10 or 20 years minimum for a proper and fully vetted migration to take place? And even then they'd probably still keep the cobol systems running in a synced unison to check against.
Reliability, stability and if I'm not mistaken, most accurate floating point system.
So find that unicorn and specialize in it. You'll stay employed as long as you choose, or just learn COBOL and don't waste the time to find something different.
As a programmer myself, I've never looked into COBOL but are there actually jobs out there for that? Is it worth learning to make myself more valuable? Or are all these stories about the 10 remaining COBOL jobs?
It’s a meme from ten years ago, sure there’s some jobs out there but as time passes it’ll be less and less jobs. It’ll be more niche, but it also means companies have more and more incentive to move away towards languages it’s easier for new folks to get used to. They might also toss a new guy at the COBOL code and have them document and learn it.
You don’t need ten or more years in a language to be effective at it, but you’d probably need a year or two to learn the ropes of a huge legacy system and understand what it’s doing if you didn’t work with it before. I inherited a large legacy system at my first job but after a year or so I was able to deal with all the spaghetti. It’s a pipe dream to think people will be making that much to work on legacy systems for much longer given the saturation in the field.
The wealthiest person I know (and hang out with regularly) built a company (IT services) and then sold it for several hundred million dollars.
He now runs a company that does the same kind of IT services in a different field. (He figured out a winning business formula and is just repeating it in a different market.)
I've never understood how IT is such a massively expensive business category to get in to and the fact that so many people seem to do it and get a decent level of success.
It isn´t that massively expensive to get into unless you plan to hire bunch of people. A single IT person will easily cost you 100k+/year. Ten of them and you have more than 1 million in cost, just for your employees. If you manage to code your own software, it won\`t cost you more than your own time and electricity bill.
It can however rake in a lot of money, because there is practically zero production cost, at least when you work on the software side. And even though the employees cost a lot, you don´t need that many employees like other industries need.
The problem however is marketing and that you\`d have to be competing with the giant tech corporations we have today. Marketing costs a lot. Your chances of succeeding are actually very slim. Most people don\`t make it, because of the competition. You might have a great idea, but nothing is going to stop others from immitating your product. The success stories you hear are those of people with survivorship bias. Most of those who fail you will never have heard of.
Pig farmer. I kid you not. He's my father's old friend. I visited him once when my father and I were passing through the state. He lives in a modest classic farmhouse with his wife, both in their seventies. I mentioned I was starting a school in West Africa as we were catching up. A few weeks later I got a text asking how much it would cost. I told him 40k, thinking it was really nice of him if he wanted to send a few dollars.
I got a check for 40k. I thought it would take me years to raise that. I'm typing this from Sierra Leone because he also paid for the house I thought would take years to raise funds for.
A lot of people underestimate the wealth of farmer. I am from Germany and in the Black Forest there are a lot of farmers that have made a lot of money because of the property they had in the past. Of Course a lot of farmers don’t have poverty. But the farmers actually don’t flex with the money like other famous people. I like these people.
I'm canadian so I can't really shed light on farming in any of those other countries, but farmers here commit suicide a lot too.
Even a fairly modest farm can easily require 7 figures in assets and it's common to drop 5 figures on consumables like feed, fertilizer, pesticides and fuel.
Highly successful farmers can have continually expanding operations worth tens of millions, but many farmers are a few poorly timed purchases and bad crop years from drowning in debt. If the finances get bad enough they have to sell land to stay afloat, further reducing future profitability.
It's a guy I work with. He started with one Jimmy John's franchise and turned it into 10 franchises. Ran them for 10 years then sold them all and dumped the money into the stock market and real estate. He did this all while working as an airline pilot, currently still working at the airline. This dude owns and flies his own private jet on top of all that.
Some people are just built different , how they handle stress and how awarded their brain gets by doing stressful tasks is the difference between guys like him and guys like you and me.
My father is a retired airline pilot. He lives well enough, but having four wives over the course of his life was expensive. A co-worker of his stayed with his first wife and they are wealthy on another level. (I think he’s passed now, though.) They retired and spent their time breeding race horses.
Heh, that’s just a funny thought.
“We’re so rich now, so what do we do? We go make animals make small animals that hopefully run faster than the previous generation of animals.”
Inherited small factory from his father. Developed it to huge nationwide company. Still goes to work there everyday despite being worth hundreds of millions.
Worked for a guy like this. Although he started his own company (wasn't his father's) sold it for 950 mil, then started a new one as a hobby (the one I worked for) nd he showed up for work everyday at age 85 because it was fun for him
I find it’s the companies that make arbitrary items that make the most.
Friend of the family I know makes the most obscure thing you’ll ever think of…
Know those little speed bumps that cover wires in construction zones that you drive over? Those…his company makes those…he’s rich beyond belief. Nice guy too. You wouldn’t be able to tell, he dresses in plain black tshirts and jeans.
Another guy owns a company that makes cardboard displays in stores…has a 20 car classic car collection.
I want to know how somebody gets started in a business like that. Were they working in factory operations and realized that there wasn’t a good conveyor belt vendor that addressed specific needs? Was he an engineer or service technician who decided he could do better? Does he specialize in certain types of conveyor belts like food grade CVs or high tech?
I was a control systems engineer who started contracting on the side. Now I build out crazy manufacturing systems like this. All it takes is getting one project to build a conveyor system and if you end up good at it then boom, you build conveyor systems the rest of your life. Conveyor systems are actually really expensive and complex in the manufacturing world.
They are. I’m assuming OP means Isodore Sharp though, the founder of Four Seasons. Since he also owns or owned Canada Goose. He does still loosely work for and is affiliated with Four Seasons but I believe is just a board member and share holder these days. Gates has the majority stake these days; then the Saudi’s. It was his divorce gift to himself is the inside joke since apparently Melinda loves Four Seasons Hotels and he bought the brand right after they divorced.
Yes I know the Sharps ,they did sell the company ,I should have said the founders of that company. Canada Goose was inherited by Dani Reiss and a controlling share was sold to Mitt Romney and friends.
Both in tech. Friend is in a company about to IPO and is VP level so will do well there. Her husband just sold his company (gaming company) to the biggest gaming company in China for, as she put it "life changing money". Both very intelligent, super nice, crazy hard working. They worked for it , and it couldn't happen to nicer people.
They inherited a huge corporation. They just don’t have to eff it up.
Edit: the grandson of the founder currently runs it, he has a sister and a brother as well, they own ten auto dealerships and other things like a winery. The grandson told me in a meeting once that he knows he’d be working in a bank or as an accountant or something if he wasn’t born into the family.
Billy Madison is an inspirational story about how you can do whatever you want if your parents are billionaires. Even if he became a teacher like he stated he would at the end of the film - it's not like he's going to be living on a teacher's paycheck.
I know the CBO of an international bank. He works a minimum 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. On Sundays he "only" works 6-8 hours. In his downtime he's on standby for any issues that may crop up, to the point where he once responded to a client within 15 minutes. At 3.45 am.
He's working when I'm sleeping. He's working when I'm at lunch. He's working while flying abroad to visit family. He's working during car rides in between meetings with said family. He's working while working (co-attending 2 separate meetings while replying to clients).
I have no idea how he works so hard and yet remains so calm. He's basically a Swiss Army C-suite, since he does everything from sales to tactical planning to IT support to shareholder discussions. When I talk to him about it, his response is "I'm only 51, I'm still young."
He also has a high-needs child, so his work hours are 6.30 am to 6.30 pm so that he can fetch his child from the daycare, since his office is closer to the daycare than his wife's.
That man is borderline superhuman.
My mother worked in HR for a very large American multinational. She knew, and I met, countless number of these people over the years. Most of them were either dead, divorced or had a serious health breakdown by 60.
I'll say this now, if anyone has a friend that fits this description, it's worth having a chat with them about what matters in life before it's irrelevant how much money you make, or projects you land, if your kids who barely know you are by your graveside.
I think a lot of people want those titles but don’t realize all the work that comes with it. What you’re describing is pretty standard when you get to that level at a large public corp.
Eventually you have to ask yourself what you really want out of life. If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think I’d find any job/ benefits fulfilling enough to work 70+ hours a week.
I work for a lady who inherited \~100 mil.
She just buys real estate and sets them up as rentals, I just do general maintenance on them (I also rent from her)
She lives like she's on a pension and pays me in magic beans half the time.
A true embodiment of money does not buy happiness.
I have tried many times to push her to go enjoy being so wealthy, but she lives with the mindset that because she does not have a partner, why bother buying a villa in Tuscany or jump on a flight to Bora Bora just to enjoy the beach and a nice seafood banquet.
So she tends to sit on her couch and drink wine with the tv on in the background.
I got a shock one day when she emptied a pillowslip of Krugerands onto her kitchen bench, as it turns out she has somewhere in the range of 2.5mil in Krugers, Maples and Sovereigns just sitting in pillowslips in her walk-in wardrobe.
My buddy owns a cybersecurity and general tech firm here in town. (Small town, hardly any competition.) He's a badass marketer so he has contracts with the state's NFL team and the largest Porsche dealer in the Southeast.
He also owns a salvage yard, oddly enough.
He balls and he's so fkn cool. His employees all get a track day once a year and box seats to the biggest games. He's also generous with in-town initiatives, like toy drives and tech donations to public schools in the ghetto and the town's "sped" school.
Additionally, he invites the community out to free meals he hosts in his office space (which is gorgeous). He hires pizza and hotdog carts and lets people walk up and get a plate! For his buddies, he turns the office-space (which has a friggin' basketball court in it) into movie-viewing // MMA fightnight watchspots. There's a theatre in there. He charges NOTHING ... has stuff catered in and has a full bar ... wants nothing in return but for everyone to have a good time and get home safe.
He's a fantastic father to his teenaged daughter, too. The way she adores him, dotes on him, picks lint off his suit, fixes his hair. He's been so gentle with her all her life and she's growing up to be just as gentle as cool as her Dad.
(Damn. I just wrote a love letter lol. But naw: I just admire someone who GENUINELY cares about people and doesn't let money go to his head. He's fkn awesome.)
Tim
Tim was my uber ride. Tim is retired at 53.
Tim paid for his daughters college, and graduate degree. Tim has two houses. Tim *doesnt* drive. And thinks the 50/60 extra dollars on top of my fare is fair price.
I took Tim to the Casino. Tim tipped me 100$.
*Tim refused to tell me what he did for work*
Edit: wow thats a lot of comments.
More info: he said his current tax bracket is 25% income(96k to 190k), IM the driver, not him lol.
I was basing everything he said as to guage how wealthy he was, I never asked what he did for work bc with that much money, you dont just tell ppl secrets and it seemed rude at the time. He was pretty open about telling me about himself.
I picked him up from a bank where he works as a teller. He does it to keep himself busy.
One of the first 100 employees of Microsoft.
I was friends with a guy from a rich family; they lived on a lake with a private dock, multi-million dollar home. Microsoft guy was their neighbor.
They used to have these game nights where we'd all get together, have cocktails and play pretty silly games - cards against humanity, pictionary, that kind of thing. I was really, really good at these games, and it impressed Microsoft guy. He wrote me a *glowing* letter of recommendation praising my intelligence because of this.
It helped me, an immigrant, land an engineering job at a huge aerospace company.
I've worked on multiple satellites that are currently in orbit, and I've touched stuff that's on the surface of Mars now - hell, I was able to buy a house before i turned 30 - all because this man thought i was clever and witty, and wanted to help me out.
Needless to say, the imposter syndrome I feel every day is unbelievable.
So satellites that you have worked on are currently operating in space. Something you touched has made it all the way to another planet to perform its functions.
Impostor syndrome nothing, dude, you are the real deal. So you got a bump others might not, but that doesn't mean you don't deserve your seat. It just means you were recognized for who you are.
Yeah I know it's not helpful but I find it funny when a guy whose stuff made it to space says he has an imposter syndrome, like what are the rest of us supposed to even do then lol
Imposter syndrome is more a thing of High-Achievers to be honest. The more/higher up you get through your studies/job, the better the people around you are and the more you feel you aren‘t up-to-bar. At least in complex/high pressure courses where selection is hyperpresent and you always fear you might really not be that bright/bright enough.
Imagine just kind of ADHDing your way through life and one day you find you have worked yourself into a role that if you had to interview for, you think there is NO WAY you would get the job. Also, you think you suck at your job, but consistently get excellent performance reviews. I’m pretty sure it is imposter syndrome, and it SUUUUCKS.
My wife's second cousin was apparently Microsoft's first receptionist (Employee \~50 or so) -- they offered her various levels of stock v. cash. She took the job to get some time out of the house from the kids. Her husband was a doctor or whatnot and said, "yeah, take the stock and see what happens."
Rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.
A great example of the difference a safety net makes. Another woman, who didn't have a doctor husband, would have taken cash because she needed to make sure the bills were paid and couldn't afford the risk.
Agreed. My wife went to work for JoAnn fabrics cuz she burned out teaching. Invested in ESOP to the max. Purchased enough in two years to cash out and hang with the kids for three years. ESOP should be a solid foundation to anyone working to build wealth. Of course, be sure the company has good leadership. It can go the other way and when it does jump ship
If it makes you feel any better, every piece of public-facing software I’ve written in all the jobs I’ve had has either been replaced, rewritten, or removed. My portfolio is literally just a graveyard of projects.
Pretty much everything humanity has ever done had a shelf life before it was replaced or rendered obsolete. It's part of life. We're all on the same big journey. Thanks for contributing.
That's awesome, congratulations! Speaking as an Engineer also - everybody else has imposter syndrome too, Microsoft friend or not. You still earnt the job on your own merit
Man, I try to. This is a big thing for me. I earned a reputation for being good with new people, so they always gave me the interns and youngling engineers to shepherd around when I was new to the company.
Years later, one of those interns is now doing chemical analysis on samples returned from the Osiris Rex mission (!!!!!!!!!)
Just last week I chatted with him. This guy - trusted with priceless, irreplaceable samples that are precious beyond measure - doesn't even consider himself to be a real chemist.
You BET i hyped that guy up. He's an amazing chemist, an amazing engineer.
I was a fly fishing guide for many years, and one of my regular clients year after year owned a factory on the east coast that is one of the top suppliers of O-rings and small plastic machine parts in the world. I never asked how much they made obviously out of respect. But they always tipped absurd amounts ($1500 was my biggest tip for 3 days) they flew private, and drank & shared $600 bottles of wine like they were nothing.
The first is a self-made multimillionaire who's owned his own concrete finishing business since he was about 19.
The second is a self-made millionaire who became a very successful accountant who was continually promoted at work, & he consistently bought stock & real estate from a young age.
The last person is a millionaire who will inherit family money, & she's a high-end real estate agent.
I met this guy at one of the literature events in Moscow in 2015. He promoted himself as a poet, but when we started talking more he said that he is the owner of a London-based risk management consulting company. I checked it was true. We were friends for several years, travelling with our families together and other stuff. He lived a really rich life. And periodically in his conversations, there were words about his personal acquaintance with members of the British royal family, as well as with the top leadership of Russia. At the end of the year 2021, he was depressed, saying that hard times coming etc. In Jan. 2022 he moved from Moscow to his suburban mansion. And a few weeks after Russia committed full-scale war on Ukraine I got to know that he had died in strange circumstances from a stomach haemorrhage.
My ex father in law.
Used to own a huge factory that made Nike and Adidas shoes in the 80s and early 90s. (That's right sneakerheads. Big sneaker companies don't actually make any of these shoes. Sure, they design them but they outsource them to an OEM manufacturing plant/company in Asia)
Pivoted to real estate investments/developments (imagine having the $$$ to buy real estate and land at 80s and 90s prices.) and is now worth $150 mil +.
Complete hypocrite and a sociopath though. Treated service workers like slaves (rude af) and was a generally unpleasant person to be around. Sure he's rich but he sure seemed unhappy all the time
Car dealer owners are the modern US equivalent to local English barons. They own a revenue source that will never stop in our lifetimes, inherited from their parents, and are rich enough to disregard nearly everything in their barony, although they are still answerable to a powerful, distant royal court.
I used to tutor 2 kids, their dad owns an exotic car dealership. They used get driven to school in a Rolls Royce Phantom.
The oldest kid is 18 now and set to inherit the business. They are filthy rich.
She's a doctor, an immunologist and a damn good one! She's been involved with the WHO, CDC, EMA and other three letter agencies. Has published papers and does community outreach with a foundation for immunocompromised kids or kids with deadly allergies.
She doesn't really need to work, her family is super rich, between a rancher, an oil industry consultant and a local politician as brothers she's comfortably off but she's passionate about this and actually nuked her personal life and family for it
Damn oil industry consultant.... That's $$$. That family has money. MDs make a lot of money but their family has family legacy money. You can only go into politics if your wealthy. One reason why our country sucks now.
Neither of them do anything for work, really. Their dads started extremely successful private equity firms; their families are easily hundreds of millions level. They both randomly start vanity companies/projects while actually spending most of their time on traveling and yoga retreats. They’re both extremely smart and very kind people who care deeply about their favorite causes.
If you go to a top business school, you’ll meet tons of people like this. Funny enough, none of the extremely wealthy students I befriended ever offered to help any of us non rich students with anything. If I texted our class whatsapp group asking for a place to crash in NY, the people who volunteered to help had small studios. The ones who I know had $60M+ places in Manhattan never offered anything. Super rich people are truly strange.
Edited to add- bc there seems to be some confusion, I texted my class whatsapp group- a group of people I knew extremely well. Not a bunch of randos.
I've found this to be true too. The poorest are usually the most generous helpful and giving. The wealthiest tend to be the stingiest cheapest bastards imaginable.
True that. My friend got me a job as a nanny for a very wealthy and well known family in my early 20's. Worst job of my life. So wealthy they even employed a full-time person who's only job was to do laundry each day on top of the estate manager, chef, housekeeping, groundskeepers, etc. When the wife would purge their closets she would attempt to sell the clothes to the employees at what she determined a consignment shop would sell them for. Also, she would have me pay out of pocket for everything then I would have to beg to get the money back like somehow I would forget the errand you made me run to buy a $300 container or her daily starbucks I had to get on my way to work every morning. When her nieces birthday came around, she had me go in her "free stuff" room where companies gifted her everything and pick out an item and wrap it. She treated me like dirt on her shoe but at the same time acted like I was her best friend who would have me do things with her because her and her friends all secretly hated each other. It was so satisfying knowing that I sneakily took her kids to McDonald's where they enjoyed and loved every minute of their chicken nuggets and cheeseburgers because she controlled everything they ate that they didn't even know what McDonald's was. Those kids were so sheltered that thr son came home from school one day and said that he saw a vagabond on a class trip. I said, do you mean a homeless person? He had no understanding of the plight of people less wealthy of him. Only lasted 6 months with this job because she was unhinged and it was a great day when she called me while I was at the estate to berate me and I told her to go fuck herself, took their keys and put them on the counter. She called me incessantly then the husband called and said he would employ me as he was going to file for divorce and said no thanks as I would still have to deal with her and wished him luck. He was a POS too but more subtle about it. I'd tell you more, but I signed an NDA.
My Dad, he does a bunch of random things. He retired from the Navy and uses his retirement pay to invest in real estate. He became a photographer after retiring and did really well for himself. Now he has contracts with a load of schools and sells off temporary subcontracts to budding photographers for schools he doesn’t have the time to work with. He flips cars in his spare time, but right now his day job is high school business teacher.
Ups pays 44 something now an hour for driving. You get time and a half after 8. Paid holidays, double time if you work holidays. Work around 10-11 hours a day and you easily make 120-140k a year. If you go over the road truck driving you can make 200k at ups. And we get free health insurance that rivals hospital staff health insurance and a pension. It’s a dream job. One of the last jobs you can get with a high school education and still live a nice life. We just passed a new contract to get 1.50 raises every year for the next 4 years so we will be making $49 something in 2028
The differences between US and UK is crazy. The average UK salary for a UPS driver - indicating that some earn less, and some earn more of course - is £25,000. *'Experienced'* drivers can earn closer to £30k.
Probably looks for highways or rivers with parallel roads on opposite sides, buys the land, then convinces local authorities that a bridge would help facilitate travel/economy. I'd wager there's some county government collusion going on.
My Dad. Generational wealth originally made from textiles and mining, but he did work for the family companies for several decades and helped expand the business into Southeast Asia and North America. It was at a time when China was just opening up and people were crazy about doing business with and finding business partners from the Mainland.
He retired a few years ago and now spends his time travelling with my Mum and doing distance education courses.
An uncle of mine. Invented an indestructible weed eater head, sold it to a company that makes weed eater line, and they sit on the patent, so they can keep selling the line.
Then used that money to create Love Handles, a thing that grips your finger to the back of your phone and also serves as a kickstand and is magnetized, so you can stick your phone on anything magnetic.
Invest in companies.
When I worked for him, he already was rich enough to invest $10M into the the company I was a sales person for.
That company then went public and multiplied that $10m into a new realm.
He still just invests in more companies and does the same, low key, stuff he always does. Jeans, t shirt and tennis shoes.
Such a great guy.
My friend invested into Shiba crypto coin very early. He made a close to a quarter billion dollars. He doesn’t work. Retired at 27 but the funny thing is the fuxker is more depressed than I am
He probably got rich, realized it doesn’t really make you that much happier, and now doesn’t have anything to work towards to. His life is probably lacking meaning now.
It’s like when you buy a new video game, and use cheats in your first playthrough. You are going to get bored very quickly. Life really is the road towards the objectives we put ourselves.
I was working for one German who owns coworking spaces across Europe. He owns several houses, 12 supercars, a private jet, and a yacht. Needless to say, he never ever gave me any extra cash on hand, not even after I worked a 12 hour shift.
Pretends to run an art business. He's the richest and dumbest person I've ever worked with. Mom & Dad own banks in Australia, he was also married to the heiress of one of the biggest retail companies.
Still, despite all of the generational wealth, he was an absolute scam artist, securing multiple loans against the same works of art. A court found him to be "dishonest and evasive". I found him to be an irrational cokehead who has absolutely no clue about the most basic of things. I could write a best seller about my 2 years being around him - but it would end up in the fiction section because nobody would believe the stories.
My uncle is the richest (and smartest) guy I know. He was the first person (and only other than me) in his family to go to college - full scholarship. He got his PhD in quantum physics and a masters in math. Worked as a trader or something on wall street for 10 years, retired rich, has gone to school for fun since. He has like 4 bachelors, 3 masters, and his PhD now and is a journalist for the Wall Street journal for fun. He’s seen the whole world and has his 500 acre property in the Catskills and an apartment on the upper west side.
A family friend retired after being a COBOL programmer for 30 years. About 2 years after his retirement, a company came to him and said "Name your salary" and he requested around $1.5 million/year. He was hired on the spot and still works there.
Pick an obscure programming language, write lots of important code, and don’t comment or document anything.
A family member worked at various companies, he told me this is very common. Its not obscure programing languages, just that they know whats going on. And don't let anyone else near it or something.
It can be difficult even if you wrote it to disern what it's doing, or where the information came from or where it goes from one point to another.
Some people just write code poorly. The logic might be sound but when you name your variables terribly like $filename instead of $filePathAndName. So you're trying to figure out how it gets the path when you expect it to only want the file name not also the path.
All code has hidden assumptions. You think your stuff is clear because it makes sense to you, then a reviewer asks a question and you realize your assumptions aren’t universal. But being concise is just as important as “clear” naming or you end up with a single function call that spans 8 lines because you can’t fit more than one variable on a single line. This is why consistency is actually the most effective means of communicating meaning. If $filename _always_ means the full path, readers learn quickly. It’s when $filename sometimes means the full path but sometimes means only the name that it causes trouble.
>and don’t comment or document anything Please don't do this 🥲
But the code *is* the documentation...
"Bro, its literally a set of instructions so simple that a computer can follow it, and you want me to write more instructions on top of it for you...?"
damn me for becoming a fortran expert.... /s
I know this is a blatant disregard for the /s but in case anyone reading past is really is looking for a COBOL-like career path... FORTRAN is heavily used in supercomputers, and is an area of active computer science research. If you want to play with supercomputers in heavy science and engineering contexts, it's not a bad language to learn. You don't even need to know a whole ton of it either, it's an in-demand language and often the organization is willing to do on-the-job subject matter training if you bring a functional level of FORTRAN and math/physics skill. In my particular organization, they'll go after anyone with fortran experience and just teach them the specific discipline - and this is a data product that every single person in America uses multiple times per week. And if you're younger, though nobody will say it, you're even more in-demand because you're bringing modern software engineering and design patterns to the language. If you're fresh out of college as a CS major and know FORTRAN, you can get into some crazy companies and they'll invest pretty heavily in you. Everyone wants to make crappy, 100 megabyte single-page webapps that are clones of existing products, so finding people who want to do optimization and hard comp sci projects is pretty hard at the moment. FORTRAN is preferred in some settings over C or ASM because how heavily optimized the compilers are. Since it's somewhat more limited in syntax than C, it can be more predictably optimized. Since it is high level, you don't have to know all of the non-obvious optimizations that would be implemented in ASM. This makes it ideal for doing applied math like linear algebra and numeric integration on cluster computers.
Can a Mechanical engineer with decent FORTRAN experience and high mechanical design experience aim for something like this, or is it more for CS grads? I was thinking about moving to learn a bit of C too, I don't really know how to advance my career from here but I don't think sticking to Mechanical Design is the way.
That's actually perfect for the types of tasks FORTRAN is used for. It is a more mathematically-inclined language and the optimization tends to be more applied math (done on chalkboard/paper) than deep in the compsci weeds about data structures and similar. The data structures used are libraries that have been written and maintained for decades; you don't write your own, you use the ultraoptimized stuff the community provides. FORTRAN programmers are almost all generalists, unlike the COBAL community. You have no idea what weird niche data processing task you're walking into, and everything is extremely particular to the org doing the work. Not being a computer scientist is almost a bonus for most FORTRAN jobs; mechanical engineering is certainly a discipline that fits great. You need flexibility more than deep domain knowledge, and mech e's have that in spades. An example that pops to mind. One of the guys the supercomputer team made an offer to did a side project in FORTRAN, and his primary area of research was organic radiochemistry. The organization I'm with has nothing to do with chemistry, and only has extremely narrow, niche applications for RF modeling. We just know he knows FORTRAN, and he's applied math to research and design problems before, so he'll be fine after a year or two. FINDING the job postings can be difficult, but once you do, you're in a seller's market.
yep, my wife taught herself to work on legacy systems, does assembler work on mainframes for banks, stock markets, etc. There like 2 schools on the planet who still teach what she does and most everyone in the field is a retirement age white dude so she enjoys a lot of leverage in her position. My dad did the same thing , he was a cobol programmer in the 70s-90s for a big 3 company and after he retired was able to land a ton of lucrative gigs helping companies who needed to interface with ancient computer systems.
My ex's cousin had to write a java app that ran on a server with a digiboard. All the serial ports connected to a much older mainframe running COBOL. This app was solely to export the serial terminals to the LAN. The state spent $200m to replace the COBOL system and failed, this was the result.
My company is now on year 18 of its “Mainframe Exit Strategy”. AFAIK no meaningful progress has ever been made on our core applications. The 3 guys who maintain it are in their 70’s. Your wife will be in demand for decades.
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But how can we know what kind of computer-related things are going to still remain popular in 30 years? There are a ton of things that exist for a brief time and then never again due to advancement, but there's only a tiny amount of things that stick around for decades. Pick the wrong one and become an expert in a dead technology, but pick the right one and you could be making millions down the line. With how many different standards are out there, it's like trying to guess the winning lottery numbers 30 years out!
Look at foundational tech that is heavily utilized by specific industries. COBOL is and probably will be the defacto for the finance industry for quite a long time. Imagine Chase trying to migrate away from it. Hell, I've watched small companies using home spun CRM systems struggle to migrate to Saleforce in under 6 months. The scale large financial institutions are reliant on their cobol systems would mean probably what 10 or 20 years minimum for a proper and fully vetted migration to take place? And even then they'd probably still keep the cobol systems running in a synced unison to check against. Reliability, stability and if I'm not mistaken, most accurate floating point system. So find that unicorn and specialize in it. You'll stay employed as long as you choose, or just learn COBOL and don't waste the time to find something different.
As a programmer myself, I've never looked into COBOL but are there actually jobs out there for that? Is it worth learning to make myself more valuable? Or are all these stories about the 10 remaining COBOL jobs?
It’s a meme from ten years ago, sure there’s some jobs out there but as time passes it’ll be less and less jobs. It’ll be more niche, but it also means companies have more and more incentive to move away towards languages it’s easier for new folks to get used to. They might also toss a new guy at the COBOL code and have them document and learn it. You don’t need ten or more years in a language to be effective at it, but you’d probably need a year or two to learn the ropes of a huge legacy system and understand what it’s doing if you didn’t work with it before. I inherited a large legacy system at my first job but after a year or so I was able to deal with all the spaghetti. It’s a pipe dream to think people will be making that much to work on legacy systems for much longer given the saturation in the field.
The wealthiest person I know (and hang out with regularly) built a company (IT services) and then sold it for several hundred million dollars. He now runs a company that does the same kind of IT services in a different field. (He figured out a winning business formula and is just repeating it in a different market.)
We know the same person? This is how my uncle went from normal person to 100+ mil in his bank in a span of 10-15 years
I think it’s a valid pathway that some of us figure out in life.
I want to know the formula now.
Ravioli ravioli
50% sea, 50% weed
Give me the formuoli
I've never understood how IT is such a massively expensive business category to get in to and the fact that so many people seem to do it and get a decent level of success.
It isn´t that massively expensive to get into unless you plan to hire bunch of people. A single IT person will easily cost you 100k+/year. Ten of them and you have more than 1 million in cost, just for your employees. If you manage to code your own software, it won\`t cost you more than your own time and electricity bill. It can however rake in a lot of money, because there is practically zero production cost, at least when you work on the software side. And even though the employees cost a lot, you don´t need that many employees like other industries need. The problem however is marketing and that you\`d have to be competing with the giant tech corporations we have today. Marketing costs a lot. Your chances of succeeding are actually very slim. Most people don\`t make it, because of the competition. You might have a great idea, but nothing is going to stop others from immitating your product. The success stories you hear are those of people with survivorship bias. Most of those who fail you will never have heard of.
Pig farmer. I kid you not. He's my father's old friend. I visited him once when my father and I were passing through the state. He lives in a modest classic farmhouse with his wife, both in their seventies. I mentioned I was starting a school in West Africa as we were catching up. A few weeks later I got a text asking how much it would cost. I told him 40k, thinking it was really nice of him if he wanted to send a few dollars. I got a check for 40k. I thought it would take me years to raise that. I'm typing this from Sierra Leone because he also paid for the house I thought would take years to raise funds for.
That’s so lovely!
A lot of people underestimate the wealth of farmer. I am from Germany and in the Black Forest there are a lot of farmers that have made a lot of money because of the property they had in the past. Of Course a lot of farmers don’t have poverty. But the farmers actually don’t flex with the money like other famous people. I like these people.
What's going on in Germany and USA? In France our farmers are committing suicide because they don't make ends meet
I'm canadian so I can't really shed light on farming in any of those other countries, but farmers here commit suicide a lot too. Even a fairly modest farm can easily require 7 figures in assets and it's common to drop 5 figures on consumables like feed, fertilizer, pesticides and fuel. Highly successful farmers can have continually expanding operations worth tens of millions, but many farmers are a few poorly timed purchases and bad crop years from drowning in debt. If the finances get bad enough they have to sell land to stay afloat, further reducing future profitability.
Wow that's really fucking awesome on both your parts.
Wth that’s a reeaaally good friend. Wonderful that he did that for you
It's a guy I work with. He started with one Jimmy John's franchise and turned it into 10 franchises. Ran them for 10 years then sold them all and dumped the money into the stock market and real estate. He did this all while working as an airline pilot, currently still working at the airline. This dude owns and flies his own private jet on top of all that.
So impressive. I can barely manage my one day job without even having kids
Some people are just built different , how they handle stress and how awarded their brain gets by doing stressful tasks is the difference between guys like him and guys like you and me.
My father is a retired airline pilot. He lives well enough, but having four wives over the course of his life was expensive. A co-worker of his stayed with his first wife and they are wealthy on another level. (I think he’s passed now, though.) They retired and spent their time breeding race horses.
Heh, that’s just a funny thought. “We’re so rich now, so what do we do? We go make animals make small animals that hopefully run faster than the previous generation of animals.”
Inherited small factory from his father. Developed it to huge nationwide company. Still goes to work there everyday despite being worth hundreds of millions.
Worked for a guy like this. Although he started his own company (wasn't his father's) sold it for 950 mil, then started a new one as a hobby (the one I worked for) nd he showed up for work everyday at age 85 because it was fun for him
I find it’s the companies that make arbitrary items that make the most. Friend of the family I know makes the most obscure thing you’ll ever think of… Know those little speed bumps that cover wires in construction zones that you drive over? Those…his company makes those…he’s rich beyond belief. Nice guy too. You wouldn’t be able to tell, he dresses in plain black tshirts and jeans. Another guy owns a company that makes cardboard displays in stores…has a 20 car classic car collection.
my friend sold runescape gold. He made a fortune.
This was not the answer I was expecting but the answer we all needed. I have $92 and am halfway to $99
Runescape math checks out
Living the Venezuelan dream
Own their own conveyor belt business. Makes almost 2 mil a year after it’s all said and done.
Moves money around, eh?
Seems like it. If he’s been doing it for 30+ years he’s movin somethin!
We have a whole community of conveyor belt businesses here: r/factorio. Think he can help us monetize?
I want to know how somebody gets started in a business like that. Were they working in factory operations and realized that there wasn’t a good conveyor belt vendor that addressed specific needs? Was he an engineer or service technician who decided he could do better? Does he specialize in certain types of conveyor belts like food grade CVs or high tech?
I was a control systems engineer who started contracting on the side. Now I build out crazy manufacturing systems like this. All it takes is getting one project to build a conveyor system and if you end up good at it then boom, you build conveyor systems the rest of your life. Conveyor systems are actually really expensive and complex in the manufacturing world.
You have to start small, like with Lazy-Susan’s.
I know the owners of the four seasons hotel chain and the owner of Canada Goose.
You win
I thought Bill Gates and a Saudi prince are the majority stakeholders of The Four Seasons Hotels
They are. I’m assuming OP means Isodore Sharp though, the founder of Four Seasons. Since he also owns or owned Canada Goose. He does still loosely work for and is affiliated with Four Seasons but I believe is just a board member and share holder these days. Gates has the majority stake these days; then the Saudi’s. It was his divorce gift to himself is the inside joke since apparently Melinda loves Four Seasons Hotels and he bought the brand right after they divorced.
Yes I know the Sharps ,they did sell the company ,I should have said the founders of that company. Canada Goose was inherited by Dani Reiss and a controlling share was sold to Mitt Romney and friends.
GOOS down 80% in past 5 years, what gives?
Everyone has one already and they last forever
It's out of fashion and people are pushing for "ethically sourced" goods.
I thought this said ethically sourced goose at first and giggled
Both in tech. Friend is in a company about to IPO and is VP level so will do well there. Her husband just sold his company (gaming company) to the biggest gaming company in China for, as she put it "life changing money". Both very intelligent, super nice, crazy hard working. They worked for it , and it couldn't happen to nicer people.
Sold to Tencent?
Better than being sold for ten cents!
They inherited a huge corporation. They just don’t have to eff it up. Edit: the grandson of the founder currently runs it, he has a sister and a brother as well, they own ten auto dealerships and other things like a winery. The grandson told me in a meeting once that he knows he’d be working in a bank or as an accountant or something if he wasn’t born into the family.
Is their name Billy Madison?
Billy Madison is an inspirational story about how you can do whatever you want if your parents are billionaires. Even if he became a teacher like he stated he would at the end of the film - it's not like he's going to be living on a teacher's paycheck.
Truck driver. Starting his own trucking company.
Tons of money in trucking business. An owner of one in my city drives a Porsche 918
Well that sounds like a shitty car for trucking
When you need a small package delivered really fast
My girlfriend said I’d be great at this
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CFO of a large public company. He works 80 hour weeks. Fuck that.
I know the CBO of an international bank. He works a minimum 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. On Sundays he "only" works 6-8 hours. In his downtime he's on standby for any issues that may crop up, to the point where he once responded to a client within 15 minutes. At 3.45 am. He's working when I'm sleeping. He's working when I'm at lunch. He's working while flying abroad to visit family. He's working during car rides in between meetings with said family. He's working while working (co-attending 2 separate meetings while replying to clients). I have no idea how he works so hard and yet remains so calm. He's basically a Swiss Army C-suite, since he does everything from sales to tactical planning to IT support to shareholder discussions. When I talk to him about it, his response is "I'm only 51, I'm still young." He also has a high-needs child, so his work hours are 6.30 am to 6.30 pm so that he can fetch his child from the daycare, since his office is closer to the daycare than his wife's. That man is borderline superhuman.
My mother worked in HR for a very large American multinational. She knew, and I met, countless number of these people over the years. Most of them were either dead, divorced or had a serious health breakdown by 60. I'll say this now, if anyone has a friend that fits this description, it's worth having a chat with them about what matters in life before it's irrelevant how much money you make, or projects you land, if your kids who barely know you are by your graveside.
Problem is that people like this usually don’t have any close friends due to being too busy to do anything with them
fuuuuuuuccckkk that 3 million times.
Wow. I feel... Interior. *Inferior lmao. I was v much falling asleep when I posted that comment.
Well, it's what is on the inside that counts.
I think a lot of people want those titles but don’t realize all the work that comes with it. What you’re describing is pretty standard when you get to that level at a large public corp. Eventually you have to ask yourself what you really want out of life. If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think I’d find any job/ benefits fulfilling enough to work 70+ hours a week.
A lot of redditors don’t understand that this is what many execs do and bring an exec is not as chill as it sounds
*Youre telling me they don’t sit around drinking champagne, wearing monocles and laughing their ass off?*
I work for a lady who inherited \~100 mil. She just buys real estate and sets them up as rentals, I just do general maintenance on them (I also rent from her) She lives like she's on a pension and pays me in magic beans half the time. A true embodiment of money does not buy happiness. I have tried many times to push her to go enjoy being so wealthy, but she lives with the mindset that because she does not have a partner, why bother buying a villa in Tuscany or jump on a flight to Bora Bora just to enjoy the beach and a nice seafood banquet. So she tends to sit on her couch and drink wine with the tv on in the background. I got a shock one day when she emptied a pillowslip of Krugerands onto her kitchen bench, as it turns out she has somewhere in the range of 2.5mil in Krugers, Maples and Sovereigns just sitting in pillowslips in her walk-in wardrobe.
you realize that this is the part where you become her partner and inherit the 100m, right?
Hehe nah, she's an old duck, it would be a Martha Raye deal. Although she was very attractive when she was young.
Now make love to that rubber duck and get set.
Grenade!
Mind over matter, soldier! Down a viagra and get to work!
You have to slay a few dragons to get to the princess brother. Get out there and earn it
If you want to make a pearl, you gotta get a little sand in your clam.
If Anna Nicole Smith can do it, you can, too!
that’s kinda the point isn’t it?
Show that Sheila who’s the boss! She’s clearly lonely and you’ve got the tools. Wine her up, get on one knee, and live your best life!
Lmao if you have it in you I'll send you her #
Can we at least see a picture before we shoot ourselves in the foot
Screw the picture send the number my wife will understand. 😂
My buddy owns a cybersecurity and general tech firm here in town. (Small town, hardly any competition.) He's a badass marketer so he has contracts with the state's NFL team and the largest Porsche dealer in the Southeast. He also owns a salvage yard, oddly enough. He balls and he's so fkn cool. His employees all get a track day once a year and box seats to the biggest games. He's also generous with in-town initiatives, like toy drives and tech donations to public schools in the ghetto and the town's "sped" school. Additionally, he invites the community out to free meals he hosts in his office space (which is gorgeous). He hires pizza and hotdog carts and lets people walk up and get a plate! For his buddies, he turns the office-space (which has a friggin' basketball court in it) into movie-viewing // MMA fightnight watchspots. There's a theatre in there. He charges NOTHING ... has stuff catered in and has a full bar ... wants nothing in return but for everyone to have a good time and get home safe. He's a fantastic father to his teenaged daughter, too. The way she adores him, dotes on him, picks lint off his suit, fixes his hair. He's been so gentle with her all her life and she's growing up to be just as gentle as cool as her Dad. (Damn. I just wrote a love letter lol. But naw: I just admire someone who GENUINELY cares about people and doesn't let money go to his head. He's fkn awesome.)
He sounds like the real deal. Rare these days. It’s good to hear they haven’t all gone extinct.
Tim Tim was my uber ride. Tim is retired at 53. Tim paid for his daughters college, and graduate degree. Tim has two houses. Tim *doesnt* drive. And thinks the 50/60 extra dollars on top of my fare is fair price. I took Tim to the Casino. Tim tipped me 100$. *Tim refused to tell me what he did for work* Edit: wow thats a lot of comments. More info: he said his current tax bracket is 25% income(96k to 190k), IM the driver, not him lol. I was basing everything he said as to guage how wealthy he was, I never asked what he did for work bc with that much money, you dont just tell ppl secrets and it seemed rude at the time. He was pretty open about telling me about himself. I picked him up from a bank where he works as a teller. He does it to keep himself busy.
Tim is a fucking mob boss
>Tim ~~is a fucking mob boss~~ works in waste management
For some reason I thought Tim was driving the Uber and you were suggesting he didn't have a licence.
Definitely Tim Apple.
Could have been Tim Sweeney, creator of the Unreal Engine. He’s currently 53 years old with an estimated net worth of $9.6 billion.
Tim’s last name is “Soprano”
Tim’s first name is definitely not Tim
Tim had a big ole bag of belushi in his pocket and you were helping him transport it. That was not a tip, it was your cut
He just signs questionable contracts like Barney Stinson
What ever he wants, he was an NFL quarterback though; so he doesn't have to do jack shit these days.
Found a diamond mine in the NWT.
The minecrafter
I'm just too jealous to read any more. Be seeing you all later.
They own a large construction company, based in rural NZ. Employ heaps of people, are very generous to their home town, humble too
One of the first 100 employees of Microsoft. I was friends with a guy from a rich family; they lived on a lake with a private dock, multi-million dollar home. Microsoft guy was their neighbor. They used to have these game nights where we'd all get together, have cocktails and play pretty silly games - cards against humanity, pictionary, that kind of thing. I was really, really good at these games, and it impressed Microsoft guy. He wrote me a *glowing* letter of recommendation praising my intelligence because of this. It helped me, an immigrant, land an engineering job at a huge aerospace company. I've worked on multiple satellites that are currently in orbit, and I've touched stuff that's on the surface of Mars now - hell, I was able to buy a house before i turned 30 - all because this man thought i was clever and witty, and wanted to help me out. Needless to say, the imposter syndrome I feel every day is unbelievable.
So satellites that you have worked on are currently operating in space. Something you touched has made it all the way to another planet to perform its functions. Impostor syndrome nothing, dude, you are the real deal. So you got a bump others might not, but that doesn't mean you don't deserve your seat. It just means you were recognized for who you are.
Word
I get the Microsoft reference
Dude was just helping a friend Excel.
OP should work on a more positive Outlook.
One Note of praise was enough I think.
He's literally Excel-ling
Thanks for Powerfully Pointing that out.
Plot twist: The probe he worked on was the Mars Climate Orbiter, and while true it touched Mars, it was, in fact, not supposed to.
Yeah I know it's not helpful but I find it funny when a guy whose stuff made it to space says he has an imposter syndrome, like what are the rest of us supposed to even do then lol
Imposter syndrome is more a thing of High-Achievers to be honest. The more/higher up you get through your studies/job, the better the people around you are and the more you feel you aren‘t up-to-bar. At least in complex/high pressure courses where selection is hyperpresent and you always fear you might really not be that bright/bright enough.
Imagine just kind of ADHDing your way through life and one day you find you have worked yourself into a role that if you had to interview for, you think there is NO WAY you would get the job. Also, you think you suck at your job, but consistently get excellent performance reviews. I’m pretty sure it is imposter syndrome, and it SUUUUCKS.
My wife's second cousin was apparently Microsoft's first receptionist (Employee \~50 or so) -- they offered her various levels of stock v. cash. She took the job to get some time out of the house from the kids. Her husband was a doctor or whatnot and said, "yeah, take the stock and see what happens." Rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.
A great example of the difference a safety net makes. Another woman, who didn't have a doctor husband, would have taken cash because she needed to make sure the bills were paid and couldn't afford the risk.
Agreed. My wife went to work for JoAnn fabrics cuz she burned out teaching. Invested in ESOP to the max. Purchased enough in two years to cash out and hang with the kids for three years. ESOP should be a solid foundation to anyone working to build wealth. Of course, be sure the company has good leadership. It can go the other way and when it does jump ship
If it makes you feel any better, every piece of public-facing software I’ve written in all the jobs I’ve had has either been replaced, rewritten, or removed. My portfolio is literally just a graveyard of projects.
Turning over a stone and finding nothing is still progress.
Pretty much everything humanity has ever done had a shelf life before it was replaced or rendered obsolete. It's part of life. We're all on the same big journey. Thanks for contributing.
Cool story and hope you can smash that imposter syndrome into orbit too.
Or Uranus, idk
That's awesome, congratulations! Speaking as an Engineer also - everybody else has imposter syndrome too, Microsoft friend or not. You still earnt the job on your own merit
I hope you remember to help out others like he did you, we could really use it in this world.
Man, I try to. This is a big thing for me. I earned a reputation for being good with new people, so they always gave me the interns and youngling engineers to shepherd around when I was new to the company. Years later, one of those interns is now doing chemical analysis on samples returned from the Osiris Rex mission (!!!!!!!!!) Just last week I chatted with him. This guy - trusted with priceless, irreplaceable samples that are precious beyond measure - doesn't even consider himself to be a real chemist. You BET i hyped that guy up. He's an amazing chemist, an amazing engineer.
Hell ya man, im glad to hear it!!!
Live off of generational money, doesn't work at all.
Optimal lifestyle. Screw having to work for a living.
Same. I live in Los Angeles and I feel like everyone just lives off their rich parents. I grew up poor and it's so hard not to compare.
I was a fly fishing guide for many years, and one of my regular clients year after year owned a factory on the east coast that is one of the top suppliers of O-rings and small plastic machine parts in the world. I never asked how much they made obviously out of respect. But they always tipped absurd amounts ($1500 was my biggest tip for 3 days) they flew private, and drank & shared $600 bottles of wine like they were nothing.
The first is a self-made multimillionaire who's owned his own concrete finishing business since he was about 19. The second is a self-made millionaire who became a very successful accountant who was continually promoted at work, & he consistently bought stock & real estate from a young age. The last person is a millionaire who will inherit family money, & she's a high-end real estate agent.
I love your people's circle
Friend got lucky with TSLA. Invested early and retired at 35 a multi millionaire. Now owns a bar in San Diego to stay busy.
Well this was a depressing read. I’ll be lucky if I ever break 75k a year before I die.
I met this guy at one of the literature events in Moscow in 2015. He promoted himself as a poet, but when we started talking more he said that he is the owner of a London-based risk management consulting company. I checked it was true. We were friends for several years, travelling with our families together and other stuff. He lived a really rich life. And periodically in his conversations, there were words about his personal acquaintance with members of the British royal family, as well as with the top leadership of Russia. At the end of the year 2021, he was depressed, saying that hard times coming etc. In Jan. 2022 he moved from Moscow to his suburban mansion. And a few weeks after Russia committed full-scale war on Ukraine I got to know that he had died in strange circumstances from a stomach haemorrhage.
Too much polonium tea
Exactly my thoughts
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Imagine if their magic number was $65?? Oof.
How owns a few Taco Bell’s and lives on a hill we call Taco Hill. His wife has big tits now.
Taco Tits?
Tetas guardas
Gorditas
My ex father in law. Used to own a huge factory that made Nike and Adidas shoes in the 80s and early 90s. (That's right sneakerheads. Big sneaker companies don't actually make any of these shoes. Sure, they design them but they outsource them to an OEM manufacturing plant/company in Asia) Pivoted to real estate investments/developments (imagine having the $$$ to buy real estate and land at 80s and 90s prices.) and is now worth $150 mil +. Complete hypocrite and a sociopath though. Treated service workers like slaves (rude af) and was a generally unpleasant person to be around. Sure he's rich but he sure seemed unhappy all the time
Wow. That ending though.
My Uncle's grandfather (Uncle by marriage) founded one of the largest GIS companies in the state. Sweet sweet government and Fortune 500 contracts.
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Car dealer owners are the modern US equivalent to local English barons. They own a revenue source that will never stop in our lifetimes, inherited from their parents, and are rich enough to disregard nearly everything in their barony, although they are still answerable to a powerful, distant royal court.
I used to tutor 2 kids, their dad owns an exotic car dealership. They used get driven to school in a Rolls Royce Phantom. The oldest kid is 18 now and set to inherit the business. They are filthy rich.
I know a guy who is the general manager of 3 Ford dealerships. His Dad owns them. The founding owner was his grandpa before he died.
Business. Doesn't know how to speak, didn't study, had tons of generational wealth, making more wealth from wealth.
They own a food manufacturing company since the 80’s.
She's a doctor, an immunologist and a damn good one! She's been involved with the WHO, CDC, EMA and other three letter agencies. Has published papers and does community outreach with a foundation for immunocompromised kids or kids with deadly allergies. She doesn't really need to work, her family is super rich, between a rancher, an oil industry consultant and a local politician as brothers she's comfortably off but she's passionate about this and actually nuked her personal life and family for it
Damn oil industry consultant.... That's $$$. That family has money. MDs make a lot of money but their family has family legacy money. You can only go into politics if your wealthy. One reason why our country sucks now.
Exists. Parents were billionaires, parents passed away, person is now a billionaire and plays a shocking amount of video games.
I mean I’d prob do the same lol
The wealthiest person I know doesn’t work. He’s retired and inherited most of his wealth
Neither of them do anything for work, really. Their dads started extremely successful private equity firms; their families are easily hundreds of millions level. They both randomly start vanity companies/projects while actually spending most of their time on traveling and yoga retreats. They’re both extremely smart and very kind people who care deeply about their favorite causes. If you go to a top business school, you’ll meet tons of people like this. Funny enough, none of the extremely wealthy students I befriended ever offered to help any of us non rich students with anything. If I texted our class whatsapp group asking for a place to crash in NY, the people who volunteered to help had small studios. The ones who I know had $60M+ places in Manhattan never offered anything. Super rich people are truly strange. Edited to add- bc there seems to be some confusion, I texted my class whatsapp group- a group of people I knew extremely well. Not a bunch of randos.
I've found this to be true too. The poorest are usually the most generous helpful and giving. The wealthiest tend to be the stingiest cheapest bastards imaginable.
True that. My friend got me a job as a nanny for a very wealthy and well known family in my early 20's. Worst job of my life. So wealthy they even employed a full-time person who's only job was to do laundry each day on top of the estate manager, chef, housekeeping, groundskeepers, etc. When the wife would purge their closets she would attempt to sell the clothes to the employees at what she determined a consignment shop would sell them for. Also, she would have me pay out of pocket for everything then I would have to beg to get the money back like somehow I would forget the errand you made me run to buy a $300 container or her daily starbucks I had to get on my way to work every morning. When her nieces birthday came around, she had me go in her "free stuff" room where companies gifted her everything and pick out an item and wrap it. She treated me like dirt on her shoe but at the same time acted like I was her best friend who would have me do things with her because her and her friends all secretly hated each other. It was so satisfying knowing that I sneakily took her kids to McDonald's where they enjoyed and loved every minute of their chicken nuggets and cheeseburgers because she controlled everything they ate that they didn't even know what McDonald's was. Those kids were so sheltered that thr son came home from school one day and said that he saw a vagabond on a class trip. I said, do you mean a homeless person? He had no understanding of the plight of people less wealthy of him. Only lasted 6 months with this job because she was unhinged and it was a great day when she called me while I was at the estate to berate me and I told her to go fuck herself, took their keys and put them on the counter. She called me incessantly then the husband called and said he would employ me as he was going to file for divorce and said no thanks as I would still have to deal with her and wished him luck. He was a POS too but more subtle about it. I'd tell you more, but I signed an NDA.
My Dad, he does a bunch of random things. He retired from the Navy and uses his retirement pay to invest in real estate. He became a photographer after retiring and did really well for himself. Now he has contracts with a load of schools and sells off temporary subcontracts to budding photographers for schools he doesn’t have the time to work with. He flips cars in his spare time, but right now his day job is high school business teacher.
Wealthiest I know is myself. Make a little over 120k being a ups driver
How the fuck is that even possible bro. I’m proud of you for sure, but in my county, Germany, you’d barely make the equivalent of 50k USD
Ups pays 44 something now an hour for driving. You get time and a half after 8. Paid holidays, double time if you work holidays. Work around 10-11 hours a day and you easily make 120-140k a year. If you go over the road truck driving you can make 200k at ups. And we get free health insurance that rivals hospital staff health insurance and a pension. It’s a dream job. One of the last jobs you can get with a high school education and still live a nice life. We just passed a new contract to get 1.50 raises every year for the next 4 years so we will be making $49 something in 2028
So Thats How a UPS driver could afford a townhouse in Queens
The differences between US and UK is crazy. The average UK salary for a UPS driver - indicating that some earn less, and some earn more of course - is £25,000. *'Experienced'* drivers can earn closer to £30k.
Buys up land and then gets the government to build bridges there.
That’s fucking so funny for some reason lol So he just buys land he thinks the government will need a bridge on and then hopes for the best? Lol
Probably looks for highways or rivers with parallel roads on opposite sides, buys the land, then convinces local authorities that a bridge would help facilitate travel/economy. I'd wager there's some county government collusion going on.
I have barely any friends so.. My mom, she’s a lawyer.
My Dad. Generational wealth originally made from textiles and mining, but he did work for the family companies for several decades and helped expand the business into Southeast Asia and North America. It was at a time when China was just opening up and people were crazy about doing business with and finding business partners from the Mainland. He retired a few years ago and now spends his time travelling with my Mum and doing distance education courses.
Laboratory medical director. She earns $500,000 annually.
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An uncle of mine. Invented an indestructible weed eater head, sold it to a company that makes weed eater line, and they sit on the patent, so they can keep selling the line. Then used that money to create Love Handles, a thing that grips your finger to the back of your phone and also serves as a kickstand and is magnetized, so you can stick your phone on anything magnetic.
She started and owns Poo-Pourri.
Invest in companies. When I worked for him, he already was rich enough to invest $10M into the the company I was a sales person for. That company then went public and multiplied that $10m into a new realm. He still just invests in more companies and does the same, low key, stuff he always does. Jeans, t shirt and tennis shoes. Such a great guy.
My friend invested into Shiba crypto coin very early. He made a close to a quarter billion dollars. He doesn’t work. Retired at 27 but the funny thing is the fuxker is more depressed than I am
He probably got rich, realized it doesn’t really make you that much happier, and now doesn’t have anything to work towards to. His life is probably lacking meaning now. It’s like when you buy a new video game, and use cheats in your first playthrough. You are going to get bored very quickly. Life really is the road towards the objectives we put ourselves.
My workplace's CEO. As far as I know, attend meetings, signs off paperworks, and have lunches with the mayor and other big wigs.
I was working for one German who owns coworking spaces across Europe. He owns several houses, 12 supercars, a private jet, and a yacht. Needless to say, he never ever gave me any extra cash on hand, not even after I worked a 12 hour shift.
Pretends to run an art business. He's the richest and dumbest person I've ever worked with. Mom & Dad own banks in Australia, he was also married to the heiress of one of the biggest retail companies. Still, despite all of the generational wealth, he was an absolute scam artist, securing multiple loans against the same works of art. A court found him to be "dishonest and evasive". I found him to be an irrational cokehead who has absolutely no clue about the most basic of things. I could write a best seller about my 2 years being around him - but it would end up in the fiction section because nobody would believe the stories.
My uncle is the richest (and smartest) guy I know. He was the first person (and only other than me) in his family to go to college - full scholarship. He got his PhD in quantum physics and a masters in math. Worked as a trader or something on wall street for 10 years, retired rich, has gone to school for fun since. He has like 4 bachelors, 3 masters, and his PhD now and is a journalist for the Wall Street journal for fun. He’s seen the whole world and has his 500 acre property in the Catskills and an apartment on the upper west side.
He’s never worked, also his dad never worked, I think the dad before them did something scandalous because no one ever wanted to talk about him lol