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points by himata4113 2 days ago | 0 comments

It's ultimately a choice, work hard and earn a lot so you can enjoy early retirement or grind out a balanced life until the day you die.

It's a balance of risk and reward, you might work hard and never get lucky enough to retire early, but more recently we've seen how a balanced life can backfire @ FAANG layoffs.

[–] ben_w 1 day ago

> It's ultimately a choice, work hard and earn a lot

"Don't work hard, work smart". Often there's an inverse relationship between how hard the work is and how well it pays. Picking crops is famously the worst. But even in software, the hardest work I did was a 10-day stretch of 10-hour days in one of the lowest paid positions I had: between my €1k-ish/month passive income and the imputed income due to no longer needing to pay rent, I get more sitting on my arse than that job paid.

Same applies to expenses. Software is (or was) one of the few forms of labour that lent themselves to remote work, and remote works allows people to lower what are often the two biggest expenses: rent, and transport.

[–] Dzugaru 1 day ago

Replace "work smart" with "be lucky"

[–] ben_w 1 day ago

Both. There's a lot of dumb luck in this world, and me being a software developer at just the right time was luck.

Working smart, living smart, also makes a huge difference. Every 83/month you save off your expenses (rent, more efficient transport, better utility deals) is the same as earning 1k/year more after tax. At lower income levels (but not the lowest because at the very lowest people don't have a choice), investing that over a lifetime turns "just about making ends meet" into "retire 4 years early".

[–] koolba 1 day ago

The smart man makes his own luck.

In some way ways, that’s what smart working does. Being at the right place, at the right time, because you were smart enough to realize you should hang around that place.

[–] fooqux 1 day ago

All one can do is try and stack the odds. I prefer to say that rather than "making your own luck".

You can equip rings of +1 to dice rolls but most of us don't get weighted dice.

Playing the odds is fine in poker if your pile of chips is big enough to ride out the bad dice rolls, but this doesn't always work in life. There are too many decisions where you're forced to go all in.

I do still largely agree with you, that our decisions influence our future options. But I feel many people who just say "we make our own luck" fail to realize just how much luck played a role in their lives. Survivorship bias and all that.

[–] himata4113 1 day ago

being smart is also being lucky, half the population is below average.

[–] prodent 1 day ago

that's not how averages work

[–] himata4113 1 day ago

no, but as with most statistics it is a bell curve which means that this generalization is generally okay.

[–] GeoAtreides 1 day ago

no, but that's how normal distributions work

[–] plastic-enjoyer 1 day ago

Have a balanced life, keep living costs low, have enough money... But maybe I'm just too European to understand American engineers

[–] himata4113 1 day ago

Indeed, even though I can afford quite a lot I keep my monthly expenses below a nice 1000. I have to expend mental effort to justify anything above that and it has helped me a lot when dealing with a sense of meaninglessness as lifestyle creep will simply lead you to chasing for more.

Best things in life are free, or at minimum, very cheap.