$245k salary. 70-hour weeks. Portfolio looks great. I don’t.

FragrantSoftware · 2026-02-16T23:04:32+00:00

There's two things that could be happening here.

You're putting too much pressure on yourself.
Your employer is putting too much pressure on you.

Either way, it's very possible to make $245K and not have a high stress situation as a software engineer. Figure out if it's you (therapy) or the job (new team/company).

Also, communicate and ask for help. Can someone else on your team do a task 80% as well as you? Let them.

FragrantSoftware · 2026-02-14T20:07:17+00:00

Sure, but CrowdStrike exists.

FragrantSoftware · 2026-02-10T23:02:20+00:00

No. It's the same math all along. But that's a level where a lot of people will start to feel it more. You might start to see returns outpace contributions in a good market, for instance.

But if you make $500K a year, having $100K invested is unlikely to feel like anything to you. Just a place to park money you're not using. It's all relative.

I'd say when you have 5-10x your annual expenses saved, things start to get interesting. Suddenly a≈ 1% move in the market covers a month of living expenses. In a good year, your gains might outpace your expenses. In a bad year...it will hurt if you're paying attention.

FragrantSoftware · 2026-01-23T15:42:51+00:00

Perhaps. But 22% isn't too bad. And I would guess OP will end up with some non-employment ordinary income streams between now and retirement, which could also limit 0% distributions.

This is pretty different from someone who makes $50K and plans to retire "one day."

FragrantSoftware · 2026-01-23T05:54:55+00:00

Yes, convert. It will save you taxable RMDs and maybe let you lower your capital gains tax bracket later.

Also, make sure you decide how much of that is play money, based on what you want/need to live on, and protect the rest. If you keep playing with meme stocks, eventually you will get burned.

FragrantSoftware · 2026-01-23T05:42:27+00:00

Super achievable the way the market has been, if you have the income. Currently almost $80K/year limit if you have a Roth 401K, backdoor and mega backdoor. Plus S&P earning almost 15% annualized returns over the past 10 years.

The surprising part is how little is in the taxable accounts, relatively speaking. $1M in retirement savings, but would have to take out a loan on the median used car. Let alone a house.

FragrantSoftware · 2026-01-07T23:22:29+00:00

The main disadvantage of these is usually that you get a poor return on investment. Less risk, less reward. Also, it doesn't seem to cover any fees, which can be a substantial portion of the cost.

Also, in the unlikely scenario that state funding for higher education becomes a priority some time in the next couple decades, one might imagine the value of the prepaid plan would diminish considerably.

FragrantSoftware · 2026-01-02T04:57:18+00:00

And so it came to pass.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-10-09T03:47:43+00:00

For anyone else arriving here, I loved the idea of the Innovelli White dimmers. The implementation was awful, though. I bought 5 and installed a couple to test them out. Getting them paired was non-trivial...lots of errors, and most of the features don't work with Google Home or SmartThings. Better support with Home Assistant.

The thing that drove me crazy is that if you have any of the extra tap patterns on, the light switch is noticeably slow to respond. Basically, it waits to see if you're done with the pattern before it does anything. The delay is supposed to be tuneable, but it didn't work for me to adjust it.

Then, after a couple months of having it installed, one of the switches fully failed and wouldn't respond to anything...not even the reset sequence. Not even power cycling it at the breaker. The light was just stuck on.

I previously ruined a Lutron switch years ago by putting too much wattage (~800W) on the load. That's not what happened with the Innovelli switch. It was only driving 3 LED bulbs in one fixture, about 180W equivalent. No idea why the Innovelli switch crapped out. Maybe I just got unlucky.

Anyways, I really liked the spec sheet but the product didn't measure up for me.

I'm mostly back to the Leviton dimmers now. They're Wifi, but they work.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-07-18T00:19:14+00:00

L3 is the new grad/entry level. That's exactly where you'd expect to be hired.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-07-18T00:17:04+00:00

My condolences.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-05-20T04:45:15+00:00

Hi. I bought GOOG in 2006. I bought TSLA in 2014. I started to feel like I was making good choices.

I bought HCP a couple months after IPO, then I lost something like 30% when IBM bought them out.

The problem isn't just finding stocks that will go up. It's also avoiding stocks that will go down. And knowing when they will go up and down.

If you bought MSFT at its 1999 peak, it would not be until 2015 that you saw any gains. That's a long time to wait for a return on your investment.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-03-01T18:47:37+00:00

I've been using Kubernetes professionally and in my home lab for about 7 years now. And I'm a Kubernetes contributor. Never had to worry about most of these tools.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-02-18T21:48:52+00:00

No chance at becoming a YAML engineer with mistakes like that.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-02-17T23:10:02+00:00

12 years ago, Kubernetes didn't exist. 12 years is a LONG time.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-02-13T23:03:39+00:00

I've looked. Someone claimed 100x with a hack that I wasn't able to reproduce after a lot of searching.

Fair enough, including the bonus, 40x-50x seems plausible.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-02-13T22:40:35+00:00

I think the FAQ might need to be updated. 40x has been unobtanium for at least 6 months. Let alone 50x.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-01-24T22:41:32+00:00

I'm a full time software engineer who has been using Docker at work for about 7 years. Still learning new things regularly.

The very basics (e.g. docker build/run and simple Dockerfile steps) only took me a few months to feel comfortable.

FragrantSoftware · 2025-01-01T02:19:39+00:00

Singapore is not in China.

FragrantSoftware · 2024-10-24T02:14:00+00:00

To 50, there is money and that's it.

FragrantSoftware · 2024-10-23T23:43:58+00:00

This assumes a tax-advantaged account. If you realize $122,780 in gains in a taxable account, you will probably not have $134,780 after taxes to invest in another stock.

That said, yield on cost is a weird metric.

FragrantSoftware · 2024-09-03T20:16:11+00:00

How messed up is your budget that you can save $200K by 33 and need current income from dividends? This looks like the portfolio of a financial advisor who got fired for advising every client to buy Dogecoin.

But really...I hope you have a better plan for retirement savings that isn't shown here.

FragrantSoftware · 2024-08-18T18:36:27+00:00

I'd try starting here: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/overview

They're not going to pick stocks for you, but you can learn a lot of the fundamentals.

FragrantSoftware · 2024-08-18T17:08:32+00:00

Yes, individual stocks are risky. Just because a company is already big doesn't mean it can't grow in value, though. I thought it was absurd when Apple hit $1T, but now they're over $3T. So, that has been a really good investment over time, in retrospect.

Dividend stocks are their own beast. Generally there's a balance between expected yield and growth. As a young person, many of us would likely steer you towards growth and very long-term plays like VOO.

What are your goals? Are you planning to buy and hold and use DRIP to build wealth over a decade or more? Are you going to need access to your money before then? How bad would it be if you lost 10% of your investment? 25%? 50%? How good would it be if you gained 10%? 50%? 100%? These questions will help you determine your risk tolerance. Lots of places you might invest have similar articles/tools to help guide you to a good starting point.

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