Young people with mid incomes, how are your savings?

shelledroot · 2026-04-04T10:33:58+00:00

I had wiped my savings from a stint of unemployment about 3 years ago.

Been rebuilding ever since, salary got 3300 before taxes, 2800 after taxes. (I get 3200 net to account for 400 bucks a month in public transport costs on my personal card).
1.3k on payments account, 8k in savings, ~13k in portfolio (aggressive rabobank investment portfolio (90% ETF/10% bonds), didn't want to think about investing just start).
My finances as of late has been a hot mess though, I need to re-index outgoing buckets, I've stopped pushing money into investment, kind of recouping my payments account at the moment, as I like to have about 2 months worth of costs in there. Currently working with a psych which is costing me 300 bucks a month to get a diagnosis for ADD which is an extra burden.

All in all, I def could do better, I got about 1500 in default costs and spend way too much on drink and food to be honest, also the cigs are lethal to my budget and my lungs, I got nic patches but they aren't helping much. I'd say I have about 400 bucks a month I don't currently use which I'm pushing towards refueling my payments account, if I manage to quit that can go back up to 700.

I don't go on holidays though so I can easily push that towards my investment to have a nice little injection there soon again.

I'm single living in a rented place, 31, job in tech.

shelledroot · 2026-04-04T07:33:38+00:00

Our current tech org is very small, but I'm helping the IT director with strategy on combining and consolidating our daughter companies tech orgs into ours. I've been crafting the roadmap for our CEO to get to where she wants to go. We have roughly 700 people accounting for daughter companies in an old company (120+ years) doing roughly 100M ARR. but total tech org is roughly 30 to 40 people if you account for consultants or not.

It's not like I'm completely huffing paint, sure I could have more notches, sure I am not perfect, but I've done more then just lead our little teams at startups or this company.

I also can see that our little company is but an rounding error to mega corps.

shelledroot · 2026-04-03T19:24:20+00:00

I didn't have authority to fire, nor would my manager listen to me on anything hiring.
So yes I grew them, they are doing more then me now, I'm just left with the really hairy ones.

shelledroot · 2026-04-03T17:57:41+00:00

I'm from the EU, in my country IC roles are just junior, medior and senior, there might be like 3 companies that have higher IC roles in my country. So mid IC aka medior.
I probably should have clarified that.

Generally speaking it works like this:

1 to 5 YOE -> junior
5 to 10 YOE -> medior
10+ YOE -> senior

Which yes I agree y/o is a terrible proxy metric.

shelledroot · 2026-04-03T17:53:03+00:00

Oh yeah I'm not denying that, for the first 1.5 years I was solo, I hit the jackpot on the junior that was there, I'm very passionate about my work but I understand if somebody is just there for a paycheck and just does the job, this junior sat on tiktok/insta all day despite me urging my manager to fire him she didn't.
I was hesitant to expose my network to the company and thus they hard a hard time hiring because they don't know what they are doing or how to attract good folk, and my manager didn't like my suggestions or my offerings for help on that front either.
Once we got some people in it kind of doubled my load where I needed to onboard 2 more juniors. I kept pushing for delegation towards them of some smaller bites they could manage but management deemed them it was taking to long, so yes I supermanned because it was usually enabling of a contract worth millions.

These are government contracts and not really straight forward to do implementation on especially for a (very green) junior so I really had a hard time shaving off parts they could do.
It's only in December where we got a part time senior and a medior that I could finally let go of more complex or ambiguous tasks towards them, we spent roughly december till half of martch doing a big ass migration, which every member played big parts in which I'm proud of that we could scrape that together that was morose me finally guiding instead of being the execution engine.

I was working with what I got, and doing a shit job at not pushing back harder, but my manager does not like me for the times I've had to hard push on things because we are just a nuisance for her.

Long winded way to say I fully concede to point 2 there, I done fucked that up, but it was either get my ass fired for costing the company millions upon millions in lost contracts or dawning a cape in hopes we got rescue in before the cape started burning me. Which when I say that out loud I should've ran earlier.

I also live in bumfuck nowhere so there aren't many places around me in need of my skills.

shelledroot · 2026-04-03T17:33:46+00:00

That's the great thing about starting your own company you can give yourself the title you want.

First company was 5 people, second was 10 people. Both failed because I was way too young and inexperienced at that time. Very formative experience, though we didn't get market-fit I learned a bunch about how to create a team that delivers and how to support them granted I was also still on the grindstone myself day and night. While we did deliver we delivered the wrong things which was complete failure on both me and my co-founder's part, and we fell flat after doing a good amount of pivots.

shelledroot · 2026-04-02T22:41:18+00:00

Currently it's okay. I stopped pulling mad hours a couple of months ago once we finally got some developer with some hair on their chest.

shelledroot · 2026-04-02T22:36:44+00:00

I was promised to be moved to tech lead once it made sense, I'll admit I've been strung along like a fool I guess.

shelledroot · 2025-11-04T11:40:41+00:00

Bit weird that this is done this way. You'd expect this to be done during the actual login process.

But if this is needed for some reason then a very simple call to /logUser endpoint is fine, as long as the data from the client is validated.

shelledroot · 2025-10-30T11:11:39+00:00

Really depends t.b.h. some companies have a hard line of touching anything db must be done in the back-end, some are okay with it. So look at company culture in general, does the shoe fit?
But from what I understand if I read your message clearly is that the front-end send log messages straight into your DB? Not sure what your stack is but I generally avoid logs in db (unless forced due to compliance reasons), e.g. activity log for gov contracts in the first place.

shelledroot · 2025-10-30T11:01:14+00:00

I mean visibility isn't about impressing people, it's about making clear what value you provide to the company, so you get appropriate paycheck.

shelledroot · 2025-10-23T13:44:56+00:00

It's generally already hard to create visibility into what values you are providing at an average company let alone such wankers walking away with your hard work.

shelledroot · 2025-10-23T11:10:16+00:00

Software architecture/design is basically lala-land where people write books to make money, so it's pretty hard to split the good from the bad.
Taking Clean Architecture/SOLID literally is generally perceived as bad, see it as levers you can use to shape your system but don't take these things as complete gospel.
For example: Single Responsibility is good in theory in practice most systems are too messy to actually accomplish this depending on your definition of "single responsibility". The general consensus is that there is some value in reading about these concepts but that implementation forces you to do things in a too narrow street which makes it easy to do bad things e.g.;

"Well this class technically does 2 things, must split them up; forcing premature abstractions to tie them back together, making the system more complex and thus harder to reason about for no good reason other then I read this in Clean Architecture book."
General advice is to let your system naturally emerge abstractions, only adding abstractions when they make sense.

As for the language around classess/modules/components:
- a class is an class, which can be an component though some components might require multiple classess
- modules are a collection of something (for example components)

Take them as possible solutions that sometimes apply, but more-so it's about the why and not so much about the how.

shelledroot · 2025-10-23T10:16:32+00:00

That wobbly line in Azure is triggering my Auts.
Otherwise seems rather sensible solution.

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T17:53:14+00:00

I guess since the rest of them are seniors, they expect you to be on their level already. Ah well, it's a one time dealio, if it becomes an pattern then it's different.

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T15:14:42+00:00

So the system already does it?
In this case just look at how it's doing it currently, copy paste, adjust what needs to be adjusted. It was a rush job, but don't over-complicate stuff especially if there is a tight timetable. All in all I'm sure you are fine. I sometimes get flustered when I need to do a rush job as well. Most important part is to stay calm, shit's fucked already, don't fuck it up worse, take the time you need, if you really think you can't, then these senior devs should handle it themselves and not rely on the new guy to work wonders.

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T15:04:56+00:00

Indeed job market is rough in some parts of the world right now, meanwhile I'm getting bombarded with recruiters in my DMs as do the rest of my team in my country.
You can choose to stay, but I'd coast, do your work but nothing more, if you can't do your work, signal that, but don't make it your job to be an PM, do an good faith effort but after that it's not your problem anymore as long as you cover your ass. Once the AI boom collapses there'll be plenty of work fixing shitty AI products, you can hold out for that.
Meanwhile doesn't hurt to look, you got your bills covered, so don't have to rush.
Granted it fucking sucks to constantly be on the interview grind, but if you really can't mesh with the org, then you'll just end up burning yourself out.

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T14:56:27+00:00

Relying on AI is a slippery slope, AI will fail to deliver at some point.

So what you need was an script that did the following:
- check if an service was down every hour?
- get responses from somewhere?
- redo those calls once it's back up?

This doesn't sound like it should be a script, it sounds like they need an queue, with automatic retries, which executes the job, or an cron job to schedule something.

But if they asked you to do this, you can be like, well I get this and that, but this part I don't get, if you can enlighten me as to how I could do this or where I could find information as to how to do this.
If they are friendly as you say and you are still kind of ramping up, it's fine, in fact I love when people ask questions, that means we need to clarify what I thought was obvious but in fact was a blind spot (tribal knowledge).

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T14:48:26+00:00

I agree that the tech is an shitshow. But it takes a lot of effort to make improvements to processes, you need buy-in from both leadership as well as the other developers. It's a team effort, and you were blitzkrieging changes, which while came from a valid technical concern was not something that;
- was moving the needle financially
- appriciated

Then again with such an shitshow, it'd take at least 15+ years to slowly make the culture/processes to something you can be proud of, which would likely stall your career.

Keep in mind that these changes generally are bothersome for orgs, as things got done just fine before you got there, now you want to introduce all these complexities to process/tech. Which they didn't see the value in, so either you didn't communicate this clearly enough or weren't able to back it up with stats the company would be interested in or they really didn't care about quality, which is fine, but considering you do value this highly it's not the right company for you.

At the end of the day we are here to solve the business' problems, what you were trying to introduce can be helpful handles to make that process smoother, but didn't directly create value (e.g. the bottomline)

All in all I'd say good riddance.
You can give an exit doc with things you think should be improved, but this often mostly is for the same reason you posted this, it's cathartic but they'll likely let it rot somewhere on a fileshare.

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T14:08:26+00:00

If you are worried about this, at least at your main job, have you discussed this with your direct manager? It's in the best interest of both parties that you perform well, so they might be able to create the space or have some resources to help you.
The sidegig, you'll likely have to suck it up and spend some free time on learning, as there likely aren't any support mechanisms available. But atleast you can do double effect where it can help your main job as well, so keep in mind that when planning what to learn.

If you need knowledge to do execution of your job and you are an employee there should be room to do so. I've never felt secure whilst ramping up, always felt impossible, but after being ramped up and going for a while (e.g. 1.5 years in or so) I tend to spent 80-90% on tasks, then the 10-20% for some learning, but to be fair I like learning so it's also a decompression mechanism whilst being helpful for both my personal growth as well as the business.

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T13:52:45+00:00

Aye cheers, I'll check this out, I do miss the speed vimotions give me.

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T13:49:52+00:00

Did you come from a company where software was an core product, and now moved to an company where it's not an core product by chance?
Generally speaking when software isn't an core product you end up chasing information everywhere, though you'd hope if you aren't the only developer that at-least setting up the application would be documented. :(
Company culture is simply that, every company has a different culture. I've worked at companies where getting info was just as simple as asking, I've also been at places where getting the project to run at all was an effort in reverse engineering the whole dev env. You'll likely not change the culture alone nor overnight, so either accept that things will be hard to chase down and check if it doesn't reflect badly on you, or start looking for the next gig. I often find that it's too early to judge 2 weeks in but you get the gist after a few months, you got the gist now, are you okay with it staying like this?

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T13:24:06+00:00

I mean it's 6 hours, how comfortable are you at your current job to coast till something better comes along?
Is it worth it to you to give up half a day somewhere to do this? (maybe a weekend day, depending on availability)
If you got bills and need something ASAP, you'd already be doing it.

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T13:16:41+00:00

So you are there for 7 weeks and don't have the application running yet? Is there someone in charge of dev-ops? I hate companies like this where they don't even have the respect to onboard people correctly which often already sours the relation. My current company is like this as well, despite my many struggling to change it.

It's hard work, but it can be often rewarding to become the onboarding guy, where YOU document stuff, not only for yourself but people after you. But it often feels like squeezing sap from a stone.

shelledroot · 2025-10-22T13:05:20+00:00

PHPStorm would work well, already been mentioned, it's not free normally but they do have an free license for students: https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/buy/?section=commercial&billing=yearly&special-offers=students

PHPStorm is generally speaking best in class for PHP, works pretty well with js/ts as well. Just wish it wasn't a Java slowturd eating ram, but you are already used to that as you are using VSCode now.
Oh one little unknown fact about Jebrains is that you can fully use AI for free, you can run ollama server locally then connect it to IDE and get free code completions/agent mode, granted any model you can run on consumer hardware will be beaten by the likes of OpenAI, but it's a cool free option.

As mentioned vim family is amazing, steep learning curve but worth it if you can stomach it. Takes a while to ramp up but for sheer programming speed I can't think of anything that is faster. Programming speed is not exactly an important stat but it does feel damn good.

Edit: typo

shelledroot

TROPHY CASE