How to Build Wealth as a Career Person

I've more or less followed this advice, and it's worked out for me. For the most part, I used my salary to pay for expenses and stock compensation to build up wealth.

The tricky part is that a lot of this advice is situation-dependent. Should you switch to a riskier company that offers a higher compensation? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Should you work late to accomplish goals hoping to get a promotion? It depends.

So how are we supposed to know what to do?

The answer, in my opinion, is people. You have to trust people who are trustworthy and avoid people who are not. As an employee, your success depends on the people who hired you--they are the ones who can promote you or cheat you. The best leaders are the ones who realize that helping you advance is going to help them advance. Help your boss accomplish their corporate goals and they will promote you--not as a reward, but as a bet that you will help them on the next goal.

Bad leaders are either too selfish (fail to promote you) or too incompetent (unable to rise, even with your help). You need to learn to avoid them.

Therefore, my advice is this: Look at the leaders in your company--people who could plausibly hire you. Which ones are the best bets? Which ones have both the talent and the integrity to succeed? If you're lucky there's more than one and you can work to get on their team. If you're unlucky, there are none and you need to find a different company.

What's weird about this article is none of it is technically wrong: "Become a cheetah(super at ___)", "Aspire and engage to be better", "Build 6 types of capital". They are not bad things to do, if you can: and that is what it misses, if you can.

But don't feel bad if you have not been able to do any of them, e.g. Most People with kids can often do very little than job and take care of kids and that's it. What is more important is to not beat yourself up about it, give yourself grace and do one or two things that make you and your near and dear people/pets happy.

A tale of two friends from engineering school in 1988:

One earned C’s, but liked to set up token ring and Ethernet networks and code network games. Nice guy, kind of a shlub but not a genius.

Another got straight A’s while mostly drunk, long hair, liked sports but still a metalhead. Breezed through any new concept as if he was born with the knowledge of complex math and advanced physics.

First guy became a VP at Google. Has multiple houses and fancy cars. Doesn’t need to work anymore but loves it.

Second guy became fellow and major CPu/gpu company. Money falling out his ass.

Me: worked hard, got B’s mostly, followed the path but never got promoted too far. Got a few mil in the 401k, but never got a big break.

I’m totally satisfied with where I’m at but these friends just hit the effing centimillionaire jackpot through stocks and weird luck.

Wish there was some consistency in my peer group. We (about 12 friends) all did well with EE degrees in the 80s. Some just did 10-100x better than others for no obvious reason.

I skipped most of the stuff described in the article and just invested most of my salary into index ETFs. Mostly because I hate work much more than I like buying stuff.

It takes over two thirds of the article to get to the actually relevant advice: spend less, invest the difference.

Kissing ass at work might help you but not nearly as much as this two ideas.

I've come across co-workers who make +$250K in salary who live paycheck-to-paycheck...

1. Alimony

2. Child support

One thing - your expenses will ALWAYS somewhow expand to your income. We see our current income as somehow the steady state long term norm. I would do your absolute best to hide extra income from your day to day self and invisibly invest it in a way you don’t even think about

And when you get a windfall (stock grants, acquisitions, etc) unless it’s truly life changing money where you never have to work again, find a good investor (CFP) to manage so you’re not even thinking about it. Or invest it in some future liability like college expenses, home down payment, retirement, etc.

I'm a "career person" and expect to retire soon in my late forties. The blog's advice is generally on point, but IMHO places too much emphasis on busting ass to play the career game. There are easier ways to win, and here's my secret sauce:

* Get a job at a successful listed tech company (not a startup) that issues RSUs.

* Get promoted to senior level but no higher (too much responsibility, poor work life balance, exposure to office politics)

* Move to a low tax jurisdiction like Dubai, Hong Kong or Singapore, at least long enough to build a serious nest egg (several million).

* Live significantly below your means: I aimed to save & invest half my income. You'll still live a good life because these countries have vast income inequality and services are cheap.

* Find a partner who shares your values.

Not saying this is easy or even possible for many, but it worked for me.

Step 1 - don't buy a boat.

I'd add or emphasize being strategic about which roles within an organization are rewarded. These are usually roles with very clearly attributable impact to top-line or bottom-line metrics.

Much enablement, unblocking, capability-based, or risk reduction work is very difficult to interpret for the business decision-makers.

This is one of the best, boiled down, to-the-point, common sense articles I've read on this topic that everyone should understand but so many don't. I'm going to have my kids read this.

I took the most boring approach: twenty five years of steady index fund investing allowed me to retire early.

I’m going to go against most of the comments here (negative) and say that there are a ton of wise nuggets in this article.

Specifically pieces about how to be valuable in a pragmatic and honest way.

You don't need stock based comps, insane salaries and selling your soul to your employer to build wealth. You just need to live within your means and invest your money.

Not sure there’s really anything useful in here for building wealth? I get to grind the corporate ladder and hope I get paid more?

Be sure to talk about your achievements. As important as making things work is making sure the right people know you did that.

The premise of this article initially appears to be that counter to common opinion, work is profitable and it's not all about investment / entrepreneurship.

But then through the course of tedious and somewhat pompous paragraphs (I only read 5 before I started skimming so let me know if I missed something) the point seems to bend towards "work hard to get a foothold so you can own stuff and then you'll make real money" .

It did nothing to change my opinion of our system where labor earns a pittance and all real wealth comes from the lottery of birthright, corruption, picking the right stock, or getting lucky in entrepreneurship.

(What's all this stuff about grades??? Does somebody think grades matter??? Maybe I'm out of touch because I got my PhD before really starting the career grind.)

Damn, brutally true. If you've seen it, you've seen it, it plays out exactly as written here. Taking it as advice doesn't put you on their level though, their gift is incredible instinct hence why they do everything here without it.

A lot of words to say “save money”. Remove the wealth aspect from this and it’s a good article for people early in their career though

In the capitalist economy one of the most important job is to build ones financial wealth and stability.

The employer doesn't do it.

Doing the day job is priority #2. Many do not fully understand this late into their career.

By then it is too late and late stage health problems start due to stress.

I know two engineers who worked their way to becoming centi-millionaires. One worked for the same company his entire life. Another looked at every job as feeding a 'system' of a) co-workers; b) clients; c) the economy.

Probably the single best take-away from the article is to never stop learning. I also like the tip about keep networking and building relationships.

That's more of a "build a career", than "build wealth".

It helps to be in the U.S., too.

Conversely, how to build a carreer as a wealthy person?

God I'm so tired of this stuff. How about instead we use our democracy to create laws that let people live their lives in dignity with no worry of having a roof over their head and food to eat without having to spend every waking moment hyper-optimizing their entire existence.

The downside of following this kind of advice is that you have to spend a lot of time thinking and strategizing about stuff that is generally pretty boring.

psyop, nobody is falling for it

but I think there is a crowd that rejects too many of the basics at their own detriment. yes, getting work, highly valued work, still helps and helps waaay more reliably for a broader population than other methods, but its just a step. So you still need to do that, You also need to parlay earnings into wealth producing assets, assets that also have their own independent value that is intended to grow.

What an insulting article.

> There is a popular idea that substantial wealth belongs mainly to entrepreneurs.

This is probably because 24yo college dropouts are achieving billion dollar valuations after 12 months of work. Their secondary sales are worth more than following all the advice in this article will be for your entire life.

(To say nothing of NVDA, SpaceX, or other big tech acquiring them and making their billions liquid, despite no moat or profitability, just because they have so much money and need to spend it on something.)

No matter how much “grit” you have, you’re still at the mercy of such people, as e.g. the engineers at Windsurf were, who worked super hard but their founders sold to Google, walked away with hundreds of millions, and gave the employees nothing.

Of course, it depends on your meaning of “substantial”. Successful engineers have great wealth too, enough that they can be very happy and buy anything they want. But pretending the two levels are comparable is silly.

The marxists are correct there is the wage earning class and also the ownership class

They are incorrect in that there is no strict separation of the two.

Anyone in tech can easily enter the ownership class. American assets are exceptionally cheap for what they are. It's very easy to purchase asset producing goods, whether that be businesses or real estate.

The ownership class matter because a worker exchanges time for money. Time is finite. Ownership is not.

A career is a quick and low volatility way towards ownership. You owe no loyalty to any company or any manager. Only owe loyalty to your friends, family, and the financial assets you own. These things reflect on you. Your job is just a distraction.

This is all good advice... but just browsing X, the salaries folks are pulling down give me incredible FOMO.. early 20s already achieving generational wealth just spending 1-2 years in the right startup or frontier lab.

..and this doesn't include hustlers in Dubai or some other tax haven earning six figures a month doing various schemes.

Why am I wasting my life?

Yeah right.