sombremesa

I usually don't argue with people who are this out of touch, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Let's do some math. In both cases we're buying the same home for keeps, so we can ignore the value of the final asset (would be the same in, say, 2100 A.D. in both cases):

Amazon stock 13x'd from 2012 to 2023. Say you had $50k vested by year 1 (close to what you'd have in 2013 as new grad). That money would be $650k in 2023. If you invested that into a house just around then, say in a $300k home, your interest rate would be ~3.7%. That means you would be paying $415,040 over the next 30 years, including your down payment.

Now let's say you were...you...and decided to wait till today. That same home is now worth $1.3 million in 2023. Your mortgage rate is 6.5%. You have your $650k in stock, so you put 20% down ($260k). Your mortgage is $1.04M. Over the next 30 years, you will be paying...a whopping $2,341,800. But hey, congrats on your "extra" $390k in stocks. By the way, you paid (if we are VERY conservative) ~$250k in rent while living in an equivalent property in those ten years.

You can look on levels.fyi for current comp, but it's a bit harder to find what someone's comp is like if they started ten years ago. Perhaps you could look at H1B data and extrapolate at a 3-5% raise p.a. with larger bumps every now and then. Even at just today's numbers though, MSFT lags behind comparable employers.

You missed the "personal" part of "personal finance." If you live in Seattle and started working in, say 2012, that "smart" decision would be costing you a ton of money today (certainly more than a few mil all said and done) should you be in need of a home.

I updated the wording to help you out.

> They are all multi millionaires.

Sure, but so am I — and I know for a fact they make very little, because of the way they talk about our mutual friends' job offers — I cannot even tell them my salary, to be honest. (Making less money is not a bad thing, but the pertinent point is that they work longer hours than I do, in the same industry!)

> Msft stock is up 10X in 10 years.

Here I'd like to correct you on one point — stock going up like this does not necessarily equate to outsized wealth. When you join as a new grad, you get very little stock, and as you get more grants, they are market-adjusted (not to mention vested over time). Plus the early stock inevitably gets sold to buy a home, etc.

Feel free to ignore me if you knew these things.

> What you call complacency, I call contentment.

Contentment and complacency are ostensibly the same thing, though the primary reason I tend towards the latter term is because I think we ought to aspire to growth (in whatever sense you determine for yourself). That's just my opinion though. It's also worth noting that I have no way of knowing what others are aspiring to, aside from what happens in their life over the years (which can be a poor proxy, given the role of luck).

Microsoft employees are some of the most complacent I've ever seen. Some of my Microsoftie friends haven't had an interview (aside from maybe one or two recruiter calls) in over ten years, having been there since graduation. Needless to say, their comp is peanuts. Yet they frequently stay at work late and have to drop engagements as a result.

Microsoft has the magic formula for lifers who don't ask much and work just as hard as anyone else, if not harder (by big tech standards — startups folks work way harder for way less).

Bingo. Getting it into production is a non-concern for non-entities with no reputation, but Google has a lot more to lose. The big guys watch and wait, and use their sizeable wallets when the time comes. I have no doubts that Apple is going to eat Meta's lunch soon, for example — a lunch Meta didn't even realize was there, for all their innovation and go-to-market.

Not sure I would call this a "backdoor," but nice of them to do that.

> One would be eventual consistency.

In the vein of the TFA, this would be a negative shibboleth (which just goes to show how being pedantic in certain contexts is just silly). The reason being that eventual consistency has no guarantee on what "eventual" means. If your replicas converge ten years from when a change is made, you can (correctly) claim to have eventual consistency.