Hey folks! This is the fifth part of my “story so far” series where I tell the story of how I learned about FIRE and all the jobs, school and relevant details that take us up to the current day. If you didn’t start at the beginning, you can do that here! Let’s head back to 2021 and see what young CJ was up to.
2021
As the year began, I now had a total of $96,098.64. And I was ready to hit that first $100k. Around this time I set a new goal for myself. I wanted to push my salary to $100k as well. Currently sitting at $85k, I felt like with the new responsibilities at my job that maybe I could push for it.
I took two more classes that semester in grad school, and one of them was the hardest in the program. One of the tough things about being in a program so new was that there weren’t many choices. The classes were generally high quality, but they were also the only classes. This one was tough and people seemed to think it was on the lower end of the quality spectrum. I had to make do.
Meanwhile work was going alright. I was missing doing actual programming work, but decided to press on for the moment. I started working on asking for a raise, since the company didn’t have any kind of annual review. The answer I got was basically “wait until you’ve been here a year” which meant waiting until May. Not exactly what I wanted to hear, but alright.
A couple days into February, I hit the goal I’d wanted to hit before turning 22 several months early: my net worth crossed $100k. Just a year out of college and 21 years old, I’d done it. I didn’t want to tell anyone since I’ve always kept my money and financial independence journey on the down low, so I went out by myself and got some ice cream to celebrate.
And then something funny happened a couple weeks later. My friend, the boss at my old job, reached out to me again. Last year I’d staved off an attempt for him to get me to go back, since he couldn’t offer me more than I was currently making. He shot me a message on a local Slack group we were both in that said basically: “Hey I have a super high pressure coding challenge for you. There’s a lot riding on this, don’t let me down.” With that he sent me a snippet of code and asked me to find the null pointer exception possibility.
For those not into programming, this usually happens when some object doesn’t exist, somehow, and you try to treat it like it does by performing some operation on it. I scanned the code for a minute or two, and felt like I could see how it was possible. I waited a couple minutes more to answer to make sure, since for some reason he said this was high pressure and I didn’t want to be wrong. Maybe it was a trick question since it wasn’t all that hard to answer.
So I responded, explaining the set of conditions that made it possible. His response was, verbatim: “I will pay you $105,000 to come back and work here. Negotiate with me.” To which all I could say is: “Does that mean I got it right?” Yeah, I got it right. He said he’d had two engineers spend three days on it and they hadn’t figured it out. And more importantly he said the $105k offer was serious. I told him thanks, and that I’d think about it.
I’d opened the year wanting to crack six-figures, and now the offer was right in front of me. This was a $20k raise, and all it meant was holding my nose and going back to work for the place that laid me off just a year ago. Some of the folks would be good to work with again, but the work wouldn’t be as glamorous. Then again, I thought, the work I was doing currently wasn’t glamorous. At least at the old place I’d be coding again.
And yet still it wasn’t straightforward. I felt bad about leaving. I’d just started to be useful fighting data fires, allowing another team member to have some time away from it. I spent a couple of weeks thinking about it, and then I told my friend I’d take the job, and he started working on getting me an offer letter.
After that I decided to do something a little dumb to satisfy my curiosity. I went to my current job and laid the situation out truthfully, except the detail where I’d already told my old job I’d take the offer. I said something like “I’d rather work here, but you’d have to pay me at least $100k, since this other offer is $105k”. That much was true, I would rather keep this job, but I wasn’t sure I’d actually stay even if they now offered me the $100k. They spent a few days thinking, then told me they couldn’t do it. And I got some speech at some point about “the grass always being greener” and to really think about going back to that place just for more money. I told them “see ya later” and quit.
Also around this time, I dropped both of the grad school classes I was taking. I’d learned my lesson on not dropping classes back in undergrad, and with the vaccines now available and the world opening up, I didn’t want to force myself to do a bunch of schoolwork. So I was still halfway there, but had five more classes to go. They also ended up not offering what I wanted to take in the summer, so I would have to wait until fall to take more classes.
My roommate I was living with, who owned the townhouse, let me know that in the summer he was going to move states to live with his girlfriend he’d met the previous year. He was going to sell the townhouse, which meant I was going to have to find a new place. I really was going to miss paying $450 for rent.
So April came and I found myself back where I’d left off the previous March. Technically now I worked for the company that acquired us, but we really only worked on the same piece that we’d worked on before, so it felt about the same. And now I’d done it: I was making over $100k.
And for just a little while, things felt a little like the old days. Sure, we were working from home now, but the couple of times we went into the office were a lot of fun. It was nice working with these folks, and I felt happy about my decision to come back. I also figured it might be temporary, since once I finished grad school I would find a better job. The good times didn’t last.
Right as I’d started the job, they hired a VP of engineering – basically my boss’s boss. And it didn’t take long for that to start screwing everything up. First, it might help to understand the size of the team I was on. There were ten people: one project manager, two QA, and seven engineers if you include my boss.
Unrelated to anything else, one of the engineers decided to leave. No problem, just the usual churn. So now we’re down to nine people and six engineers. Also of note is that when the two-thirds of us got laid off a year ago, people that were kept got offered some tens of thousands of dollars in severance to stick around. Now that money had come, and one of the best engineers had signaled his intent to leave when he found something better.
As a jarring aside (that I don’t know how to make any smoother), that summer, my dad passed away. It wasn’t exactly a shock, we saw it coming, but it was still hard. I felt like I’d done a lot of processing in the months and years leading up to it, and did what I could to have a good relationship with him while I could. I’d always hoped it could’ve been even better in the future, and now it wasn’t going to happen. I dealt with it as best I could and continued on.
Before long, the VP of engineering pissed my boss off. My boss had specifically recommended he not be hired, since he sensed he was going to make things worse, and the CTO ignored that. My boss had budget to hire more engineers, and now the VP was screwing with that. Anyways, it didn’t take long for my boss to get tired of it, and he quit around the end of June. Alright, eight people and five engineers now. And now my boss was the VP. Great!
My boss felt really bad about bringing me onto a sinking ship. But I told him not to worry about it. Besides, I found it kinda entertaining. I also started to wonder what was going to happen. I certainly wasn’t worried about losing my job, but I started to wonder if the company was going to freak out if they sustained more losses.
In the middle of all this I made the bad decision to get back with my ex-girlfriend, and the worse decision to move in together. The upside was that we split rent, meaning that I was now only having to pay $360. The downside was, well, everything else. Not one of my finest moments.
The group of us on the team were fairly close, and around this time we compared salaries. It turned out I was making more than other folks, sometimes by a ridiculous amount. One of the other engineers, who was hired even before I was hired the first time, at $78k, was making only $70k, which means I was now making 50% more than him. Another engineer was making $95k. The remaining lead engineer who was planning to quit was making $145k, but he also had more than a decade of experience. The only one we didn’t know the pay of was the architect, who’d been with the company for over a decade and had written some of the original code (though according to my former boss it was only on par with the other lead engineer, kinda crazy).
Armed with that information, the engineer making $70k obviously felt like he was being underpaid. I agreed. So did one of our QA, who after a decade with the company was also making only $70k. Both went to the VP to ask for more money. The VP told them they could maybe get a token raise to $77k or so. Then both found jobs for $90k somewhere else. Then suddenly the VP said he could pay them more. But of course, it was too late. So we lost them both. Then we were down to six people and four engineers.
If I recall correctly, this was the panic threshold for them. I was pulled into a meeting and told that if I stuck around through June 30th, 2022, I would be given a retention bonus of $30k. There was no risk to signing it, I either stayed on that long or I didn’t. But it was a large enough money to peak my interest. I had originally thought I’d leave sooner, but it also seemed like it might line up with when I finished grad school, so maybe I could stick it out.
The engineer making $95k got an offer to go work as a data scientist. He wasn’t much bothered by all the work drama, but wanted that role so he took it. So we were five people, three engineers. And then of course, the one I knew was coming eventually: the lead engineer found a better role in August, and he took it. Besides my original boss leaving, this was the one that sucked the most, since we’d been keeping each other going for a couple of weird months. So of the original crew, we were now down to just four people, and only two engineers including myself.
I say original crew because in July we hired a new lead engineer. And a senior with a couple months after that. But they were so new that it really took more work to get them up to speed than they contributed. And it became clear to me pretty quick that this lead developer wasn’t all that great at his job. Then they started bringing on some contractors as a cost cutting measure, which meant more onboarding. And shortly thereafter a new engineering manager got hired, making this boss #3 for me so far.
Honestly, it was a mess, but it was a lot of good experience. Now being the second most tenured engineer, even just counting since coming back in April, when a big new project came down the pipe it was handed to me and the architect.
And then in September, the CTO himself, the man directly responsible for my getting laid off, pulled me into a meeting. This was also panic induced on his part. They now had only two engineers on this whole company they’d acquired that had any institutional knowledge. Oh yeah, and it’s worth mentioning that the parent company had gone public just before I came back, pretty much off the back of our division of the company propping them up. So long story short, they needed us.
How badly did they need us, and by extension, me? Enough to do all of the following: raise my salary from $105k to $115k, raise that retention bonus from $30k to $40k, $100k in stock vesting over the following four years, and additional stock grants every year equal to 25% of my salary, with those vesting over three years. Oh, holy shit. I guess it pays to stay on a sinking ship!
So now I was sure I’d have to stick around to the end of next June. Maybe even until the end of September to see the first bit of that stock vest. I would lying to tell you I didn’t find the entirety of this story hilarious. I was making $78k when I was laid off, and if they’d just kept me, I’d probably be making $83k. And now they needed me so badly they were paying all this money to do it. It was awesome.
And that was really the duality of working there. I was still pissed they laid me and all those other folks off. I was even more pissed they’d managed to get all of my remaining friends to quit. And yet, their idiocy was creating a golden opportunity. And I was going to take them for all they were worth.
I was becoming close with my new boss, boss #3, and we bonded on not really understanding what the hell this company was doing. He was growing to dislike the VP, which meant I knew he must be a good guy. With all the increased responsibilities at work, I was wondering what it would take to get promoted to senior engineer. Sure, titles only mean so much, but maybe I could try to leverage that into another senior role. I figured I was probably a year away from being considered for it.
So in my 1-on-1 with the VP, I asked him. He told me he’d delegated that to boss #3, so ask him. So I asked boss #3. He said something like “honestly it kinda feels like you’re already at that level now”. He said he would see if he could get it done by the end of the year. Well, alright!
The work on the big project at work continued, and I picked up a couple more classes for my graduate degree. These ones seemed to be a little less demanding that the ones from spring. I really wanted to just get it done at this point, which meant I couldn’t drop them again.
My boss was hitting some roadblocks getting me promoted. Namely, the VP was in the way. With all these people being so new, there was no real process of any kind. So the VP was trying to set direction, and that meant we needed to create a promotion packed. So my boss did. It was rejected. We worked together on a new one, and sent it over. In between all this were multiple 1-on-1s with both my boss and the VP. The VP was telling both of us different stories. He was telling me the packet would be enough, he was telling my boss he wanted to see me finish this big project. My boss didn’t understand why this was so difficult, since it never was at his old job.
And then the double hitter: the VP got fired, and boss #3 announced he would be resigning at the end of the year to go help on his dad’s farm. While I was happy the VP finally got what was coming to him, my unread promotion packet was sitting in his inbox. So that was going to be a problem. In the meantime, our company had been using a consulting firm and one of the guys from there was going to stay on for a while. In the wake of the VP announcement, it was decided he was going to be an acting US CTO, even though the company had a CTO already, though he was based in Europe.
That made this new consultant guy my best shot at pushing this through. I’d already figured it would be smart to get him on my side since the CTO and VP loved him. This only made that more apparent. Boss #3 sent him over the information about what had been going on, and I talked to him myself before the end of the year. I explained that the VP had the packet, it was all going to go through, explained how much my role had changed in the last several months, all of it.
I remember in this first meeting getting something to the effect of “titles don’t matter” and felt like maybe I wasn’t going to get anywhere, but he said he’d look into it. He came back once and asked about that raise I got in September. I’d figured this might be a problem, but I knew, as I explained to him, that was only because they were panicking. Anyone left at that point got it, and it wasn’t a promotion. He seemed to understand.
My grad school classes ended up going really well, which placed me at 70% of the way there. I decided to try something insane for spring: taking all three of the last remaining classes at once. It meant that I could walk at the May commencement and I could finally wash my hands of this school business once and for all. And anyways if I messed one up I could always take it in summer or fall. Couldn’t hurt to try.
I also broke up with my girlfriend, which was hard but necessary, meaning I was now on the hook for the two bedroom apartment we’d moved into. So rent was now $720, but still totally manageable.
As the year drew to a close, the stock market was hitting record highs, and I had been investing all year long. I maxed out my Roth IRA, HSA and 401k and was able to contribute to my brokerage account plenty too. That left my net worth at $188,903.78. Can’t hurt to have the market go up 27% in a single year! Find out in part six if I get the promotion, how I navigate this insane job, and if I manage to get grad school done. Thanks for reading!