Hello, everybody. It's Sam from the Financial Samurai Podcast. In this episode, I have a special guest with me, Andre Nader. He used to work at Facebook Meta for about nine years. He's based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'd love to talk to him about his FIRE journey and what he is doing post-Meta.

Say hello. Andre Nader Hey, Sam. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to get to chat with you a little bit more about my journey and being at Meta for nine years and then the next steps that I'm still trying to figure out and talk through that with you.

Sam: Yeah. Well, we first, I guess, connected over Twitter or I saw an article about you somewhere and I signed up for your newsletter, which I thought was really fascinating and really in-depth, particularly for those working in big tech and in tech in general in an expensive location. I really appreciate the detail you went through.

During my book tour with Buy This, Not That, you were gracious to host me at Meta to talk to I think 500 to 600 people over the course of an hour. And then you've just been really graceful in helping me just spread the word. So I really appreciate what you're doing.

In the beginning, tell me about your newsletter. When did you start it? How many subscribers do you have now and where can people sign up? Andre Nader Yeah. No, definitely. My newsletter, it's called Fang Fire, so F-A-N-G Fire. Right now it's hosted on Substack. So the link is my name, andrenader.substack.com.

I also have a shortcut that you can get to if you type in avocadofire.com, it'll take you straight there. I'm slowly trying to make Avocado Fire a thing. If I keep saying it over and over enough, it will eventually start sticking and I'll get my own definition. But I started writing I think about two years back.

And what I was finding was there's so much good fire content out there. I think among you and a dozen other people posting and just having such good in-depth information. But what I felt was kind of missing is this interesting perspective of being in a big tech company, working on the coasts in these expensive areas, and going into fine detail like what exactly should I be doing?

Because I think there's a lot of the fire foundation isn't different regardless of whether you're making 50,000 or 250,000 or more. But there's a lot of nuance that comes particularly when you're in tech around just understanding compensation. If you talk to someone in tech and ask them, "How much do you get paid?" It's really surprising how often they understand how much they were offered when they first signed up or they have some rough idea of their base salary.

But so much as you advance in your tech career ends up coming from RSUs and stock-based compensation and different employee stock plans. And it becomes a little bit confusing. And you have these incredibly intelligent people that are very good at specific things. And then it's not always like the financial piece just doesn't come for free and you need to understand and learn it a little bit more.

So I was just wanting to go through and explain to people. One, I was just starting from a place of in my own personal journey of I'm planning myself for fire and I'm a data analyst by trade. So naturally that comes with a lot of spreadsheets and doing a lot of planning for myself and creating a lot of dashboards around just me even answering that question.

How much do I make? What is my total comp? What is my total comp today? Facebook stock just dropped 20%. What is it now? And being able to quickly answer those questions. And it started with just building out these different tools and then writing about the tools. And then people started finding them valuable.

And within Meta there's the fire community. I think when I left we had about 11,000 people that were part of it. So having that community of people that were going through similar circumstances I found like really, really valuable. So that's why I started writing was contributing both to the internal Meta fire community, but just as well as like the broader FANG community.

The compensation is similar across a lot of big tech in how it works. So what I found was how my compensation was structured, how I was setting up my dashboards with a little bit of modification. It could work for pretty much anyone that is in tech and getting paid in RSUs.

And just wanting to, again, start from that place of like, here's me and my journey talking from a point of someone who's physically going through it right now. Like I always write it into like, my goal is to be able to be fire in five years when I started writing a couple of years ago.

And being able to talk in detail. And I love going into too much detail and going and breaking down all the numbers and going down and going through crazy scenarios around moving and going into a lower cost of living area. But just kind of going through. And it ended up resonating with a lot of people.

They found that they could relate because they're going through the same thing. And that's where I was coming from and just sharing kind of my story is all I was trying to do with my writing on FANG Fire. Great. And let's talk about compensation because when I write about expensive coastal living, a lot of people can't believe the cost of housing and some of the budgets that I have on like $300,000 budget and so forth.

So can you give the listeners an idea of what a first year engineer would make at Meta in terms of salary plus RSUs? What does that package look like and how does it vest? Yeah. I'm going to post on there real quick so I can speak specifically. I created a outline actually of following a new grad all the way through from their first year all the way to Fire.

And let me pull it up real quick. Fire, for those who don't know, is financial independence, retire early. It's a movement that I helped pioneer or started back in 2009 and then a lot of people talked about it. And I think it's something that I think will continue to go, although it's interesting because now post pandemic, there's a lot more work flexibility.

I see a lot of people playing pickleball during the middle of the day and just taking naps. I saw a CEO of a public company yesterday play tennis at 2.45 p.m. next to me. I always needle him and was like, "Hey, don't you have a company to run?" Anyway, so that's interesting that maybe Fire is not as necessary or interesting now given we can just work and play at the same time.

Yeah. No, definitely. And I think the – and even what you're saying like on the remote work piece. One of my first posts, if we can go into the compensation on a new grad, but one of my first posts when I started writing was all around relocating and leaving San Francisco.

Because San Francisco, the cost of living is so high and the budgets that go with it end up needing to be high to compensate. And the companies needing to – if they want people in their offices, need to compensate people enough to make it worth them leaving their homes in Texas to move to expensive coastal living like the headquarters for Meta down in Menlo Park, one of the most expensive areas in the country.

Other headquarters in New York and Seattle, all very expensive areas. So you just need to be paying people enough to make it worth it. But with remote work, all of a sudden it opened up. But I think now we're seeing an interesting trend of like, is remote work the future?

I think we're seeing a little bit of an interesting clawback and wanting to have more and more people in the office. I know there was a big revolt at Amazon, maybe even just yesterday, because they were being asked to come into the office three days a week. And that led to a worker strike there.

So there's like an interesting tension going on right now on like the future of full remote work and flexibility versus wanting to get back into the office. I think that natural – workers had all the power early in the pandemic and then now the pendulum is swinging quickly back into the other side of things.

So tell me about the compensation. Yeah. So a new grad engineer, like the – you have to remember too, we're talking like meta, the compensation philosophy is always around trying to get the very best from the very best schools with the best experiences and paying them at top of salary bands, like in like the 99th, 95th percentile.

So the salaries that we're going to be talking about, like these are not like salaries that everyone can roll out of bed and go and get. This is the people that get these have worked their asses off. They've had the best internships, multiple internships in many cases, coming from top schools.

But these – there's still like the – like thousands and thousands of new grads that are getting these jobs. And there's a tremendous number of them and opportunities there. So a new grad, the way that it works when you're starting at Facebook and as an engineer, there's different levels.

Each level has specific salary bands of how much they're going to make, both in terms of base comp as well as bonuses, as well as RSUs. On the base for a new grad engineer, the level is called E3, so engineer level three. And the base salary starts at $125,000 entirely base.

And if you're thinking through like, okay, $125,000 base, then that doesn't include any of the stocks, doesn't include any of the bonus. And the way that it's structured broadly is the – at that initial level of E3, they're eligible for a 10% bonus per year. And that will happen after performance reviews.

And it's all based on their salary that they've made times that 10%. And there's also individual multipliers depending on their individual performance. So if you do really well, you can actually get more than 10%. If the company does really well, there's also an additional multiplier there. Or if it does poorly, it can also come down a little bit more, bring it down to earth.

So you have that base salary, $125,000. You have that 10% bonus piece. But then you also have equity. And equity is where, as a tech worker, initially starts as not the largest amount. But if you're staying at a company long enough or as you get more and more senior, it becomes a bigger and bigger piece of your overall compensation.

So a new hire engineer can expect a new grant of around $180,000. So we have – just to recap that, $125,000 base, a 10% bonus, and then $180,000 in new stock grant. And the way that these stock grant work is they vest over a four-year period. Starting immediately, though.

Back when I first started, there was at least a one-year vest, which meant you had to wait a year before any of your stock vests. More and more companies have kind of done away with that and started vesting immediately. So every single quarter, a portion of that $180,000 will vest.

And that kind of brings up into the – I don't know. That puts you in the – already, right off the bat, in the $200,000 range of total comp kind of coming in. And that's like a crazy amount to me, thinking about a new grad coming in, never worked, potentially ever.

First time on their own, and then making $200,000. And this is why I started writing, is just because there's so much opportunity. If I was starting out in my career making $200,000, I couldn't even think about it. As a new grad, I was an economics major, graduating into the Great Recession back in 2009, and dreaming of making six figures down the line, working in the New Yorks.

So having now, thinking through, okay, now we're in 2023, these engineers being able to come in, go to San Francisco, and make upwards of $200,000 in year one, it's unbelievable. But they don't have the – sorry, go ahead. Is it $200,000, though? So it's $125,000. So $180,000 divided by four is like, I don't know, $45,000.

So that's $170,000, and then there's a raise. So like almost $200,000, but not $200,000, right? Like maybe $180,000? Yeah. Here, I can – It's still pretty good. Yeah, still pretty damn good. It's not too bad. And it really increases really quickly, too. So the base starting at $125,000, that's at E3 level.

There's like an expectation within the first two years of you being able to advance to E5. So that's two levels more. And if you don't get to E5 within those two years for the engineering side, there's the – essentially an up and out kind of thing around, like they're expecting some rapid progression, and you being able to level from E3 to E4.

With E4, the base salary is already $150,000, and the bonus increases to around like 15%. And your equity grants are higher as well. Is it every four years you get topped up another $180,000 plus in equity? How does that work? Every single year at Facebook, you get a refresher.

And the refresher, this is where it's important when you're going into DECK, understanding the compensation philosophy of the different companies, because they all approach it really differently. So you can't – like I'm talking about how Meta approaches it. But I can't – and it's important. Go to websites like levels.fyi and see how these packages kind of look like.

But broadly speaking, like at Meta, it's very formulaic. It's very much based on like what is your level, what is your role, what country are you in, and that's how much stock you'll get, and like your performance, the performance rating that you get at during the annual review cycles.

But it's formulaic. It doesn't look back and see how much stock they've given you in the past. It doesn't look at what your base salary is. It's just – it doesn't look at how the stock has performed over that period. It's very much, okay, this is how much stock you'll be getting.

You're at this level. And this is – you're in the United States, so you're going to be getting this top up. And every level has different bands. Every position has different bands. So you have like engineer – we're talking about software engineer. It's typically going to be the highest compensated role within a tech company.

The second one being the product managers, and then everyone kind of going through from there on. So you have like the engineer, top tier, getting – they are the ones that set the bands of everything. Then you have the product managers, which are probably getting paid on like the – I don't know, 70% to 80% of the RSU package of an engineer.

And then it kind of goes down from there. >> In terms – product managers, interesting. I've seen a lot of jokes about product managers online where they just kind of – they do their day in the life of meta and then they go and eat their – drink their kombucha.

Then they have like a nice buffet spread and then they just sit back in a lounge chair and then they just say, "Hey, what are you guys working?" And the engineer is like, "Hey, this is what we're going to do." And then they go have drinks later. Now, how much of that is like real and fake?

What does a product manager do? Is the product manager the person who stereotypically just doesn't know how to code so they just are just pushing pencils around? What do they do? >> It's definitely a role that's evolved over time. I think especially within tech, oftentimes in the early days, most of the product managers were former engineers and that's how it started.

And certain companies have very strong engineering-driven product management philosophies. If Google particularly up until recently, the vast, vast majority of product managers at Google were ex-engineers because that was how they valued the role showing up. But I'll tell you, you see the day in the life pieces. I think the product managers earn every – I'm not a product manager.

My role is product growth, so it's more on the closer to a product manager meets a data scientist and the comp closer to data scientist as opposed to a product manager. But the product managers, I think they – in my experience working at Meta, among some of the best product managers that I've worked with, they earn every single penny.

It's a tremendous amount of work in order to wrangle, set the vision for an entire team. And then when you're working at a place like Meta, you're not just working in your own silo where it's like, "Okay, I'm working on how businesses advertise. I have this control over this one piece." And you can't just in isolation focus on building that one item.

Everything is so interconnected. It requires a tremendous amount of coordination across teams. So you have the product manager setting the vision for the team, but also needing to do a tremendous amount of work around building consensus across partner teams. Because if you have a team working on advertising that's trying to do something to increase the amount of ads that are being shown, that will have a tremendous amount of impact on the user experience.

And then you have teams working on the user side of how newsfeed works or teams working on reels or teams working on all of the latest and greatest different features that are being added. And all of these different features and all of these product changes have foundational implications on the rest of the ecosystem.

So a lot of coordination. And then we're going into 2023, what is top of... It's like front and center. We're in an entirely different world than when I first started at Meta nine years ago, where it's a much more privacy conscious, a much more sensitive environment. So there's a lot of policy reviews, legal reviews.

And the product managers play a huge role in making sure all of the roadmaps that the teams are working on are fully compliant and meeting all of our obligations that the teams have set. And really just setting the vision. And then they're entirely liable on the execution. At Meta, it's very much a, what is your impact?

What are you having? It's not around setting the vision, it's around what did you actually deliver? And among roles, I think product managers are the most on the hook for actually delivering on the vision that they set for. It's not just setting the vision, it's actually being able to deliver and execute on that.

And again, doing that from a point of, they're not the ones actually coding. So having to motivate the team, set the vision, coordinate with all the cross-functional partners, get the engineers bought in, excited, and just being able to execute on that. And the world also changes on a dime, especially at a Meta where the pandemic happens, all of a sudden your roadmap changes entirely and needing to quickly at the drop of a hat change it.

Or there's a year of efficiency, which Mark announced, and there's a reduction in workforce. And all of a sudden the roadmap that you had built out that anticipated your team growing by 50% is now seeing a reduction in team and needing to at the drop of the hat change the entire roadmap.

But people don't like to change goals either. So how do you make the same level of impact with fewer people, fewer resources on top of being distracted by other changes that are happening around you? So it's definitely the day in the life pieces. They take care of us at these places like Meta and we are spoiled.

And I will not deny that the food is there. You're getting chauffeured around in buses, taking you from San Francisco down to Menlo Park every day. But you work for that too. It doesn't come for free. Speaking of work, the other dilemma I think a lot of people have is big tech or startups.

And I've written about in the past how if you join a startup, you'll probably end up poorer than richer because the success rate is low. And all you hear about are the huge successes in the media. But the reality is, think about it as a venture capitalist, nine out of ten of your investments fail or they're zombie companies.

So how are you going to make that money? So is there a, I guess, "risk" of being too comfortable at big tech and getting lulled into just doing the same thing over and over again? Because I have met many people from big tech who have left big tech to try to do something a little bit more impactful on a smaller scale at a startup.

What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, no, it's really interesting. And it's something that I've been at. I was at Meta for nine years. I've over that time continuously talked to other companies, most of them startups, to learn more about what they're doing. And I'm of the philosophy that you should constantly be thinking about what's next and learning what's out there because life is all around opportunity, cost, and understanding.

What's out there helps you make those decisions around whether you want to make those tradeoffs. And I do think it is easy to get comfortable once you finally make it in to one of these large companies and you're continuously getting these new stock grants every year. They call the stock grants "golden handcuffs" for a reason.

They're investing over four years and you're getting more of them every four years. I think it's easy to get comfortable. And it's, in a certain level, fairly predictable around how much you're going to make. The past couple of years has been a little different because of the volatility of the tech stocks themselves.

But I think the FOMO that you see, even among people at the largest tech companies of startups that are doing well, is very, very real. I think you see you can make a lot of money in big tech within the FANG company. The FANG, by the way, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google is where the acronym came from.

And you can make a tremendous amount of money there, but it's like the... And the risk is generally lower if you're at those companies. But if you're wanting to... The startups has the potential for significantly more, but that risk is super high. Like you said, the vast majority of them will fail.

The vast majority of them won't be the next Facebook. It won't be the next... I don't know. I was almost going to say Twitter. That's probably not the best outcome that you want. But there's the higher likelihood of it not working out. And it is challenging because when you're joining a startup, your base salary is going to take a hit and the equity is entirely liquid.

You're going to be getting an imaginary amount of equity that could 10X, 100X. And that's kind of what you would be banking on in order to get that upside versus just taking a job at a public company and having that there. But I think it was... I think a few years ago, it was all around all the crypto companies earning tremendous amounts of venture capital and seeing valuations increase like year over year at incredible rates.

And then you're seeing the same thing on a lot of the AI startups where the valuations... So your paper money all of a sudden seeing ridiculously large increases. And at the same time, I'm talking about the RSUs being golden handcuffs. It's just as easy, I think, at a startup if you're in early and it starts doing medium well to kind of get stuck because you get in this dangerous place where all of a sudden your paper money is worth a lot, but it's not super liquid.

There's some opportunities to sell in the secondary market, but it's still incredibly challenging to cash out in a predictable way. So that's my high level view. It's worth doing the math, understanding the potential that could be there, but also going in being like, "Hey, it could probably fail." Assume your startup grants are going to be worthless and go in with the opportunities that you have.

You're going to get a lot of different opportunities at a startup. You're going to be able to do so many different roles. You're wearing all of the hats. At big tech, you end up getting very specialized and becoming very good at being a good employee at big tech, working on a very specific type of problem.

And within a startup, you don't have that luxury of specializing as much. You need to be a generalist and need to be a jack of all trades to get anything done because you can't lean on another team of engineers to go build something. You need to – if you're not going to be working on it and getting your team to work on it, it's just not going to happen.

So it's an entirely different dynamic. >> Yeah. I know a friend who I started playing softball with back in 2017, 2018. And in 2020, he joined Figma as the VP of something something. So he probably had like $185,000, $200,000 base salary. He was at Uber grinding it out pre-IPO.

I mean, Uber didn't do that great, right? But then Figma got acquired three years later by Adobe. I think he went from maybe like $2 million total to like $50 million in just three years. I mean, it was unbelievable. And I had never heard of – I was like, "What is this Figma?" I was like, "What is this?

Design something on the fly, whatever, whatever." And it's like, "What? $20 billion acquisition by Adobe?" So I think it's these type of stories that really create a lot of FOMO for people. Where like, "Wow, I could go from $1 or $2 million net worth to $50 plus million." I mean, it's just unbelievable.

>> And I think that you're seeing all the IPOs a couple years ago, and all the stocks are popping at the IPO. So there was a big trend of like, "Oh, I want to get into the next pre-IPO company. I'm going to go join all these different places that are about to go IPO." I think we ran into a harsh reality over the last couple of years.

We had a lot of people going to companies like Instacart, Stripe, all these companies that were the golden child, about to IPO, having evaluations increase and double on a regular basis. But then the market soured, and all of a sudden, their plans to IPO were like, "Oh, we're going to put it on hold and wait a little bit and bump it out a little bit, bump it out a couple years." So it's not always guaranteed, and the upside's not locked in.

And even those safe, like, "Oh, I'm going to go at a very established company that's almost about to IPO, and I still get some of that upside, and it might not materialize." But like you said, it doesn't always go well. We've seen more and more IPOs recently not do well.

You mentioned Uber. So my wife's actually at Uber. She's been there five years. So we've gone through the full pre-IPO to IPO, and the stock is still not back to the IPO price or within the relative range. So it's not always a home run, even getting in pre-IPO and working through the IPO and years after.

It's good salary. Don't get me wrong. It's just not the all of a sudden, I'm flying private and going to my condo in Jackson Hole on the weekends kind of thing. But the CEO is doing that. The CEO's, yeah. The CEO's are a different thing. Once you get to the executive level and the comp packages become – I mean, it's all public information being able to see what the top executives are making.

It's a different world entirely once you make it to that upper echelon. Yeah. It's not bad. It's interesting how much they get paid for a lot of times how little they do. I don't know how much they can affect the company's share price. But even if it's flat, they still get paid huge amounts or if it underperforms.

It's just amazing how great it is to be a CEO of a large public company. I mean, if they were like the founder and CEO, okay, I can respect that. But if you're like just a guy, a hired gun to try to like move some chess pieces, that's pretty impressive.

I want to move some chess pieces for $100 million a year. It's such an interesting dynamic going from like the different companies that are like under-led still, which Meta being one of them, Mark still being the founder and still being CEO and still holding the majority of voting shares and having like full autonomy to decide the course of what's going on.

Not full, like obviously still at the duty of the shareholders, but having much more control than say like Dara, who's the CEO at Uber after Travis was forced to step down. They have a lot of equity, but it's not coming in as the founder with like 50% equity range.

It's an entirely different dynamic. How do regular people like me and maybe a lot of listeners here get into big tech? Because I tried getting into tech in 2012 because I've been in San Francisco since 2001. After I engineered my layoff in 2012, I was like, "Okay, let me just try to get into big tech or tech." I applied to Airbnb when it was a $3 billion company.

I was like, "Oh, this is obviously a no-brainer." But I couldn't get in at all. I came from finance, so I didn't have a tech background. But I felt like I had an MBA. I went to undergrad. I spoke normally. But I guess I didn't have any connections. How do normal people who didn't go to great schools or have connections get in?

What's like a path? I would like to say, I perfectly planned my career to get into big tech and it was executed flawlessly. I never imagined that I would be at big tech. My plans were never to do it. I can tell you my journey and I can tell you how I would think about it and the advice that I would give to people trying to pursue it.

For me personally, like I was saying before, I graduated with an economics degree, University of Texas in Austin back in 2009. I wanted to do finance. I wanted to do banking. That was the prestigious job at the time. It was like, "Oh, I want to be an investment banker and work 100 hours per week and be in New York." That's just the dream.

That was the pinnacle of every econ business grad at the time of what they were wanting. Going into internship season 2007, people were getting all of their offers started to get rescinded from all the investment banks. Being in Austin already, all the job fairs dried up. There was nothing available.

All there was was a handful of anything finance related was like selling insurance. For some reason, they're always able to hire. What I ended up doing was I was like, "I want this econ degree." I don't even know what that means at the time. I'm just kind of like, I don't know.

I wanted to do business. I found a random role at a startup in Austin. The company is called Build the Sign. It's an e-commerce company that works and makes custom signage. I'm just like completely very random. What ended up being is a handful of software engineers out of the University of Texas found this interesting niche where the online sign industry was run by these mom and pop shops that are just operating in person.

It was super expensive to deal with. In the classic, let's go in and disrupt this industry, they set up this entirely custom online sign design software. At the time, it was kind of revolutionary for the industry. They just had a fine detailed understanding of all of their costs were so able to quickly undercut everyone.

I kind of came in over there and was working on what's called SEO, so search engine optimization, which is something I never even heard of. It's not something that they taught at schools at the time, but it was all around how do you help a website rank highly in Google.

It involves some analysis. It involved a lot of just learning the ins and outs of how search engines works and how different pages can rank in Google and Yahoo and depending on what you're doing, all these different places. It was just like this, not what I planned, not what I went to school for.

I just had to be opportunistic because that was what was available. It almost had business analyst in the title, I think was one of the reasons why I was initially went down that path, but it had nothing to do with getting big tech in the beginning. It had nothing to do with banking.

It was just what was available. I was going into a tough job market and that was kind of what was there, but what I quickly found is this is a big niche. There's not a lot of people now after being an intern there for the summer and staying on during my junior year working there.

Not very many people have this SEO skill set back in 2008, 2009 and being able to leverage that into another internship at a different company that was then paying me $15 an hour instead of $10 an hour and that being a big jump up and then learning the ins and outs of the next company.

The next company was offers.com, which was doing basically like RetailMeNot, doing a coupon website where they would earn an affiliate commission off of every signup. Just very random companies that I wouldn't have thought about or knew about until I was in the job hunt. The consistent thing was slowly getting these more and more niche skills and what was required to be able to be effective at these jobs was getting more technical.

At the time, it started with being really proficient in Excel. Over time, it became needing to know how to use SQL because the data sets ended up getting bigger. All it was, if you're coming from finance, you know your Excel, you know doing pivot tables. It was just translating how to do all of that into SQL.

It's just like reconstructing all of your pivot tables into SQL ends up being the same. If you're coming from an Excel-heavy background, starting to get more technical in SQL, once you understand how the connections are working and how you're trying to manipulate the data in the same way, the connections start happening there.

There's this overall trend of being more technical over time. Then I had another break where I joined Indeed.com, which is the job search site. Again, just being opportunistic, constantly looking at new opportunities. I think these first couple of jobs I was there, a year and a half, two years max, and continuously looking for bigger roles, bigger opportunities, and the opportunity to learn more.

Early on, again, I was earning $30,000 out of school, no equity. I was getting some private company stock, but it was imaginary stock that just went away after I left the company. It wasn't even the pre-IPO things that we're talking about in Silicon Valley now. Just starting from very small beginnings, not imagining that I would be working at big tech, but getting more technical.

Indeed, it changed the game for me because the data sets ended up getting much larger. I had a manager that pushed me to be more technical. It was like, "Hey, if you're going to do this and be successful, you need to really double down on your technical acumen. It's not good enough being a marketer that knows Excel.

You need to be proficient in SQL. You need to be proficient in Python because that's what we need you to be. If you're going to be successful here, you need to learn these things. We'll equip you with the training and the classes to get there, but you need to put in the work." It was that big unlock and getting even more technical with every single role, getting even more niched down where I had this specialty that I could always fall back on, where I felt like I could get these niche jobs at any place.

Indeed, I had the benefit of them growing incredibly quickly. When I started, I think there was a couple hundred. When I left, there was a couple thousand over three years. When you're at a company that's small and growing quickly, you also quickly gain ownership over different things. I went from being an analyst to a senior analyst to a manager to a director within a span of three years.

There's a lot of title inflation that goes on in smaller companies, but as an early career person, you're getting more responsibility faster than you would get anywhere else. Now, we're talking. We're talking the five years out of school, still in Austin, never thought I was going to be leaving Texas, bought a home, got married, had chickens in the backyard, the classic American dream in my head.

It was like the white picket fence, house with the red door kind of thing. Then get this random message on LinkedIn from a recruiter at Facebook and saying, "Hey, we have this opening on this role called growth marketing and we think that you would be a good fit." Little did I know, they reached out to every single person on my team.

They found a little pot of people with the skill sets that they wanted. Every single person in my team, probably around ten people, little did I find out afterwards, we had all interviewed. They got in contact with all of us. Half of us ended up flying out to San Francisco or Menlo Park to do interviews in person.

And ended up just doing well in that interview and getting that job in there. That was kind of my in. It was never planned. It was just like I was getting more technical. I was learning SQL. I was learning these skills that it turns out these big companies are really in demand for.

That was kind of my story and how to get there. If I was trying to master plan my way there now in retrospect, if my goal is to be in big tech, you don't have to go through and do exactly what I did and meander through opportunistically. I do think you should approach your career opportunistically because the roles and jobs that I'm in now didn't exist when I was first graduating.

My title now was product growth manager. That's not a title that existed. Or even when I joined Facebook originally, it was like growth marketing. That's not a title that existed. So going in and getting tunnel vision too much on some of these roles isn't what's important. It's more around the broad general skills that these companies are looking for.

And so I think LinkedIn is a great resource of looking through and seeing who are these different people in these companies. And what you'll find is actually there's more than just product managers and engineers at these companies. There are hundreds of different roles across the spectrum, again, from doing traditional finance, especially at these public companies, the teams and teams of finance, HR, recruiting, design, content on the business side, ops, research, customer support.

There's all of these different roles. And if you look through the people that have these titles, go through and see, okay, did they start at this company? In many cases, most roles, the person probably didn't start at Meta. They started somewhere else, but they gained certain skills that Meta found valuable for these roles.

One example that I can kind of give you for the team that I was on, on product growth, some roles hire new grads, other ones don't. Like engineering oftentimes will hire new grads and kind of like train them up. Ops roles, customer support roles will hire new grads because they can start them from zero and build them up.

But other roles, they have the luxury of being like, "Hey, we want other companies to do the hard work and getting people with the skills, and we'll just go and poach them later on and offer them 99% salary packages." And the team that I was on, you would see pockets of people from these companies.

Like I said, everyone on my team indeed was recruited because we had these certain sets of skills. You would have dozens of people on the team from Capital One, dozens of people from companies like Vistaprint or DraftKings, because these companies are actually really, really good at hiring really smart new grads and training them from scratch and getting them the skills that then these big companies really value.

So you end up having like these unofficial feeder companies. These companies wouldn't like to hear that, and I'm sure they hate seeing it, but they do a really good job of training new grads with the skills that larger companies value. So I think if you're being an analyst, like a data scientist or any type of analyst, like "Ah, man, Capital One, I think more data scientists and analysts come from Capital One than nearly any other company that I was to pick from within Meta especially," just because I think they have such a good reputation and program of getting new grads in and learning those experiences.

So I think it's like, look at the roles that you're excited about. See what skills the people that have those roles have and what companies they worked at before they joined Meta. Then there's also the other path around like what roles do these companies like Meta hire new grads for?

And then kind of like once you're in, like sometimes there's a lot more mobility on internal transfer. If you asked me like five years ago, I would say it was even easier. Now I think it becomes a little bit more challenging depending on the... Everything is impacted by the macro environment of like how fast teams are growing and the need for people in different roles.

When teams are growing really quickly, it's much easier to be able to get in without like all of the skill requirements. As things tighten up, it becomes a little bit more competitive because again, you're competing with people externally that might already have these skills. So needing to really set yourself apart and prove that you can kind of drive value from day one because they're not paying top of band 99% salary bands for someone that they need to train up.

So there's a reason why they're offering those bands because they're wanting the people that already can hit the ground running and execute from day one. >> Okay. Well, thanks for that. So you've been there for nine years and you talked about first year guys starting out at $185,000, maybe $200,000 depending on the RSU value.

You joined sounds like at what, 28, 29? >> Yeah, right around there. So I joined Meta in 2014 and now I'm 36. I have to do the math backwards, so around there. >> Okay. So joining then, obviously the stock price was much lower. You had all that base salary growth and you got promoted.

So can you give an idea of how much wealth you were able to build over a nine-year bull run? Because I think a lot of listeners including myself will think, "God, he surely must have made a heck of a lot of money in those nine years." >> Yeah. Early on again, so I joined Meta.

I was talking about the different levels that I had and I remember that. So I was coming, I was at Indeed before my role was director of something or another. I think I was making like $80,000 and Meta, I joined and that was in Austin, Texas too. And then I joined Meta coming in and the offer that I ended up signing was I think in like $135,000 plus like $100,000 in stock.

So already like around how much a new grad software engineer would make. So that kind of gives you kind of the delta that a engineer has to a lot of these other functions kind of coming in. So having that, what sounds like a big salary increase, but what I actually penciled in was that it was like compared to the cost of living and the increase that I would need to have in relative to Texas.

I was doing it like, okay, it's probably like a little bit higher, but almost a wash. But I was approaching it very much of the mindset of proving that I could do it at a place like Meta would let me go back to Texas in three years and start running things and getting all the C-level jobs at all of these tech companies in Austin.

That was kind of like my vision at the time. So it was never around like I want to go in Meta to just earn a shitload of money and advance really quickly. But every year I was kind of like, okay, do I stay at Meta or not? And I would always say like, I have three more years in me.

I have three more years in me. And the reason was because the salaries continued to increase. The amount of equity that I was getting continued to increase. Again, so you have that initial 100,000 rent. Then a couple of years, the next year, getting another 100,000. And again, like you were saying before, the stock when I joined was $60.

So that $100,000 is static. That $100,000 was based on Meta stock at, or Facebook stock at $60. So you benefit tremendously from when the stock is doing really well. All of a sudden your salaries can go from like an expectation of getting like under $200,000 to $300,000. And then after a couple of years, the salaries like continue to grow because you're building up every single year, additional vests, additional equity amounts that are being granted over different amounts.

So over my span of nine years, like my total comp was anywhere from like $200,000 some years all the way to like $600,000 at like the peak. So in a single year all in, and that's like liquid amount that I could sell every single year. So we have talked about like nine years in that range, you're able to quickly, very quickly accumulate significant amounts of capital.

And also my household is double tech. My wife's at Uber five years, other companies before that. And we'd always been able to maintain a stable or like keep our spending in check. We went eight years without having a car in San Francisco, shared a one bedroom place in the middle of the mission and able to take advantage of the economies of scale that come from the dual income, no kids lifestyle early on.

And I think we were saving more than like $300,000 per year in like relatively quickly and able to just like quickly accumulate assets. And like I was always of the mindset of as soon as I get any stock, I'm selling it immediately and buying like a diversified index funds and just maxing out every single retirement account, every single mega backdoor Roth account that I could take advantage of.

And it's just like pumping money into these accounts. And like in my head, I was like, okay, this is like what started as like, okay, I'm going to be able to fire in 10 years. I'm like, okay, this is like, it can happen much more quickly than I thought.

What also happened is like I was there nine years. My fire number, when I thought I could live off of also drastically changed. And when I first started, I was like, all I need is $60,000 per year to live off of. So I was starting from Austin, like $60,000 was a ton.

I could support two people, no problem. I was earning $30,000 or around there. So then my, what I needed to sustain myself, my, so I kept moving the goalposts as the salaries were increasing, but I also kept enjoying the job too. So there's, I was getting a lot of fulfillment from the job.

So there wasn't this rush of wanting to cut out and disconnect. But when you're saving like 300,000 plus per year, which again, coming from a kid that started graduated making $30,000, like I never imagined that I would earn $300,000, let alone be able to save that amount. So just, it adds up quickly, like the compound interest on top of just being able to pound money away and save it, the assets build up.

So I'm going to do the simple math for everybody. Nine years times 300,000 is 2.7 million. You add, I don't know, 5% compound growth, even 8%, we're at $3 million. And that's before you were saving any money when you joined Metta at 28. So I'm going to guess y'all's net worth is three plus million.

Yeah, you're, you're, you're, you're, yes. Okay. And what is enough for a family of three? What is your fire? How do you calculate it? My fire, I feel like I'm conservative, but I'm not as conservative as you. Where I like to keep it simple around, like I like the 3% rule as opposed to the 4% rule.

So I kind of just take how much I need to spend and multiply that by the nice and easy 33.33, which I think will get me to that 3% number. So I think I put in all in my fire number being like a bit more than 4 million. I do have, I have a five-year-old right now.

So my fire number includes certain amounts of spending. So I think I'm wanting to spend like 120 grand a year, not including housing and being able to have my daughter's college. Not including housing. Why is that? Because I think the housing is the biggest, I don't know where I'm going to retire.

And the, I struggle with being able to put a number down on my enough number without knowing where. So what I did was actually, I deconstructed my enough number into different components. One was to cover the amount of space spend that I want, excluding housing, because housing is so variable.

And right now my rent in San Francisco is $5,000. If I were to buy a house, it would, my mortgage would be north of $10,000. And if I moved somewhere else, it would be maybe half of that or something like that. So that variable was always a little bit complicated.

So what I did was enough to get me $120,000 per year to spend, excluding housing. And I had this like ballpark number of like, okay, let's like say I'm going to leave and go to North Carolina and buy like an $800,000 house. So that's kind of where I backed into the 4 million.

It was like this assumption that I leave San Francisco, but I haven't left San Francisco. I stayed in San Francisco. So that's where my enough number for North Carolina, isn't it my enough number for San Francisco. And that requires kind of like potentially staying, keeping working or figuring out what that is.

And it's kind of been shifting and doing it. But at the same time, I think like life is too short to not live somewhere that you want. And that's where I've continuously kind of reevaluated like is, I feel like it's moving the goalposts, but at the same time, like I don't want to make a sacrifice that I like, I'm still young.

I'm like in my 30s, 36. I live somewhere. I was like, there you go. So the following in your footsteps. And yeah, I think that like, I like San Francisco still like for all its ups and downs. It's still like a great place to live. And I think there's like so much opportunity here that but it does, it changes your fire number for sure.

But I'm going to tell you your fire number right now. So you spend 10,000 a month, 120,000 a year. And if you rent at 5,000 a month, so that's another 60,000 years, that's 180,000 times 33.3. So that's 6 million. There you go. 6 million. But obviously, if you move to a lower cost area, you're probably good at 4 to 5 million.

Yeah. So 4 million was my non-San Francisco number. And then San Francisco has the extra wrench. Right. So it sounds like you're kind of close to it, to your non-San Francisco number. I guess my question is do you really feel close to it even though it says you're close to it on paper because there's an emotional aspect to it of walking away and then there's actually walking away.

It's hard to do. It took me – it didn't take me actually that long to do because I had the severance package and I was strategic in planning. But it is still hard to do. So how far away do you emotionally feel from that fire number? Yeah. I think the – so I think we were dancing around it and I can kind of go more specifically.

So I was laid off from Meta last week on Wednesday. And it wasn't like a huge surprise. The mark had announced a year of efficiency back in February. And then back in November, we had the first round of layoffs. So we knew that there was layoffs coming for different teams.

And I knew that my team would potentially be impacted in May. But it was very interesting to me because in my head when I was thinking about it in January, I was thinking it was like awesome. I'm pretty close. I'm a two-income household. We could get by with just like me retiring like my wife wanted to still work being able to do that.

Or we could fire and leave and go to the North Carolinas of the world and fire immediately if we wanted to. But what I found interesting was when reality happened and the announcements of the year of efficiency and more specifically of your role being at Jeopardy in May, my first reaction was immediately start applying for new jobs.

So I found that interesting where I was like on paper, I'm writing about enough. I'm writing about like this is what I need to do to be able to do whatever I want and not have money be the primary motivator. And in my head, it was always like if money was not an option, I don't know if I would spend my day working.

Like in my head, I wouldn't do nothing. But on paper, when I was thinking about it, I don't think I would be spending 40, 50 hours a week in a tech job even if it was paying $500,000 plus per year. That was not what I said. But I think that's different when all of a sudden reality comes and punches you in the face and being like, "Hey, your job actually might go away." And immediately start applying at every single thing company and like getting out there.

So like the fight or flight response in me was let me quickly fill this salary gap immediately as quickly as I can. And now I'm on the officially still employed because I'm on severance or during the war period and officially will be off in the end of July. But I also have a severance coming in that they've been fairly generous on.

So I do have the luxury of not being in a hurry to do something new. But I feel less able to unplug even if I'm at my number than I thought I would be. And I think that the struggle of like, "Hey, you just got reality. You got knocked out.

You got a severance package on your way out." If you're going into fire, like you said, you're always the king of engineering your exit and getting that severance on the way out. I can't think of a better way to go into fire than getting a severance package as you leave.

Absolutely. But actually, I'm one week in of having- Caught you raw. Of the seven series. So you're coming in raw and having the like, "I don't know." I think the part of me is wanting to taste the freedom that can come with fire. But at the same time, the uncertainty is still there.

The reality changes when the big paychecks kind of stop, especially I think when after severance ends. It hasn't stopped yet. It hasn't stopped. I'm still getting paid like normal through July. And then the severance check lands in August. It's like a race against time. You basically, you're like, "Okay, let me see if I can set something up before those normal paychecks end." But here's one strategic thing that I suggest you do.

Have you started applying for unemployment yet? Last week on Monday, I was doing my projections. And then this week on Monday, I was filling out my unemployment. And very interesting for California folks, while you're on your warrant period, you're eligible for unemployment. And that's up to $450 per week.

And you could be sure that I immediately signed up for unemployment and got the ball, started to be rolling there. And if the unemployment office is listening, I'm also actively looking and willing to work as one of the many requirements of doing that. Exactly. Yeah. So for the folks out there who've gotten laid off and you have your warrant act pay of one or two months, maybe longer, you deserve to apply for unemployment.

You're part of your salary. Your company paid for unemployment insurance. It's yours. You get usually up to 26 weeks for most states. Go apply for that ASAP because you're not going to get denied because the company laid you off and therefore they'll say, "Yes, you are eligible for unemployment." The other thing mentally for you, Andre, I think is you have a wife who sounds like similar age to you who is making a similar amount of money to you.

Yeah, correct. And what's interesting in the FIRE community is that I've noticed many, many men out there who say, "I'm retired or I'm financially independent," but then they have working wives making a lot of money. And because I think men have more fragile egos, they aren't willing to say they are stay-at-home dads.

They want to say, "I'm retired. I conquered the financial mountain." And I'm trying to encourage more men out there to just say, "You know what? I support my loving wife who is bringing home the bacon and I'm here to take care of my child full-time." Absolutely. And so having a wife who works at Uber surely has to be comforting, no?

Yeah, definitely. And you can live off that income if you want. You can completely live off that and still save. And it's funny that you say that. I actually posted on Twitter, I was like, "What is the difference between a stay-at-home dad and a dad who's early retired?" And I was like, "The hubris." I can't think of anything else other than that.

There's no material difference. And just the ego of man to not be able to say, "I'm just a stay-at-home dad." I was like, "But I don't know. What is the difference, practically speaking, if your partner's still working?" That's what I think. I don't think I've run into many women, even if they're in the ability to not need to work because their husbands are paying, that would say that they're retired.

I think there would be a backlash if they were to say that. But men have no issue of being able to say, "Oh, I'm retired. I worked and I'm done." I was like, "Yes, but I have this five-year-old that I also am now having more time to hang out with.

But I'm retired." It's a funny cultural dynamic that exists that's a real thing of just the gender norms of being able to accept that. So I'm right there with you on making being a stay-at-home dad an acceptable outcome and to be proud of it. I don't think any parent will ever regret spending more time with their children.

The data is like 80%, 90% of the time you spend with your child is over after they leave the house at 18 or 19 years old. So I'm pretty certain that you're not going to regret spending two, three hours at the San Francisco Zoo on a weekday when there's no class that day versus going to work to try to make six figures a year.

I guess how does your wife feel about the whole situation? Is she nervous, scared? Is she more motivated to work and work longer? How does that dynamic work? Yeah. She's been incredibly supportive. I also want to be very aware of this new dynamic. We've been married, I don't know, we've been together 15 years and had a kid for the last five years but lived together for almost that whole 11, 12 years.

But it's always been one of equality and both of us earning similar amounts and both of us having incomes and never needing to rely on... We're a partnership for sure. I always said for someone in FIRE, the best decision that they can make is having a supportive partner that views finances in a similar way.

It's a double bonus for me because he also is compensated at a high level in tech as well. But now I think it does change the dynamic a little bit. I'm conscious of now I don't want to put stress on her. I'm like, "Hey, you're the only one earning a living." I've always been the one that is passionate about finances and dealing with the spreadsheets and tracking everything.

So what I've been doing more of in the last week as I've been laid off is opening up the things a little bit, explaining things a little bit more and being like, "Hey, we're good." I know that I don't want her to have this added pressure and stress of being the sole income earner of the house and we're all reliant on her.

And if we don't do that, we won't be able to eat. I'm like, "That's not the case. We're good." I'm still in this severance for the next six months and we have health insurance paid for by Meta. Thank you, Mark, for the next six months. And we're in a good spot and I can get another job if needed.

We're set. The whole reason for FIRE and focusing on these things is so we didn't have to have these stresses. And that's the thing why I'm also coming in a week after being laid off and having generally good spirits. I'm not like super, it's not super fun, but it's still like, "Hey, I'm good.

I was preparing for this. I'm ready for it. I have that huge emergency fund buffer. I have plenty of equity to live off of and a heavy working spouse that's still earning her side of things." So we're in a good spot. And I think she's getting more comfortable with it, but I'm being extra conscious of making sure that she's not feeling extra pressure on it.

And also I have more time. I need to step up and do more in the household side of things and not be a productive member of the household just because I'm not working. Because I can be in a cave downstairs and play video games all day and not continue to contribute.

>> I forgot to ask, with your net worth, roughly what is the percentage breakdown in how you invested since you're renting your place? >> Yeah. That's a good question. So when I was in Texas, we actually bought a house when we first got married. And I was like, because my plan was originally to go back to Texas in three years.

So we kept the house and we were renting it out. I hated being a landlord. It was like, actually for the first year and a half, two years, it was fine because I didn't have to deal with anything. But as soon as I had turnover and went back and saw that they destroyed the place, they had like four dogs that I didn't know about and the carpet was ruined.

I was like, "Oh, I'm going to manage it myself and remotely from California and not worry about paying a property manager." And just like, I was looking at my tech salary and how much I was saving. I was looking at how much I was gaining in rental income. I was like, "This is not worth the stress." I'm like, "I'm going to dump this and put it all in index funds." So all of my net worth is all like super boring index funds split across.

Most of it now is in taxable, but I'm filling out every single square inch of tax advantage accounts that I can. Both Facebook and Uber offer the ability to contribute to what's colloquially called the mega backdoor. So I'm able to contribute like $66,000 for each of us between traditional and Roth money and then beyond that, so that already there is like what, 60, 66, like 100, 120 plus thousand tax advantage per year.

And then the rest is just going into taxable, just buying stuff like VTI, VTSAX, VOO. I'm boring. I like being boring. I viewed it very much as I have a high salary. I'm earning a lot of money. I don't need to be going and chasing high returns in the market.

I'm fine with being as good as the market. I don't need to hit home runs. I just want the easy singles without having the downside risk or as much as the downside risk. That's smart. It's definitely smart, especially if you are at big tech, which is more volatile than the S&P 500 index.

What you might find as you gain more wealth is that even investing in the S&P 500 starts feeling a little volatile as well. Last year, for example, 2022 is down almost 20%. That doesn't feel good. I'm sure a lot of people are like, "Oh, I should have sold everything in 2021." You will see that I think your perspective will change as the absolute net worth figure does increase.

I hope it does increase. Yeah, that's the hope. And then the real estate too is also one that they got. The reason I've never done real estate both on my personal residence, mostly from my personal residence standpoint is I've never been confident that I'd be somewhere for more than five years.

And to me, penciling it in, the rent was fine. If you know that it's going to be the seven years and you're not banking on appreciation too much, it starts making sense. San Francisco is a tough one where the housing is so expensive. I think the housing that we would look at would be in the one and a half to two million range.

And it's a lot. That changes the math very, very quickly. So I think that's the other portion. I don't know if it'll wreck forever, but until I'm super confident that we have like seven plus years in a place, I think the hanging tight in that. I'm going to guess with a 75% probability, you're still going to be in San Francisco within the next 10 years.

I don't think you're wrong as someone who's consistently written about leaving San Francisco, but still stays in San Francisco over and over. And my daughter just got into a great public kindergarten in the city. And I think this is the first time ever that I've been able to like, "Hey, if we like this kindergarten, I could see that's like six years." And now I'm no longer having to pay private preschool tuition.

That's gives me almost $40,000 a year, which is going to be pretty awesome. Yeah. I see your future. The Oracle in here. We can go play pickleball sometime during the week. Yeah. Well, this has been a great conversation, Andre. And I wish you the best of luck in your job hunt or whatever is next.

Can you remind the listeners again where we can find you, especially your newsletter? Yeah, absolutely. You can find my newsletter. Go to avocadofire.com or search Andre Nader and you'll find my sub stack newsletter. Subscribe there. I've been writing twice a month, but now I have a little bit more time on my hands.

Maybe I'll be writing a little bit more often and testing the waters on more frequent posting schedules. You should because I publish three times a week. You should publish more. You might discover that it'll be easier and then obviously you might grow further. And then you might be like, "You know what?

I don't need to go back because my newsletter is growing so much." You never know. That could be the dream. I'll follow in your footsteps. All right, buddy. Well, it was great chatting with you and I'll see you around the internet sphere and we'll be in touch. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Sam.

All right.