Absolutely and unequivocally, you need to get out of IC design and into software engineering.
As mentioned by others, you are vastly underestimating the earning potential of 1st world software engineer. Someone fresh out of college or otherwise with little experience should expect $100k/yr from a typical technology company. A senior software engineer is probably $150k or more per year. Expect 35-50% of it to go to taxes, depending on where you live. If you're in Canada those taxes go towards wonderful things like universal health care that keep down your cost of living. If you're in the USA they mostly go to foreign wars and the parasitic healthcare industrial complex and you pay for things out of pocket. :shrug:
That said, expenses for a family of 4 are going to be a lot larger. I would expect to pay $36k or more in rent per year to live in a large enough apartment in a suburb of the SF bay area commuting distance from your job and with not terrible schools. Almost certainly another $12k on groceries, and $6k on car ownership (a necessity in our poorly designed cities). In the US (not Canada), you'll need an additional $6k or so for basic family medical insurance. If I assume that you land a $120k//yr (pre-tax) salary, that leaves you with only $18k left after taxes and basic living expenses. So if you did nothing else (no preschool, no daycare, no traveling home, no lifestyle creep, no leisure activities whatsoever) you'd be able to save approximately your entire current pre-tax annual salary.
Improvement? Yes, but there were a heck of a lot of 'if's in there. And as you note you can basically do the same thing or better by living on your family's land and getting freelance / remote work, taking advantage of the cost of living differences. Many tech workers in the USA dream of doing exactly what you could very easily be doing: go live in a cheap 3rd world country while earning USA-sized freelance salaries. On the internet, no one really cares where you are living or what your daily expenses are, just that you're doing a good job.
That said, it can be daunting to start freelance work, and hard to get your rates up without the professional network that comes from having worked in 1st world tech hubs. If you were single and unattached I might recommend the move to California or Toronto or something, but I'm not sure that's a good fit to your current situation, unless moving to the USA or elsewhere was your goal anyway.
Good reasons to move: Escape the Philippine drug war, network with other rationalists, cryonics, and transhumanist people, acquire better passport,, better opportunities for your children.
Bad reasons to move: Income (you can do as good or better freelancing), grass is greener (it's not).
If you chose not to move, you can still do effective networking by attending conferences and other professional events, as well as open-source hackathons and meetups in the locales you pass through. Choose and industry that you are not going to be fighting an uphill battle to establish yourself in, and then become reasonably well known and respected in that community. Often this will allow you to get travel support for attending conferences and community events, at least to cover all or part of your flight and hotel. Long-duration remote work will probably also involve frequent 1- or 2-week travel to the company or team headquarters. Expect to travel 1-2 months of the year. In any case you can and should take advantage of whatever nearby meetups are available either in your subfield or the rationalist/lesswrong & transhumanist communities.
By the way, Is your resume available? There are actually people here who might be able to hire you.
Side note: you should be able to sign up for Alcor even if you live in the Philippines. Have you properly looked into this? There are surcharges for foreign cryopreservations, so your insurance will have to be higher, but there is precedent for this. I don't know about the Philippines, but one of the recent Alcor cases was a 4yo Thai girl.
Side note 2: having been through a CFAR workshop, I don't think it would be worth the much higher relative cost for you to attend. There are cheaper low-hanging fruit to engage with in any case. And besides, the epistemologically confirmed parts of CFAR knowledge-base can be picked up $1.50 in late fees from your local library.
Re: underestimating tech salaries, thanks for the corrections; I may have discounted similar information before because even senior software developers I know personally locally are <$30,000/yr, and "start at $100,000/yr" sounded much too good (this is retrospectively obviously a bad heuristic and I will now strive to do better). In retrospect, checking the salaries of relatives who migrated to the USA should have corrected this.
re: moving to 1st-world country as a goal, my wife has this as a goal (FWIW it's a common goal for a sizable fracti...
Hi all,
Mostly lurker, I very rarely post, mostly just read the excellent posts here.
I'm a Filipino, which means I am a citizen of the Republic of the Philippines. My annual salary, before taxes, is about $20,000 (USA dollars). I work at an IC development company (12 years at this company), developing the logic parts of LCD display drivers. My understanding is that the median US salary for this kind of job is about $80,000 -> $100,000 a year. This is a fucking worthless third world country, so the government eats up about ~30% of my salary and converts it to lousy service, rich government officials, bad roadworks, long commute times, and a (tiny) chance of being falsely accused of involvement in the drug trade and shot without trial. Thus my take-home pay amounts to about $15,000 a year. China is also murmuring vague threats about war because of the South China Sea (which the local intelligentsia insist on calling the West Philippine Sea); as we all know, the best way to survive a war is not be in one.
This has lead to my deep dissatisfaction with my current job.
I'm also a programmer as a hobby, and have been programming for 23 years (I started at 10 years old on Atari LOGO; I know a bunch of languages from low-level X86 assembly to C to C++ to ECMAScript to Haskell, and am co-author of SRFI-105 and SRFI-110). My understanding is that a USA programmer would *start* at the $20,000-a-year level (?), and that someone with experience can probably get twice that, and a senior one can get $100,000/year.
As we all know, once a third world citizen starts having first world skill level, he starts demanding first world renumeration also.
I've been offered a senior software developer job at a software company, offering approximately $22,000/year; because of various attempts at tax reform it offers a flat 15% income tax, so I can expect about $18,000/year take home pay. I've turned it down with a heavy heart, because seriously, $22,000/year at 15% tax for a senior software developer?
Leaving my current job is something I've been planning on doing, and I intend to do so early next year. The increasing stress (constant overtime, management responsibilities (I'm a tech geek with passable social skills, and exercising my social skills drains me), 1.5-hour commutes) and the low renumeration makes me want to consider my alternate options.
My options are:
1. Get myself to the USA, Europe, or other first-world country somehow, and look for a job there. High risk, high reward, much higher probability of surviving to the singularity (can get cryonics there, can't get it here). Complications: I have a family: a wife, a 4-year-old daughter, and a son on the way. My wife wants to be near me, so it's difficult to live for long apart. I have no work visa for any first-world country. I'm from a third-world country that is sometimes put on terrorist watch lists, and prejudice is always high in first-world countries.
2. Do freelance programming work. Closer to free market ideal, so presumably I can get nearer to the USA levels of renumeration. Lets me stay with my family. Complications: I need to handle a lot of the human resources work myself (healthcare provider, social security, tax computations, time and task management - the last is something I do now in my current job position, but I dislike it).
3. Become a landowning farmer. My paternal grandparents have quite a few parcels of land (some of which have been transferred to my father, who is willing to pass it on to me), admittedly somewhere in the boondocks of the provinces of this country, but as any Georgian knows, landowners can sit in a corner staring at the sky, blocking the occasional land reform bill, and earn money. Complications: I have no idea about farming. I'd actually love to advocate a land value tax, which would undercut my position as a landowner.
For now, my basic current plan is some combination of #2 and #3 above: go sit in a corner of our clan's land and do freelance programming work. This keeps me with my family, may reduce my level of stress, may increase my renumeration to nearer the USA levels.
My current job has a retirement pay, and since I've worked for 12 years, I've already triggered it, and they'll give me about $16,000 or so when I leave. This seems reasonably comfortable to live on (note that this is what I take home in a year, and I've supported a family on that, remember this is a lousy third-world country).
Is my basic plan sound? I'm trying to become more optimal, which seems to me to point me away from my current job and towards either #1 or #2, with #3 as a fallback. I'd love to get cryonics and will start to convince my wife of its sensibility if I had a chance to actually get it, but that will require me either leaving the country (option #1 above) or running a cryonics company in a third-world country myself.
--
I got introduced to Less Wrong when I first read on Reddit about some weirdo who was betting he could pretend he was a computer in a box and convince someone to let him out of the box, and started lurking on Overcoming Bias. When that weirdo moved over to Less Wrong, I followed and lurked there also. So here I am ^^. I'm probably very atypical even for Less Wrong; I highly suspect I am the only Filipino here (I'll have to check the diaspora survey results in detail).
Looking back, my big mistake was being arrogant and thinking "meh, I already know programming, so I should go for a challenge, why don't I take up electronics engineering instead because I don't know about it" back when I was choosing a college course. Now I'm an IC developer. Two of my cousins (who I can beat the pants off in a programming task) went with software engineering and pull in more money than I do. Still, maybe I can correct that, even if it's over a decade late. I really need to apply more of what I learn on Less Wrong.
Some years ago I applied for a CFAR class, but couldn't afford it, sigh. Even today it's a few month's worth of salary for me. So I guess I'll just have to settle for Less Wrong and Rationality from AI to Zombies.