Quote:
Originally Posted by NickMPK
That's definitely true of FAANG engineers, but literally being a FAANG engineer is a very elite job that requires a ton of other background, talent, and skills that the overwhelming majority of people, including the overwhelming majority of poker players, do not possess. There are certainly a subset of poker players that could have gone down this route. But do you really think Shawn Deeb could be an engineer at Google? Or Daniel Negreanu??
But mostly I was responding to the assertion that the way to earn 300k as an accountant, etc., was to become a partner such that you are managing other people and bringing in business yourself.
Becoming a FAANG engineer is a lot more do-able than you're making it sound. It's not really an "elite" job since they now employ hundreds of thousands of engineers. Google in 2006 was elite, now it's just a standard good tech job (but significantly shittier as an employer than it was in 2006). It certainly requires _some_ talent/skill, I don't think anyone can do it, but most people you would describe as "reasonably bright" could.
A CS degree is helpful but not strictly necessary. The easiest path to a FAANG engineering job is to work at any random software engineering job, put it on your LinkedIn, FAANG recruiters will reach out, and you can grind Leetcode problems to pass what's effectively become a standardized test.
Now, this formula was MUCH easier 2013-2021 than it is in the 2024 tech recession, but it's still basically do-able. However, I do agree with you to the extent it's a big life commitment to develop all the necessary skills and do all that studying which most people won't want to do.
Certainly some talent is required but not really that much more than becoming a high stakes poker pro and theres some overlap in skills. I'm not sure about Deeb or DNegs but I have no question guys like Galfond, Haxton, Polk, could have done this. Guys like DNegs could also probably sneak into roles in product management, marketing, or operations which can pay a little lower on entry level roles but typically have higher upside as its easier to get promoted to the top ranks without needing to be a super-genius like in engineering.
Btw, pretty much nobody at FAANG makes more than around $250k salary, the rest of the money comes in stock and at FAANG companies that's effectively cash since it's easily sold. A senior engineer will typically make around 400-600k total and up to 1M is possible even as an individual if you're god-like, or just become a Director+.
Also you typically have to live in very high cost of living areas like the Bay Area or Manhattan although with the rise of remote work some people get FAANG compensation in cheaper areas but you can get a paycut and theres been a lot of return-to-office.
The much, much bigger issue with FAANG jobs moreso than talent or intelligence is just that they are big corporations and they expect you to be a cog in a wheel, show up to work most days, give up ownership of everything you work on on the side, etc. There's way less freedom than being a poker pro. While they're not quite as bad as high finance jobs they are closer to it than in the past. Some people may prefer the structure of these corporations but many poker players skew a little more anti-authoriarian and struggle with it. I certainly did.
I actually worked at Google as an engineer for 3.5 years around when it was transitioning from "fun hippie startup" to "full blown corporate machine" and couldn't really take it. Truly it was always a corporate machine but the facade was much stronger before 2015.
As far as the broader discussion, I always get a little irked by "why play poker when you could make money doing something else"? I don't think everyone has to pursue the absolutely maximum income at the expense of all other considerations. Maybe someone simply likes pro poker more than running some accounting firm or working in high finance.
There's some pendulum where some people are told "do whatever makes you happy" without consideration for money, which is bad advice, but the opposite "optimize for money without considering your happiness" is equally bad advice. No money will make you unhappy but making money the only meaning in your life will too.
300k is a high bar and I think you basically need to do finance, management consulting, FAANG-tier engineering, medicine, big law, or run a successful business. I think for some top stakes poker players, they are just poker savants and can only play poker. I think for many others, they are just generally smart people and could do those other activities IF they applied themselves and committed to those careers but those are big IFs. Most of those careers are high pressure, long hours, and do require a big time commitment to break into . They're not something you do on a whim so even if you could do them in theory, there's still the huge step of doing all that work to get there.
By the way, when working 60 hours a week at a full-time job theres no point in poker even being a "side-hustle" because you wont have the time to get meaningful volume, you wont have the energy to play an A-game, and its hard to care when the money wont mean much relative to your income anyway.
There's a quote from Harold and Kumar that says "just because you're hung like a donkey doesn't mean you have to do porn" that's relevant here. Every single job has its downsides. And when it comes to jobs that pay super-well, the vast majority of them pay that well for a reason, it's not that they're out of reach for a smart person, it's that they require a huge time-consuming grind to get them and keep them.
I personally quit a 400k a year job to focus on poker. That sounds insane on the surface but if I bore you with my life details you'd probably understand why it makes sense at this point in my life. The short version is I get way more flexibility while I build some other businesses that take time, and I enjoy it more since my last job was making me miserable.
There's simply a lot of variables that go into this decision. I do agree that if your only goal in life is to maximize your annual income, being a full-time poker pro is a really bad option. But if you factor in the million other relevant variables, it might make sense, even if you're smart and capable enough to do other things.