After three open houses and a couple hours of analysis, I thought I picked the top 5 rental candidates with the best financial records, but I was wrong. All was fine until my fourth and last open house when a 28 year old single guy who graduated from CalTech came in and applied. He is a software engineer at Google and makes $450,000 a year! What the……
In addition to his eye-boggling income, he has $400,000 saved up after 6 years of working. Perhaps some of that is 401K or Google stock, but whatever the case, I was blown away. The 35 year old cardiologist who makes $300,000 has nothing on this Google guy, partly because the doc is in so much debt and also because he is so anal! After 20 questions, you’ve got to give a person some breathing room buddy.
When I went to business school, a third of my classmates were engineers because they were the smartest people who were “stuck” making $150,000-$200,000 a year. They saw their less smart colleagues in sales and marketing move up in the firm and make $300,000+ a year and were envious. These guys all got 730+ on their GMATs out of 800 and 3.8+ GPAs out of 4.0. It seemed obvious to me they had a chip on their shoulder and felt like they should be running the place.
The Googler’s applicant simply shattered my belief that engineers face a ceiling. If you are 28 years old and making $450,000, you are absolutely crushing it. Only in industries such as private equity, money management, and banking do 28 year olds with 6 years of experience make this kinda dough. Even if you went to Yale Law School and joined super prestigious Wachtel Lipton, you start off at around a $200,000 base (vs. $160,000 base for the other top 20 corporate law firms) and a potential $100,000 bonus.
The war for talent is on! So what about the rest of us?
PLEASE STOP MESSING AROUND Read More
