Okay. If you read this blog post and your takeaway was "I can make $4M in my first 4 years out of school working at Facebook" (or Amazon, Google, etc.), you should have a seat.

Your odds aren't much better than that NFL player's.

MY CHILDREN, COME LISTEN TO MY TALE OF WOE 1/x https://twitter.com/mekkaokereke/status/1353743074719981568

(well maybe not woe, I turned out okay BUT ANYWAY)

Okay, that $4.2M figure? That's for someone who started at FB in 2010. That's 2 years BEFORE their IPO.

So yes, if you're lucky enough to be struck by lightning, and get pre-IPO shares, great! You probably won't, though.

Come with me on a journey back to...

*TV static effect*

THE 1990s.

Let's say you started at Microsoft in Jan. 1995, and got 5000 options. By Dec. 1999, MSFT had split 3 times, meaning you now had 40,000 options at $8/share.

MSFT was at $117.

You had $4,360,000 on paper.

This was an exciting time to be in Seattle. There were loads of 20-somethings splashing cash around, and more on the way, trying to emulate them.

But Microsoft wasn't going to grow 12x in 4.5 years again. In fact, if you held all that stock, you were worth <40% of that by 2001.

So the difference between the Microsoft class of 1995-2000 and the class of, say, 1998-2003, was that the former got multiple hundreds of thousands in appreciated stock every year, and the latter had options that were worthless for years.

Lots of that second wave made bad bets on their options being worth more each year. They bought McMansions that they could afford maybe the first and second year.

Then their options were underwater, and they had to pay a $5k mortgage with a $6k take-home paycheck.

(CW: DV, death)
For those of you not in tech who are thinking "poor little rich kids," someday I'll talk about the era of stack ranking, the "ten-percenters," and the rates of drug use, depression and DV in that era. I remember and mourn people my age who died because of it.

I only contracted at Microsoft, so I got no equity. Instead, I left in 1997 to work for a startup. I got options for $1/share! We even went public! On IPO day, I was worth half a million on paper.

The bad news: that was March 10, 2000. The day before the dot-com crash.

By the time my 6-month lockup had expired, that $500k was $80k. Six months after that, we were delisted.

I never saw a dime of that money. I got laid off. Six months on unemployment.

For every fast Facebook millionaire, there are at least a hundred who were told we were next.

Definitely don't feel sorry for me. I turned out okay.

But also don't treat a tech career as any less speculative than a pro sports career. They're both high-risk, take tons of preparation, and are beset with all manner of rip-off artists grifting off good talent.

Do not expect that you will be worth $1 million when you're 30. That mentality will leave you vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation.

Don't trade away salary for equity. It might be all you ever get, and serious companies have the resources to give you enough of both.

Equity is a lottery ticket. Maybe the stars align and it returns 100x. Most often it goes to zero.

Oh, and did I mention your pre-IPO shares can be diluted by the board? Yup! While founders' shares split as more stock is issued, employee shares often dilute in value as you grow.

Your paycheck (and benefits) should cover your cost of living. If you need to sell stock or use bonuses to pay your debts, then a) you're eating away at your nest egg, and b) you're in deep shit when the next recession hits, the stock is down 50% and there's no bonus pool.

I saw close friends lose their homes in 2001 _and_ 2009 by gambling on their stock only ever going up. Those were hard times even if you had a steady income. And it terrifies me to think how many people will get washed out next time, just when they thought they'd made it.

Every day, tech workers pack up their $3k/mo Menlo Park apartments and move back to Flagstaff or St. Paul, hoping the whole way they don't need to ask someone to Venmo them gas money.

Remember that while you're counting the millions you'll make someday.