r/financialindependence • u/fidgit86 • Aug 13 '21

What do you do that you earn six figures?

It seems like a lot of people make a lot of money and it seems like I’m missing out on something. So those of you that do, whats your occupation that pays so well?

15k Upvotes

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2k

u/FatFiredProgrammer Aug 13 '21

Software development. We're all software developers here. True story.

694

u/737900ER pls fix Aug 13 '21

That's not accurate! Some of us have to make PowerPoints about what the software developers are doing.

170

u/Slammedtgs Aug 13 '21

PowerPoint is 50% of my life, excel is the other 50%.

99

u/737900ER pls fix Aug 13 '21

And Outlook is the missing 25%.

35

u/FatFiredProgrammer Aug 13 '21 edited Aug 13 '21

You're slacking if it's only 25%.

15

u/pAul2437 Aug 13 '21

I’m more of a teams guy

3

u/bono_my_tires Aug 13 '21

I have to use both but 95% using Slack and oh man does Teams feel brutal after coming from Slack

2

u/NotChristina 32F | 6k total NW with debt and a dream Aug 13 '21

My company overall uses Slack but IT uses Teams. Any time I join their standups or meetings I get irrationally angry at Teams.

2

u/bono_my_tires Aug 13 '21

The fact that there’s no compact mode and 3 messages take up the entire screen is infuriating alone lol

2

u/catwok 29d ago

This thread really ircs me

1

u/pAul2437 29d ago

What’s the AIM here?

7

u/FatFiredProgrammer Aug 13 '21

Come on? Nobody caught on to the clever Slack pun? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?

5

u/likegolden Aug 13 '21

I loved it (PM here)

3

u/NotYourGa1Friday Aug 13 '21

Slack takes up 25% of my time

2

u/apneax3n0n Aug 13 '21

No teams? No planner? Lazy

2

u/xter418 Aug 13 '21

Ok. That's fucking funny.

1

u/supershinythings Aug 13 '21

Slack is yet another tool.

2

u/FatFiredProgrammer Aug 13 '21

But if you subscribe to a lot of channels it can suck a lot of your time--- like reddit.

1

u/supershinythings Aug 13 '21

Yes! A HUGE timesucking tool!

I like to post my cat's pictures to my coworkers on Slack, so they won't feel like their time is wasted, and mine isn't either.

These are definitely helping my coworkers get their jobs done:

/r/meowser

2

u/CuntWizard Aug 13 '21

I think you mean the EXTRA 25% :(

2

u/sleepymoose88 32M / 20% to FI Aug 13 '21

The 25% you’re doing off hours because your working 125%…

1

u/PrashnaChinha Aug 13 '21

100% reason to remember the name

3

u/small_trunks Aug 13 '21

Ex-Developer here - Excel is now 95% of my life and I even fucking like it.

3

u/Slammedtgs Aug 13 '21

A lot of people knock excel, I love it. I’ve learned to how automate most of my tasks, including interacting with commercial plug ins and libraries via VBA.

Before my current role, my secret weapon was my ability to automate mundane tasks. There are better solutions available if you can make the business case and get the company to invest, but for me I could spend a day writing code and then let the program run and complete my work while I went to lunch or screwed around.

2

u/small_trunks Aug 13 '21

I've written massive programs in power query in recent years which would have been a nightmare to program in any other language.

Right now working on a large customer database cleanup which incorporates 19 different sources of information (sql, csv, xlsx) - all merged and cleaned using PQ. I spend most of my time answering questions on /r/excel, tbh...

2

u/ACMEanvils Aug 13 '21

Howdy, partner.

2

u/homogenousmoss Aug 13 '21

Me: why the fuck does this 30k employee company not have a project management software beside Jira if you want 6 month plans constantly updated for 20 people? Oh ok, I see, the company is now agile and that’s why we dont have license anymore. That makes sense!

Enter Excel as a project management tool!

3

u/737900ER pls fix Aug 13 '21

Excel can do anything as long as you believe in it

1

u/TotallyNotDesechable Aug 13 '21

The entire world financial system agrees with this

2

u/creations_unlimited Aug 13 '21

And dare u to format just one field in excel and it becomes -9.4648585E-56 Ask me how I know?

2

u/throwawaybenjamins Aug 13 '21

Vim, ssh, git.

2

u/amysqurrl Aug 13 '21

Chasing requirements is 95% of my time. Actual UX design is the other 5%.

2

u/zjustice11 Aug 13 '21

I’d rather be poor than work on excel. I am not poor but I don’t work on excel

2

u/Slammedtgs Aug 13 '21

Why the hate for excel? It’s a great tool.

2

u/zjustice11 Aug 13 '21

I suck at it lol.

1

u/r_lovelace Aug 13 '21

It's a great tool but it's not the only tool and often it isn't the correct tool. This leads a lot of us from having no feelings about excel directly to pure hatred when we encounter the company or business unit that's running everything off of macros is some 2003 Excel spreadsheet and now you're tasked with integrating that into real systems.

1

u/Slammedtgs Aug 13 '21

Ha. Macros are great, for the person who writes them and then only.

I always caution my team to make sure it’s fool proof or don’t use them. Most are never foolproof and when you turn over to someone else they unknowingly break stuff and don’t even know what happened.

2

u/smashnmashbruh Aug 13 '21

my life is getting my clients out of excel so they can work in a database and export it to excel

2

u/Slammedtgs Aug 13 '21

Databases are far superior, in my experience people are just afraid of them. For data storage, and regular processing I’ve moved this to access for myself, but as a company excel is still the powerhouse for us. We have commercial plugs ins too that allow us to access data but you don’t get the flexibility of owning the database like you can with access. I can do whatever the hell I want, and even blow it up if I’m stupid.

1

u/smashnmashbruh Aug 13 '21

My problem is explaining that managing data the way data needs to be managed to utilize it versus viewed in a report, for example a a a and b b b is better than ab ab ab. They need to see it managed in aggregate form and only what they want, they don’t want to see key fields or additional fields that help manage data because they are narrow minded or easily confused. It’s been a trip migrating us to a variety of integrated systems and tables within quickbase versus easy departments own master yet duplicative “master” spreadsheet.

1

u/r_lovelace Aug 13 '21

Reading this post literally makes me shake.

2

u/unique-name-9035768 Aug 13 '21

If Excel is 50% of your life, goggle search has to be about 68% of the 50%.

1

u/TXCV Aug 13 '21

Are you me?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 13 '21

[deleted]

1

u/Slammedtgs Aug 13 '21

I work in a pretty lean environment, we have a lot of meetings but I would say very high productivity. Constant alignment is key amongst our leadership team.

1

u/j909m 29d ago

I won’t believe you until I see an Excel chart of this data in a PowerPoint slide.

29

u/GSD1309 Aug 13 '21

And Excel spreadsheets

5

u/This-Moment Aug 13 '21

When the last remaining monuments to the last days of humanity are slowly crumbling, somewhere a radioactive roach will still be tracking something in Excel.

3

u/Trek186 Aug 13 '21

Not a six figure earner (yet) but I manage a multi-decade forecast model for a multi-billion dollar project in a massive Excel workbook for work. I have the associated debt service forecasts in three other sizable workbooks. As you can imagine using a VPN to connect to the office is not fun.

25

u/bethaneee Aug 13 '21

And some of us sell what the developers make.

7

u/Drtyrock Aug 13 '21

Some of us deploy the machines that run the software that the devs created

1

u/[deleted] Aug 13 '21

[deleted]

1

u/bethaneee Aug 13 '21

Business Development, account executive, sales director. I'm in sales management but was making 6 figures when I was selling. SaaS sales would be what I would look into. If you have a lot of technical skills, look into sales engineer roles. What type of boot camp are you doing?

118

u/scorp171 Aug 13 '21

Some of them done even make presentations. Just edit JIRA tickets (Not me though) 🤣

8

u/nkdeck07 Aug 13 '21

Hi fellow PM!

2

u/scorp171 Aug 13 '21

I'm into tech. I do get sh*t done, not just edit JIRA. 🤣

6

u/boneseh NoVA | 13% Aug 13 '21

Omg Jira... Our PMs got sick of doing it and roped us in. I hate Jira.

4

u/raymond8505 Aug 13 '21

Bite your tongue, at least you're not stuck with Monday, only thing I miss from my old company is jira

4

u/gwvent Aug 13 '21

We use both... I actually kind of like Monday but JIRA can eat my shorts.

2

u/crimson117 Aug 13 '21

I want Jira's editing but with Rally's hierarchy. And Jira's old markdown editor, please.

5

u/BoweryThrowAway Aug 13 '21

The amount of time spent raising a JIRA ticket, the issue could have been fixed…

4

u/[deleted] Aug 13 '21

[deleted]

3

u/KayotiK82 Aug 13 '21

I've learned the art of reassigning.

5

u/mariahmce Aug 13 '21

I think you mean delegation.

3

u/buzzsawddog Aug 13 '21

We only had one... Now we have two! Going back and adding labels and changing them three things on bugs for the last two years....

2

u/CuntWizard Aug 13 '21

If you’re a CSM making that money you’ve figured it out.

I too want to jockey JIRA for that kind of money…

5

u/chatmac Aug 13 '21

I was a 6 figure worker telling people how to use jira. Now 6 to organize people into sprints and help them test. This is best industry. Minus jira

2

u/a1579 Aug 13 '21

If you are good at that job, well worth the 6 figures. Our scrum dude is not so great and it makes life horrible for everyone. 😵

2

u/California__girl Aug 13 '21

leaving that behind was best thing about retiring (to be an at-home mom), but it was clearcase/clearquest back then. I hated that sh*t. I hear spouse on the phone for work and JIRA is the bane of his existence.

0

u/sleepymoose88 32M / 20% to FI Aug 13 '21

We techies tend to ignore our JIRA and get hounded by the TPOs and PM to do it. So we create the stories after the work is done and move it straight to complete. I don’t have the spare cycles to mess around with moving stories on a board during the day. I’m already working 55 hrs as it is.

4

u/crimson117 Aug 13 '21

How do you know what needs to get implemented without having it written down somewhere?

2

u/scorp171 Aug 13 '21

Agreed! And what do you test without knowing the scope.

1

u/sleepymoose88 32M / 20% to FI Aug 13 '21

Our PMs are utterly useless, so our team has technical team leads doing the actual workload planning and assignment of tasks. The PMs/TPOs basically just do a very poor job of communicating outside of our team.

We track all work through a ticketing system because almost all the work we do has to be run through a change advisory board, so JIRA is basically just a copy/paste of what we do in the ticketing system and thus an utter waste of time.

9

u/zstrebeck Aug 13 '21

And some of us have software developer clients

11

u/msyxx3201 Aug 13 '21

And some of us recruit developers

2

u/Lopatou_ovalil Aug 13 '21

I wish i got recruited.

10

u/DillaVibes Aug 13 '21

Some of us have to make visio flow charts about what developers will have to integrate

3

u/bluthco Aug 13 '21

Those are called Project Managers

3

u/Powerlevel-9000 Aug 13 '21

Ah did I find a fellow product manager?

2

u/emt139 Aug 13 '21

Ugh that’s me.

2

u/Wheat_Grinder %FI Aug 13 '21

Yeah! I just make sure the compile and build servers are running

2

u/MochiMochiMochi Aug 13 '21

And some of us design for users.

2

u/Secondstrike23 Aug 13 '21

Current developer. Life goal is to make powerpoints instead.

2

u/IntelligentCa913 Aug 13 '21

ERP implementation project manager checking in. Can confirm.

2

u/Spacebier Aug 13 '21

Hello fellow Product Manager.

2

u/Goody242424 Aug 13 '21

Some of us have to sell the software the developers make via the powerpoints you create.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 13 '21

[deleted]

1

u/FatFiredProgrammer Aug 13 '21

If you don't love it, stop. You won't be good at it and programmers don't much respect other programmers who aren't great at what they do. $.02

1

u/AnusMcBumhole Aug 13 '21

I write slides to help the sales guys sell what the Software Developers have built because they can’t explain it themselves.

1

u/DubiousChordate 1d ago

You’ve just described 45% of corporate marketing jobs…making PowerPoints. Then there’s the 40% of corporate marketing jobs that have to do with running software or doing analysis. 10% of the remaining jobs are writing stuff. The final 5% are management.