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 fraction (which I haven’t researched) of Filipinos, which should indicate just how lousy Philippines is), not so much mine. I personally feel that I should strive to make the Philippines better, and initially thought that staying here would be the best method, but I probably need to re-consider that, which is why I need to consider the option of working abroad, whether permanently or temporarily. I worry about decaying values if I leave the Philippines (i.e. would Gandhi drink a pill that has a 1% chance of making him indifferent to India), but maybe I just need a credible way of maintaining the values of my future self.
re: freelancing, yes, that was my analysis. My wife and I talked several months ago with a couple whose husband had successfully transitioned to a freelance software job here in the Philippines, although exact numbers never got mentioned (but it was obvious they were comfortably well off). So I took to guessing that maybe a freelancer would get 50%->80% of what a regular USA jobholder would get, and used my (flawed!) understanding of USA salaries to consider this. So maybe I should recompute this after all… Looks like freelance is a better option than I thought before.
As for my family’s land, I’ll have to check; it’s possible it doesn’t have Internet or electricity, haha (Internet access is expensive in the Philippines, and my understanding is that it’s one of the more expensive rates in the world). FWIW I and my wife and children live at my wife’s uncle’s, since the building is rented out as residential units and my wife’s current job is managing it; Internet is paid for by my wife’s uncle since they communicate by Facebook and Viber (my wife’s uncle emigrated to the USA), so I don’t strictly speaking need to be at my own family’s land as long as my wife keeps her job.
re: resume, I have a pdf copy. I was going to say that I don’t have a website to put it up on, but then I remembered that I do have amkg.github.io, which means I really really really need to be a lot more aware of my options and resources, because seriously, a REAL PROGRAMMER (TM) without a website? Okay, I’ll put it up there after I dredge up the instructions for updating that site.
(side note: NetHack is good rationalist training, because a lot of deaths there are in retrospect pretty stupid when you get “Do you want your possessions identified” and found out you had very valuable items you forgot to use because you didn’t stop and think through your real options and take a good long look at your available resources… I need to treat real life more like NetHack, hahaha)
re: cryonics, I remember researching that maybe a decade ago and deciding that the total cost was too much for my salary then (and I’d have to contend with the possibility of relatives preventing me from being cryonically preserved anyway); I can’t remember where I put the computations for that, though, sigh. Come to think of it, I haven’t re-computed for my conditions now (I’ve been assuming the cost for me a decade later would be higher than the cost then, and cancel out my increase in purchasing capacity), which I obviously should do (damn cached thoughts), at least for my children if not for my wife and I… It’s amazing how stupid a brain can be, I should have rethought that earlier.
re: CFAR, yes, that’s my impression so far. Libraries in the Philippines are few and far between, but there are other ways to get the information (e.g. this website). I’d still like to attend one at some point in the future if only to see if they’ve gotten better, but obviously that has to come after I’m the smiling agent sitting on top of a heap of utilons.
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 fraction (which I haven’t researched) of Filipinos, which should indicate just how lousy Philippines is), not so much mine. I personally feel that I should strive to make the Philippines better, and initially thought that staying here would be the best method, but I probably need to re-consider that, which is why I need to consider the option of working abroad, whether permanently or temporarily. I worry about decaying values if I leave the Philippines (i.e. would Gandhi drink a pill that has a 1% chance of making him indifferent to India), but maybe I just need a credible way of maintaining the values of my future self.
re: freelancing, yes, that was my analysis. My wife and I talked several months ago with a couple whose husband had successfully transitioned to a freelance software job here in the Philippines, although exact numbers never got mentioned (but it was obvious they were comfortably well off). So I took to guessing that maybe a freelancer would get 50%->80% of what a regular USA jobholder would get, and used my (flawed!) understanding of USA salaries to consider this. So maybe I should recompute this after all… Looks like freelance is a better option than I thought before.
As for my family’s land, I’ll have to check; it’s possible it doesn’t have Internet or electricity, haha (Internet access is expensive in the Philippines, and my understanding is that it’s one of the more expensive rates in the world). FWIW I and my wife and children live at my wife’s uncle’s, since the building is rented out as residential units and my wife’s current job is managing it; Internet is paid for by my wife’s uncle since they communicate by Facebook and Viber (my wife’s uncle emigrated to the USA), so I don’t strictly speaking need to be at my own family’s land as long as my wife keeps her job.
re: resume, I have a pdf copy. I was going to say that I don’t have a website to put it up on, but then I remembered that I do have amkg.github.io, which means I really really really need to be a lot more aware of my options and resources, because seriously, a REAL PROGRAMMER (TM) without a website? Okay, I’ll put it up there after I dredge up the instructions for updating that site.
(side note: NetHack is good rationalist training, because a lot of deaths there are in retrospect pretty stupid when you get “Do you want your possessions identified” and found out you had very valuable items you forgot to use because you didn’t stop and think through your real options and take a good long look at your available resources… I need to treat real life more like NetHack, hahaha)
re: cryonics, I remember researching that maybe a decade ago and deciding that the total cost was too much for my salary then (and I’d have to contend with the possibility of relatives preventing me from being cryonically preserved anyway); I can’t remember where I put the computations for that, though, sigh. Come to think of it, I haven’t re-computed for my conditions now (I’ve been assuming the cost for me a decade later would be higher than the cost then, and cancel out my increase in purchasing capacity), which I obviously should do (damn cached thoughts), at least for my children if not for my wife and I… It’s amazing how stupid a brain can be, I should have rethought that earlier.
re: CFAR, yes, that’s my impression so far. Libraries in the Philippines are few and far between, but there are other ways to get the information (e.g. this website). I’d still like to attend one at some point in the future if only to see if they’ve gotten better, but obviously that has to come after I’m the smiling agent sitting on top of a heap of utilons.