年薪20万美元，为什么还依旧过不好生活Making $200K a Year and Still Living Paycheck to Paycheck

Introduction

We're in the middle of graduation season worldwide. Not long ago I was catching up with a friend who works at one of the big Silicon Valley tech companies — we got to talking about AI, about life inside the giants, about work in general. In 2025, the job market on both sides of the Pacific is not good. You could even call it dismal.

Structural unemployment hasn't budged, and on top of it, frictional, cyclical, and technological unemployment have all spiked noticeably, driven by AI and by the macro picture.

What follows is my own experience over the past year, layered on top of feedback I've gathered along the way. These are personal opinions only, aimed at no particular company or person. Discussion and debate are welcome.

Here goes — enjoy.

01 The world, at bottom, is one giant pay-to-rank auction

If you drew a chart and looked for a dividing line, 2018 — or 2020 — would be the obvious marker. For careers on both the Chinese and American sides, both years are clear inflection points. The pandemic changed a lot. Arguably, it changed everything.

2018 fell during the first round of the trade war in Trump's first term; 2025 marks the opening of the trade war in his second.

Before 2018, among Chinese students who came to the U.S. to study, the ratio of "go home" to "stay in America" was roughly 70/30 or 80/20. Today it's completely flipped: stay-versus-return is now 70/30, or even 80/20.

Take a sample from my own circle. A friend finished a Princeton computer science PhD in 2014, then spent five years working in Silicon Valley; his wife is also at an internet company. In the local slang, they're a "Silicon Valley dual-coder" household.

1. Housing: In 2014 they bought a house in the Bay Area — a $1.2 million place (prices have probably nearly doubled since), 2,000 sq ft (about 185 square meters), 4 bed, 3 bath, in a good school district. They took a $600K mortgage, paying $3,500 a month; property tax is 1.12%, another $1,100 a month. Safe neighborhood. The kind of place where nobody bothers to lock the door at night.
2. Food: Both eat breakfast and lunch at the office; dinner they cook at home. The company serves dinner too, but the ever-striving Chinese stomach still prefers home cooking. On weekends they eat out two or three times. About $2,000 a month.
3. Leisure: Two trips abroad a year, plus one trip back to China. About $10,000 a year.
4. Transport: Two cars; insurance, maintenance, and gas run $5,000 a year.
5. Work: In by 11, out by 7, with plenty of discretionary time. He gets along well with colleagues, has switched jobs once, is now a staff engineer at a big company, and is looking to move onto the management track.
6. Income: He makes $500K+, his wife $300K. After maxing out their 401(k)s, and counting that contribution, their after-tax income is around $500K, against $110K in spending — so they save roughly $390K a year.

Compare that to a classmate of his back in China — another top student, and a close friend. He joined Tencent in 2010, before mobile internet had even taken off. He's now a small-team lead in some vertical, at level T3, earning 1.3 million-plus RMB, around 800K after tax. Household after-tax income is about 900K. The 996 grind is the norm and the pressure is intense. His net worth today — stocks and cash — is two to three times his American friend's.

That friend joined a startup in 2019. It went public in the first half of 2021, and the stock rose eightfold.

That, roughly, is the American workplace and cost of living before 2020.

And after 2020? Education (tuition), healthcare, and housing became the three great mountains of the new era.

At Safeway, California's most ordinary supermarket: Häagen-Dazs is $7 a pint; whole-wheat bread $4 a loaf; a bunch of fresh roses (a dozen) $14.99, so about $1 a stem; apples $3 a pound; a head of cabbage $3.69; milk $3.80 (2.5 liters); corn $0.70 an ear; bananas $1 a pound (at Trader Joe's, $0.23–$0.29 each); laundry detergent about $18 for 2.5 liters.

The prices of daily necessities — eggs, bottled water, milk — have doubled in five years. Restaurant tips start at 18%, and even the self-service ordering kiosks now pop up a screen asking you to tip.

I have a friend in Silicon Valley, around my age, who graduated and landed at a big company — a perfectly respectable start, $200K–$250K on entry. He doesn't spend recklessly, but when he tallies things up at month's end, money is still tight. Some months he even has to sell stock to clear his bills.

(Figure in original.)

The reason behind all this is: the world, at bottom, is one giant pay-to-rank auction.

Your income — and the standard of living it buys you — comes down to two things. First, where your income ranks locally: in Beijing or Shanghai, in the Bay Area or New York. Second, where your income ranks nationally, even globally.

Your global ranking is essentially your maximum purchasing power over goods. If a good can be packed into a shipping container and moved to another country, across an ocean, by one mode of transport or another, then it is essentially being bid on by the whole world at once. China can buy cherries grown in Chile; America can buy iPhones made in China. There's logistics and there are tariffs, but the final price of a good in different countries differs by at most a factor of two. A Silicon Valley coder taking home $200K–$400K a year may not be top-tier locally, but on a global scale is at the very top, with enormous purchasing power over goods.

But if a good can't be shipped in a container — education, healthcare, housing, legal services — then when you buy it, you're only competing with people inside your own locality. Prices then vary wildly by region. Seeing a doctor in the U.S. might cost 10 or even 100 times what it does in China. In that case your purchasing power comes down almost entirely to where your income ranks locally.

An income of $200K–$400K is a very good income globally, but in Silicon Valley — especially in the wealthier neighborhoods — it's only lower-middle, entry-level even, not very competitive. So if you insist on buying the best of everything, you'll end up spending more than you make. And if the services you're buying are labor-intensive, the prices in America become almost too painful to look at.

These days, for middle-class-and-above households and individuals on both sides of the Pacific, over 80% of spending goes to buying services — housing, medical care, healthcare, eating out.

So for Chinese people: no matter how much you earn, the moment you convert it to dollars it looks pale. And for people living in America: no matter how strong the dollar's purchasing power is, no matter how cheap American beef and lamb are — even if the price dropped to zero, you'd only shave 20% off your spending.

Still, there is an upside to holding a currency of high absolute value: as a consumer, you can compete asymmetrically.

The working stiff in America earns decently but doesn't live rich. But the moment you go abroad — back home to visit family, or just traveling — the experience takes off instantly. You can stay in five-star hotels the whole way, because a night in a Beijing or Shanghai five-star costs less than the daily property tax on plenty of Silicon Valley houses.

That's how large the cost-of-living gap between China and the U.S. really is.

America isn't perfect, and China isn't worthless. If you asked me, I'd tell you: on balance, America still offers more opportunity, and hard work is more reliably rewarded — that's a lot better than in China. Anything not involving people is cheap; anything involving people, China's experience crushes America's; and life in America carries less pressure than life in China.

02 What business school admissions teach us about startups and brand-building

Beyond graduation season, it's also the time of year when American business schools send out their offers. Some rejoice, some despair.

Some people are holding more than one offer, agonizing over where to go; others are on the receiving end of the dreaded clean sweep of rejections. Nobody enjoys being rejected, and business schools are no exception — which is why the schools, just like the applicants, are locked in a relationship that is equal parts competition and cooperation.

American business schools break roughly into three tiers: HSW, M7, and S16. HSW is Chinese students' playful shorthand for Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

(Figure in original.)

M7 — some say it stands for "Magic 7 Top Business Schools," others for "Magnificent 7"; which is the authentic full name, nobody can say. As for the origin of M7, the going legend is that these seven schools — from deans to admissions officers, from career counselors to marketing staff — gather once every two years to hold court and debate industry trends, something like a trade association. It's as if seven kingpins of the martial-arts world, kindred spirits who admire one another, formed a private league that outsiders simply aren't allowed to join.

S16 stands for "Sweet 16," supposedly named after the round of sixteen in American college basketball — though I've never actually heard anyone in the U.S. use the term. The ranking is simply M7 plus the following nine schools.

(Figure in original.)

Today I mainly want to talk about three of them: Stanford GSB, Harvard HBS, and Northwestern Kellogg.

Stanford is a truly singular case. Silicon Valley's rapid rise gave Stanford not only a fast-climbing reputation and a great deal of money, but something less tangible and more important: an endless supply of intellectual talent and vibrant energy.

Riding on Silicon Valley's technology-development edge, Stanford earned handsome patent-licensing revenue. From 1954 to 1976, that revenue hovered around $45,000. But from the founding of its technology-licensing office in 1970 through 1998, licensing income reached $300 million. Companies born of Stanford generate $100 billion in revenue a year. In 1991, Stanford's centennial fundraising drive brought in an astronomical $12.6 billion — the highest figure in the history of higher education, one that even Harvard of the day couldn't come close to.

Over the past 50 years, more than 1,200 companies in Silicon Valley have been founded by Stanford professors, students, and graduates; today nearly half of Silicon Valley's products come from companies tied to Stanford alumni. Counting HP, from 1988 to 1996 the revenue created by Stanford people's companies made up 60% of Silicon Valley's total.

It's not just the students who love to start companies — Stanford is enormously supportive of professors doing it too. As long as they fulfill their basic teaching and publishing duties, Stanford doesn't interfere with professors moonlighting at outside companies. It even lets them leave to found companies or take senior roles at them. Stanford's tenth president, and Alphabet's board chairman, John L. Hennessy is a vivid example — Marc Andreessen called him "the godfather of Silicon Valley."

In the 1980s, after inventing the RISC-based MIPS processor, Hennessy co-founded MIPS. For the next few years he mostly worked at the company rather than teaching or researching at the university. A few years later MIPS went public and was sold to its customer SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.). Hennessy returned from industry to Stanford as dean of the engineering school — and later became the university's president.

Hennessy believed that entrepreneurship is part of the university. He encouraged professors to partner with businesses. Stanford's faculty and students share a conviction: that their innovations will make the world better. Ever since Frederick Terman, Stanford professors have had a tradition of investing in their own students; by Hennessy's time this had become a tradition of professors and students founding companies together. Stanford's patent office has licensed over 8,000 school patents to businesses, collecting $1.3 billion in patent fees.

(Figure in original.)

Stanford favors "young people with entrepreneurial spirit," and throughout your time there it relentlessly "brainwashes" you, pushing you to start something. The result: 40% of graduates skip the job hunt and go straight into starting a company, and once you add those who quit to found something within a few years of graduating, the vast majority probably end up as founders.

Startups succeed only rarely, and Stanford's are no exception. But those that do succeed get very rich — and then they can donate to the school! And the ones who fail? No matter — nobody was counting on their donations anyway. Had they taken jobs instead of founding companies, they wouldn't have struck it rich either, and would have had no money to give.

For a school, the point isn't getting most people to a comfortable middle-class life — it's producing enough people who get rich. Over time, Stanford built a virtuous cycle: plenty of alumni donations, plenty of need-based scholarships, students carry little loan burden, more of them go on to start companies after graduating, and when they strike it rich they come back and give. So Stanford runs its education like a VC firm.

Harvard is a second fascinating example. It especially loves recruiting "young people who fear nothing." The case method is its main pedagogy, and a big chunk of your grade comes from "class participation" — so everyone is furiously encouraged to raise their hand and speak. The result is often a contest of who can shoot their hand up fastest. Plenty of people haven't even understood the case, haven't even heard the question clearly, and yet up goes the hand; sometimes you just stand up and ramble, because saying something earns points and saying nothing earns none. Come the Q&A, the fast hands hog 90% of the air time. You can imagine that once these people graduate into big corporations, they too more easily get noticed and get more chances to prove themselves (and, of course, more chances to make mistakes).

The corporate ladder at big companies is very, very long. The people who reach the top are often the ones who, while still young, caught the eye of a senior leader and rode the "elevator" up — proof that following the right person matters a hundred, a thousand times more than doing the right thing. In such an environment, Harvard people can polarize: beat your chest and grab the project, and if you blow it you lose your job — but if you pull it off, you get a shot at rapid promotion. The downside and the upside are entirely asymmetric. Among the business schools, Harvard is the best at producing senior leaders for large corporations. By one rough count, Harvard Business School accounts for 33 of the CEOs of the Fortune Global 500 — more than the next several schools combined.

Kellogg is a low-key school that many Chinese may not know well, but say the name to an American and you'll get a thumbs-up. As recently as the 1970s Kellogg was an obscure business school; in the 1980s it suddenly burst onto the scene, and over the following 30 years it held the number-one spot in American business-school rankings for nearly a third of that time.

Why? Back in the late 1970s, Kellogg's newly appointed dean, Jacobs, discovered a secret and made a small reform around it. At the time, business schools admitted students mainly on GPA, standardized tests (GMAT/GRE), résumés, and application essays. Jacobs noticed that many students with outstanding application materials didn't do well in the job search, while many who landed great jobs had rather mediocre applications.

It turned out that the companies doing the recruiting cared, beyond grades and résumés, most of all about the interview — and many people who could ace tests and write essays weren't much good at interviewing. So Jacobs made the interview a key part of admissions. The upshot: the cohort screened through interviews saw its employment rate jump sharply.

American magazines and the business schools themselves love to compare employment rates, salaries, and placements. And there it was — Kellogg surging past the pack. Not only that, Kellogg began publishing an annual "employment report" listing every graduate's name and destination (which seems to have set a precedent that endures to this day), along with average salaries and bonuses by industry. Gradually, more and more strong applicants applied to Kellogg and made it their first choice. And employers, finding they could hire "useful" people out of Kellogg, expanded their recruiting there; those graduates, a few years on, would return to their alma mater to recruit and to donate. With more strong students, many strong professors also became willing to teach there. The virtuous cycle was complete.

Speaking of business schools, I find much of this transfers by analogy across domains.

Alan Levy said: "Your job is to understand the problem, then offer them the best product to solve it." So some people manage not to "just give the user whatever they ask for" — because the focus isn't the problem itself, but doing everything possible to find the root of the need; the focus is on the more essential, deeper cause, and then delivering the best, simplest solution or product.

Founders can learn from how Stanford and Kellogg rose.

1. First, you must clearly understand who your users really are, and what their core need is. The core users of the "product" that is the MBA applicant are the companies coming to campus to recruit; the core users of the "product" that is MBA education are the business school's applicants. So only by satisfying the recruiters' core need (hiring good people) can you satisfy the applicants' need (landing a good job).

And your choice of user often determines the shape of your product, which in turn shapes user behavior. That kind of "coherence" is often precisely why competitors — even ones much bigger than you — can't copy you.

2. Competition exists most of the time, but sometimes it "breaks down." For someone truly exceptional, both competition and cooperation effectively cease to exist. Take Einstein: he too wanted to collaborate with others, but who was worthy of collaborating with him? Others may have wanted to compete with him, but who could out-compete him?

3. It's not hard to be a maverick; the hard part is being a maverick correctly. Talk more with smart people, spend time with smart people three to five years older than you, and then think hard about the places where they disagree with you. Being a maverick among fools is worthless.

4. In many fields the first-mover advantage is pronounced. To start a company in such a field, you have to be like the Harvard Business School student — quickly grab investors' attention, raise money, then sprint, then raise more and keep sprinting. When Pinduoduo rose, opening a shop couldn't have been easier, and it was free — so simple that traditional merchants would take one look and think, "what junk is this," and not deign to open a store.

Eventually everyone realized just how profitable it was. Then more "professional merchants" rushed in to grab a slice, but by then the barrier was already too high — opening a store was still free, but the newcomers' products ranked lower, their conversion rates couldn't keep up, and so they had to spend to buy their way up. And then they discovered that running an online shop was no easier than running a physical one: no "rent," sure, but the other costs were higher.

Because they were paying a tax — the latecomer's tax.

03 The people who buy time

If childhood experience shapes a person's character profoundly, then your twenties are the prime time to rebuild the self. Fresh out of the ivory tower, your worldview and values not yet fully set, you begin to gain independence from your parents — materially and spiritually — and to chase a life of your own.

The books you read, the people you meet, and the things you experience in this phase will profoundly shape your inner character. And every choice you make in the present carries a cost; the further along you go, the more factors any change must reckon with, and the greater the resistance and difficulty.

At this stage, you must be willing to invest in yourself. It looks like a lot of money spent, but across the full length of a life it is actually the lowest-cost investment there is — building a strong will, mastering scientific and effective methods, and constructing the life you want. The returns are so high they simply can't be measured in money.

If the whole aim of a product manager is to "solve a pain point," I personally prefer David Heinemeier Hansson's framing — the itch — the kind you just have to scratch before you feel right.

A truly good product does deliver a great experience — one that didn't exist before but exists now, and once you start using it, you can't imagine going without it.

Big things, like today's large models, or the search engines and phone navigation apps of an earlier day; small things, like "copy and paste," which you now take for granted on a computer — guess how maddening it is for PC users switching to a Mac to discover there's no "cut"?

Every founder wants to find a pain point. How do you find one? Setting luck aside, the only reliable answer is: accumulation — through long immersion and buildup in a field, you come to know what the most important problem is, what the necessary conditions are, which skills you'll need to pull it off, and what gaps you still have to close.

Is it enough just to start accumulating very, very early? Not necessarily. Time is a great measuring stick, but there's another necessary condition: direction.

In recent years you may have noticed that things which looked utterly out of reach five or ten years ago suddenly, concretely, appear right in front of you.

If a founder has no accumulated depth, they have no ability to think about the future. And then they have no direction — and so the accumulation may not, in the end, prove useful at all.

If visionary founders are few, visionary investors are always fewer still. But precisely for that reason, these very few investors with the strongest foresight are more tightly connected to one another, even to the point of mutual kinship — and so they command orders of magnitude more resources, because the extreme and the concentrated is a universal effect.

If there are things worth doing to think about the future, I'd say they are:

a. Open up the mind — read widely and eclectically, the more the better. Miscellaneous reading greatly increases a person's capacity to take in new things (a form of comprehension). The richer your experience, the stronger your understanding is likely to be, and the more likely that, faced with the unknown, you can quickly find something in your existing knowledge to draw an analogy to, and so build a judgment.

b. Cast a wide net of goodwill — as the saying goes, at home you rely on your parents; out in the world, on your friends.

c. Build an aesthetic for your own life: what kind of life do you want to live?