you should search what "opportunity cost" means.
The market is highly inflated compared to other investments because people are blindly buying without thinking at almost any stupid price. Your comment is a perfect example of that.
You can leverage your money much better with a mortgage though. You just need a small down payment, but you get the upside (and downside) on the entire value of the home.
I'd also argue that most other assets are also highly inflated. The P/E on most tech stocks for instance looks a lot scarier than the overall real estate market. I'll add that people have been saying the Bay Area housing bubble will pop for over 30 years. It hasn't yet.
This is a bet on the future price of the home. And a lot of simulations have shown that you will come ahead in stocks unless you are in an exceptional growing market and not moving for at least 5 years.
There is a huge lobby in society to convince you that owning a home is the way to go (banks, real estate agent, other homeowners and people repeating this nonsense all the time). Don't let this fool you and make the calculations before buying anything.
I didn't say you could leverage it to guaranteed success, just that you can leverage a far larger amount of capital. That of course means larger risk along with the larger reward. No one is going to loan you 300k to invest in the stock market but they will to buy a house.
I'm sorry but this is such BS. There are what, a dozen other engineering industries out there? EE, Civil, Mechanical, Aeronautical etc. and in not a single one of them do they do this monkey dance. It would be absurd to ask a Aeronautical Engineer to do something like derive the Navier-Stokes Equation on a whiteboard and its equally absurd to play the same game with SWE's, you all have just been bamboozled and strong-armed by employers into accepting it as a valid practice. I doubt you would be willing to say that those other industries are failures or hire low quality engineers because they don't torture their employees with essentially pointless trivia games.
In fact one might say that the Aeronautics industry is in far better shape than the Software industry, a failure in one of their systems results in people dying but I can go to any major tech companies websites and experience a bug on any given day.
> It would be absurd to ask a Aeronautical Engineer to do something like derive the Navier-Stokes Equation on a whiteboard
A thorough interview in physical engineering disciplines will often expect you to demonstrate/validate something about your technical skill in-person, unless you are being interviewed because people already have validated knowledge about your capabilities (e.g., hiring a known individual from a competitor that is well-respected among peers).
To your point, a physical engineering interview might be more about "spot checks" than "assume the person is lying so ask them to complete a bevy of undergraduate final exam questions". In the software world, maybe that would be akin to starting with FizzBuzz and finding other ways to get solid proof the person can implement, not just talk. To me, if you have open source work that can be read by an interviewer, I would find it disrespectful for that interviewer to act as though the work doesn't exist and they should verify from scratch you can actually write working code.
It's comparatively a lot harder to just have a conversation with a software person and be certain they have the technical competence they claim vs. other technical realms. I tend to think it is the nature of the subject, as well as the salaries drawing in more charlatans than in physical engineering realms.
> In fact one might say that the Aeronautics industry is in far better shape than the Software industry, a failure in one of their systems results in people dying but I can go to any major tech companies websites and experience a bug on any given day.
This probably has more to do with Aeronautics actually practicing engineering as compared to today's software development practices. Also software development as a field is far less mature than traditional engineering disciplines. That's not meant to be pejorative - it's just where humanity is.
>A thorough interview in physical engineering disciplines will often expect you to demonstrate/validate something about your technical skill in-person, unless you are being interviewed because people already have validated knowledge about your capabilities (e.g., hiring a known individual from a competitor that is well-respected among peers).
This to me is one of the worst things about the Tech industry. You could be a senior engineer at Google and to move to a new company you will have to do the same algorithm interviews that New Grads are doing. It's a bad look for the industry. Like oh I see on your resume that you have worked for Facebook, Google and Amazon, well we better put you though an algorithm interview because you could have just been a false positive at all 3 companies. It massively devalues SWEs in an industry that we already know colludes to depress wages.
>This probably has more to do with Aeronautics actually practicing engineering as compared to today's software development practices. Also software development as a field is far less mature than traditional engineering disciplines. That's not meant to be pejorative - it's just where humanity is.
Not disagreeing but my point was that they have a far better performance record despite not doing the bizarre interviews that the Tech industry favors.
> EE, Civil, Mechanical, Aeronautical etc. and in not a single one of them do they do this monkey dance.
EEs definitely go through basic, advanced, and domain-specific circuit design questions in their interviews. And compared to LEETCODE they are much more difficult to prepare for too.
There is a reason why SWE is a fallback option for many other engineering disciplines -- resources like leetcode and low barrier of entry to learning make it much more accessible.
