

What the Highest-Paid Programmers Earn - msredmond
http://adtmag.com/articles/2011/05/27/what-highest-paid-programmers-earn.aspx

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patio11
I've said it before but I'll say it again: the highest paid programmers don't
call themselves programmers. There are a lot of things you can do which
involve slinging code that pay rather substantially more than the equivalent
amount of undifferentiated code slinging.

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saturdayplace
I've apparently missed this in the past. Would you mind elaborating?

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yannickt
Basically be a domain expert, rather than an implementation technology expert.

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jgmmo
No - basically, have your contribution be measured in how much value you added
to the business. EX: App redesign makes sales go up 10k then the work was
worth 10k

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msort
The highest-paid programmers usually become rich via: 1) Founding a business
or startup. 2) Becoming an early employee of an averagely successful startup,
or a per-IPO employee of hugely successful startups (Facebook, Google). 3)
Becoming an IT manager or quants/traders at IB or Hedge funds 4) Becoming
world-leader in open-source technologies (e.g. Scala, Hadoop, JQuery). 5)
Writing books, giving lectures: teaching others how to become great
programmers.

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veyron
What does 'rich' mean?

If you mean upper-middle class then 4 and 5 are out of the question

If you mean upper class (top 1%) even 3 is out of the question. 500K a year is
upper-middle-class in jersey and middle-class in manhattan. And after all of
those expenses, you would be lucky to save 100K of that after taxes

If you mean `rich` (i would define rich as having enough money not to need a
paycheck from another company -- maybe 10M in the bank is a good threshold)
then 1 and 2 are the only ways to go

One thing to note: taxes are a pain. Most people in that 200-500K range are
stiffed by the AMT (why I had to pay AMT at 22 is beyond me)

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maigret
250k/y is rich, even in NY [http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-
klein/2010/09/even_in_...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-
klein/2010/09/even_in_new_york_city_250000_i.html)

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veyron
rich is not measured as a percentile! If you take rich as a percentile, then
yes 250k is rich.

If you take an absolute measure of rich and compare cost of living, 250K is
really not that much. Especially after taxes and the ilk.

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maigret
Somehow over the last 10/20 years, the notion of "rich" has had a much bigger
inflation than the rest of the world, this is particularly true in the US. If
your definition of "rich" is not needing a paycheck, then 2M with 2% interests
over inflation should be enough to live OK in most countries except maybe
Switzerland, Denmark or Norway.

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veyron
The rub is in the statement " 2M with 2% interests over inflation", which is
harder to sustain over terms over 10 years.

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maigret
OK... I have two answers to that. First, when you are rich, it is easier to
get a better return on investment. Because you can afford better advisors, and
because you work with higher volumes, bringing the transaction costs down, and
possibly accessing to expensive investment products other can't afford. There
are many articles on the rich getting richer, I will not post another one
here.

Then, second point... Let's say you just get the return as high as the
inflation... You still have a 2M pie you can eat from :) That would mean for
example 50000$ a year during 40 years, augmenting pair with the inflation. I
don't know well in other countries, but for me that would be enough to let the
state retirement come. That wouldn't be the millionaire life but quite enough
to enjoy my life with what I'd like to do. But for now I rather work and
code/design things that matters :)

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veyron
"when you are rich, it is easier to get a better return on investment" <\--
This argument is valid at a scale two orders of magnitude higher than what I
am talking about. It's easy to lop people with 1M net worth in the same bucket
as people with 10B net worth, but there's a very meaningful difference there
(beyond whether or not you decide to get a third bugatti). A million-dollar
portfolio is below the thresholds that many financial institutions would
consider for an investment.

"Let's say you just get the return as high as the inflation... You still have
a 2M pie you can eat from :)" <\-- lets say you are 25 now and you live to be
80. Even if you can just match inflation, you have less than 40K per year to
play with. In most suburbs of NYC, its hard to live on that (taxes on a house
alone will eat away a quarter of that).

Your arguments would be valid if I decided to move to a third world country. I
could go to India and live like a king for the rest of my life on less than
300K USD. But now you are comparing apples to oranges here: taking earnings
from a place where earnings and costs are high, and exporting them to a place
where costs are low.

NOTE: My goal isn't to pick a fight. You will understand when you get there
that a million dollars just isn't that much (and not in a keeping-with-the-
joneses sense)

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maigret
I quite get you're arent't picking up a fight :) I understand your points and
agree we are picking different environments for investment. As I said, in
Europe when you get at 0 when your are 67 (max!) is then covered by state
retirement.

Your point made me think about geo difference BTW. It is now clear to me how
much the US needs more performance from you to ensure retirement. BTW feel
free to tell me if you want to follow that thread per email... I'd be glad to.

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veyron
put your email in your profile :)

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hkarthik
I imagine some of the top level programmers at Microsoft, Google, Facebook,
etc probably earn in the mid six figures.

But just like executive pay, there's a point where the bonuses and profit
sharing make up the vast majority of your compensation. Base salary stats
don't really apply then.

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rick888
I think you probably have a better chance at making 1.2 million from your own
company than finding a job that will pay you that much.

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maigret
Yes. You also have a much better chance of getting broke with your own company
than getting a six fig salary at an existing company - so at the end it is
just basic risk management.

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malkia
This omits bonuses, and other out-of your salary payments, that programmers
usually take. I've heard about minimum 15% bonus at google for example. (and
15% meaning not very good performance)

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alexgartrell
Even for a new employee at Google, Facebook, etc. bonuses and stock make up a
significant percentage of pay

eta: new as in "unproven and fresh out of school." The statement because
trivially obvious when you're talking about VPs acquired from PayPal, etc.

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skarayan
The person making 1.2 million isn't just a programmer, but he/she also
understands the business well. More so, he/she is an integral part of the
business.

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gaius
That person was probably Sergey Aleynikov, who made $400k at Goldman Sachs
then jumped ship to Teza for $1.2m - salary. He was doing high frequency
trading code in C++. This is a matter of public record. Unfortunately he's now
in jail having been accused of stealing said code from GS.

EDIT: I have now read to the last page of the article, and I guessed right!

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bhickey
Aleynikov was convicted, not just accused. Teza came in with a low offer and
then bumped it up to $1.2m when he offered to give them Goldman code.

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gaius
Interestingly, for a while I used some of Aleynikov's code myself, he wrote
Oracaml. It hasn't been touched since 2006, doesn't build with the current
OCaml or GCC without some hacking, and he's probably not going to be uploading
patches from jail! So I restarted the project as OCI*ML on Github.

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joshz
If you look at that H-1B table that was up here a while ago, there are at
least 24 software engineer, analyst, programmer type entries that paid more
than $500k and up to $1mil and 52 entries between $200k and 1mil. Those
exclude managerial or executive job titles. Although given how many errors
that table had, I don't know how accurate that information is. I'm sure there
are plenty more non visa people that earn in that range or above.

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iuguy
Incidentally I can't say for the US but in the UK our industry pays the
equivalent of $125k - $190k for security testers in the app space.

We (mandalorian) don't, but instead focus on more freedom and better jobs. Not
hiring right now, but check back in a couple of months.

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ChuckMcM
I've always felt that some people were 'coders' who given an algorithm or a
task can craft an elegant piece of code which implements that algorithm
tweaked in any of a number of directions (fast, robust, testable, portable,
Etc.)

Other were 'analysts' who took problems and solved them with a combination of
coding and process and perhaps hardware.

Then there were 'techs' who, given a set of steps, translated those steps into
something a machine could consume.

Analysts seem to have the widest range in pay, coders are pretty bunched up
around various levels of experience.

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georgieporgie
_...some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million per year to
programmers who can code them better than anyone else._

Correction: some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million/yr to a
programmer _who can bring them source code representing the cumulative effort
of a team_ from one of the most 'respected' firms in the industry.

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rorrr
Google Offers Staff Engineer $3.5 Million To Turn Down Facebook Offer

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-
enginee...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-
engineer-3-5-million-to-turn-down-facebook-offer/)

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gcb
isn't staff engineer a manager?

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rachelbythebay
A staff engineer could just be someone who's one level above senior. Someone
like that in Mountain View probably makes around $200K/year.

