
Ask HN: Fulltime software engineers over 250k, how'd you get there(updated)? - throwaway007007
I’ve been inspired by an old HN thread that asks what software engineers with &gt; 200K salary did to get there ( tinyurl.com&#x2F;hwvw5yl ). I am looking for recent data points&#x2F;advice on what people did or are doing to get &gt; 250K base salary (total &gt; 300K comp) these days. Silicon valley&#x2F;new york data points are preferable, but other outliers are interesting as well. To keep the spirit of old thread - there are the questions: How much are you making? Is your income stable or volatile? What industry are you in? Where do you live? How long&#x2F;What did it take to get to your level? What kind of work do you do? Do you enjoy it, or is it the stereotypical &quot;highly paid because it&#x27;s crappy&quot; work? Is this a short-lived opportunity, or do you expect it to exist in 5 years? What would your advice be to a 25-yr-old aspiring developer? 30? 35 ?<p>Hope this post helps someone who is either entering the field or a current player looking for a similar path.<p>This was a quick write up, so I’ll add any important details I missed later.
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jasonkester
Two steps:

\- Get provably good at something.

\- Find a company that needs that something _really bad_.

Notice that you don't just need to be good. You need _proof_. I'd strongly
recommend a fully functioning site that does something undeniably cool and
that you built yourself from top to bottom. I'd strongly recommend not just
building a bunch of open source stuff that's up on Github.

Another form of proof that's nice to have is happy clients & bosses. You want
their CTO to be talking to your old CTO over drinks and have your ex-boss
mention how he once had to lay off a team of 12 developers when they ran out
of money, but they needed to keep one guy around to finish the thing up, and
how there was this one guy on the team who was clearly the guy to be that guy.
And if you're looking to do this thing we've been talking about, which sounds
hard, and you need somebody to build a team around, here's his email address.

Work for lots of places, build good stuff, and make sure it's always
recognized and visible. Then build more recognizable, visible stuff on the
side that can only be attributed to you.

Then go ask for that rate.

~~~
mildbow
Should be more like

1\. Find a company that needs something really bad

2\. _then_ get provably good at it.

No point building skills without a market :)

Now, if you've been with a company for 2~3+ years, you should be able to
figure out what domain specific things will make you non-fungible.

But, really I don't make 250k+ base so what do I know.

~~~
bbcbasic
> 2\. then get provably good at it.

Still risky because the company will probably find someone else while you are
getting provably good at it. Or they simply may not like you for some other
reason.

> Now, if you've been with a company for 2~3+ years, you should be able to
> figure out what domain specific things will make you non-fungible

A good start, but also you need the company to be able to afford the new rate.
Also companies work hard every day to make sure that everyone is as fungible
as possible. Playing politics may help make people perceive you as less
fungible.

The sort of plan I'd come up with (not an expert though) is try to find a very
large company (or an industry) that routinely pays people this compensation to
many people and figure out how to get that role.

Google and finance spring to mind.

------
jnordwick
I work in finance, most often front desk trading. I love what I do, and I
can't imagine doing anything else. I won't go into exact compensation figures,
but my total compensation tends to be mid-6-figures (plus on a good year --
most of my comp is bonus based), but I also work a lot of hours.

I have very unique skills for high-performance, low-latency programming
especially in Java and C++. There aren't too many people who go digging
through assembly dumps from Hotspot. I've been doing this for about 15 years
now. It can be very stressful. I've literally had a day where I lost a million
dollars in seconds, but I've also had days where I've made tens of millions in
seconds.

I'm a very good programmer. My math skills are pretty good too.

I live in NYC (I've also lived in Chicago). No surprise there. Right now I'm
actually taking a pay cut to work at a finance startup. Maybe one day I'll be
principle of my own firm. Or at leave a C-level :)

~~~
CyberDildonics
So if I can write programs that out perform Java programs I can make 250k?

~~~
jnordwick
Can you write Java programs that can outperform C++ programs is the questions?
That are also significantly bug free? Oh yeah, and don't GC, and either use
only in-house libraries or or ones you've written. Almost everything I've done
is hand written just because of the very unique nature of the softish-RT and
high-performance requirements. The work is very interesting, very demanding,
and very fun.

~~~
CyberDildonics
I would use ISPC and optimized memory layouts to shame whatever programs
people told me couldn't be faster.

~~~
kasey_junk
I've interacted with ISPC based trading cores, they provide some value but the
trading context is frequently not that parallelisable and often the things
that ISPC is good at are even better done by custom hardware.

The real challenge is integrating with other systems and changing the code as
new requirements come to market, so the kind of work being described is to
make the some Java component that must be communicated with fast enough to not
have to be rewritten entirely.

In any case, if you have a mix of Java/C++/HPC, can prove it, and enjoy it,
there are lots of finance jobs that pay in that relm.

~~~
jnordwick
One thing I've really wanted to try is a FPGA on a socket. I've seen FPGAs
that fit in CPU sockets before and used the QPI link to communicate to the
other processor and anything else on the ring. Since you don't need to pay the
PCI bus latency costs you could potentially do some pretty wild things such as
talk to the NIC directly and keep your book on the FPGA and pushed into the LL
cache. You can even speak to the LL cache directly, make DMA calls. Talk to
the memory controller. Etc.

I've tried some GPU stuff for options and looking down futures curve, but the
cost of going off core is prohibitive in most cases.

~~~
kasey_junk
I assume you mean _wouldn 't_ pay the PCI bus costs.

But yeah that would be cool.

I've never had a chance to work on in router asic/FPGA and I'd like to try
that some time.

------
csallen

        How much are you making? What industry are you in? Where do you live? Is your income stable or volatile?
    

I charged a $250k rate ($125/hr) as a contract front-end developer based in SF
for years. I worked exclusively for startups, and I worked remote more than
50% of the time.

My income was stable. I never had any downtime between contracts, and I often
turned down work. I only had "light" months when I took vacations. Some months
I made as much as $30-40k.

    
    
        How long/What did it take to get to your level? What kind of work do you do? Do you enjoy it, or is it the stereotypical "highly paid because it's crappy" work?
    

I started as a web developer in college and I had contracts where I charged
$60/hr. I didn't start charging $125/hr until I was 26.

I genuinely enjoyed the work I was doing. I only took gigs where I'd have a
lot of creative license. More than a few times, I was the only front-end
developer on the team. Sometimes I was the designer, too.

    
    
        Is this a short-lived opportunity, or do you expect it to exist in 5 years?
    

Depends on the supply and demand of the startup economy: how many startups
there are, how much funding they're getting, and how many good developers
there are. Things seem like they're going strong, though. Last year I taught a
smart friend of mine to code. She got a job making $100/hr in January. In
hindsight, I probably could've charged more than $125/hr :D

Personally, I'm done with contracting. I really like the idea of running my
own businesses/projects that generate regular income. Currently I'm working on
[https://IndieHackers.com](https://IndieHackers.com). Not only is it a
business for myself, but it also helps other with the same goal. I think being
independent is the future of work for programmers.

    
    
        What would your advice be to a 25-yr-old aspiring developer? 30? 35 ?
    

Don't become complacent. Never stop learning. Keep working on side projects
and releasing them into the world. Almost all of my contract jobs were inbound
requests that came when people saw my projects and wanted something similar
for themselves.

~~~
pulkitpahwa
Hey,

Can you tell me where do you look for freelance projects ?

~~~
infinite8s
Getting that kind of rate requires building a network (usually in person).

------
wwalser
> "> 250K base salary (total > 300K comp)"

This point will keep lots of people making >$300k out of the conversation if
"base" is taken to mean cash compensation (which is what I would take it to
mean).

I've gotten offers in the past year for north of $300k in liquid assets but in
all of those cases equity made up >40% of the deal.

------
nyrulez
In finance its not hard to make. What is hard is to get hired for those roles:
great school, do awesome in interviews that involve software, math,
probability domains. On the buy side (hedge funds), you will be easily making
that much in 2-3 years after joining. And finance folks love their puzzles and
brain teasers too.

In tech, its harder. Equity is key. A big company can offer that kind of
equity if you offer something really unique or are in great demand (i.e.
wanted by multiple great companies). Startups, you got to choose carefully and
see if you can pick the right one that won't go under and also offer you good
equity. I have rarely heard anyone getting paid that much in cash in tech
except senior roles that can take a while to get to.

------
SEJeff
In general, work in finance. I have a friend who works as a systems engineer
(sysadmin who can code) at Bloomberg and makes just that. His total comp is >
300.

~~~
swyx
holy shit. what do they do all day in bloomberg??

~~~
SEJeff
Maintain large kafka clusters, futz with mesos, and futz with kubernetes. Same
as all of us really. The difference is that a lot of startups will talk about
their "hard big data problems" and might have 500T. A firm like Bloomberg's
"big data problems" might be 400+ Petabytes. They also generally speaking
totally shun the cloud as at that scale it tends to be cheaper to build on-
premise.

~~~
infinite8s
They also shun the cloud because they have one of the largest physical
datacenters on the island with real heavy iron (IBM and Sun/Oracle boxes)

------
Avalaxy
Live in the US. There's no way you'd make that kind of money anywhere else in
the world as a SE.

~~~
lucozade
I have had and have devs making more than 300K working for me in:

\+ London

\+ Singapore

\+ Hong Kong

\+ Tokyo

Edit: and NY, Chicago and Houston but that doesn't really make my point.

I have very good reason to believe (I've seen their salaries) also in:

\+ Paris

\+ Frankfurt

\+ Dublin

The trick is to have skills that are needed in industries that understand the
value of tech and have the money to pay for it.

~~~
borplk
Can you give some examples of the kind of skills you are talking about? I keep
hearing this but no one mentions concrete examples.

------
buddyboy
Get multiple gigs going. It's not too hard to get > 300K if you are willing to
work all the time! I've been able to do it with just a couple clients. I don't
really recommend working all the time because it does take a toll. But there
is a benefit to having multiple clients in terms of diversification, i.e. if
one goes away you're not left in a lurch.

How'd I get here? Worked at one startup after another in Austin for about 20
years. Then started working consulting jobs. Not nearly as exciting as
startups and in fact most of my projects now are rather boring. But good SE's
are hard to find and when companies find someone that can reliably deliver the
goods you are in and it can become stable work.

~~~
malux85
Hey - Fill in your hacker news profile, maybe we can work together?

------
hbcondo714
Maybe these software engineers are working on Oracle's new public cloud:

"The company has offered many of the team working on it stock-based incentives
worth around $500,000, and has thrown additional incentives of $100,000 or
more at people who have shown interest in leaving for other companies."

[http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-has-special-team-
worki...](http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-has-special-team-working-on-
new-public-cloud-2015-10)

