Taking a Look At High-End Programmer Salaries

msmoriarty writes "Our reporter decided to try to document the high end of programmer salaries (at least in the US). It seems that $300,000 to $400,000 and up is not unheard of in the financial industry, but the highest salary we could document was apx. $1.2 million, earned by Sergey Aleynikov, who was later convicted of stealing proprietary source code from a previous employer, Goldman Sachs."

Comments

Re:Ah, but

[dintech]

Yes and No. Non-disclosure is considered a given in any job and would have been in his contract. You'd have to be out of your mind to try to steal code from a bank since there's a lot of monitoring in place to watch for it. (Disclaimer: I work for one).

The reason he is paid so much is not because he's a programmer who keeps his mouth shut. It's because he's a programmer with experience and understanding of how high-frequency trading systems work.

An individual's first job in banking is likely to be better paid than any other IT job. However, you have to build up a lot of domain experience before you can get paid those kind of salaries. Some developers even make the jump over to the business side to unlock bigger bonuses, but a maths PhD is usually required. For others the top money is in contracting. £500 - £1000 per day, more in short contracts. But again, you need domain experience.

Re:Financial Industry

[TheRaven64]

I periodically get contacted by recruiters for banks, because my CV mentions Haskell, and there's a massive shortage of Haskell programmers. They're offering silly salaries to people with no experience in the financial sector. Still not quite enough to convince me that I want to move to London and work on tedious soul-destroying stuff though, they'd need to add another zero onto the end for that. If I could telecommute, I'd be quite tempted - I'd pay off my mortgage in about six months.