Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Taking a Look At High-End Programmer Salaries

Posted by timothy on from the today-let's-take-the-gold-robot dept.

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."

24 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Ah, but by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But programming was a minor part of Aleynikov's job.

    His primary duty was keeping his mouth shut.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Ah, but by chord.wav · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Same as any well-payed job.

      "Every organization rests upon a mountain of secrets" - Julian Assange

    2. Re:Ah, but by dintech · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Ah, but by cold+fjord · · Score: 2, Informative

      "Every organization rests upon a mountain of secrets" - Julian Assange

      Including Wikileaks, and Assange.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    4. Re:Ah, but by NNKK · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Whether he keeps his mouth shut about how the algos work or other dodgy goings-on is irrelevant. Non-disclosure is non-disclosure.

      Not in the US. You cannot contractually forbid someone from reporting illegal activity.

  2. Financial Industry by ThomasFlip · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From my understanding, programmers making 300 - 400 thousand in the financial industry are typically quantitative analysts or financial engineers with masters degrees or Phds in these fields. Their primary duties are things like modeling complicated financial scenarios or finding statistical anomalies to exploit in high frequency trading. Yes they code their strategies but I don't know if I'd put them in the same category as your typical programmer.

    --
    If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
    1. Re:Financial Industry by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:Financial Industry by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      They wanted people with any functional programming experience. A lot of these companies use their own in-house languages[1], but functional programming is popular because it's easy to verify functional programs, and because languages like Haskell facilitate rapid development. Cincom does good business selling Smalltalk to trading houses for a similar reason. Typically, a small improvement in a trading algorithm gives you an advantage for a day - maybe less. Being able to go from idea to deployment in under an hour is something that Smalltalk and Haskell give you, and that's something that the financial industry values highly.

      [1] In an industry where having a 5ms advantage over your competitors translates to millions in profits, there are lots of in-house languages, frameworks, and so on.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re:Financial Industry by cptdondo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I owned a consulting company. There's a reason why you make so much. You work that much harder, and you put your entire financial future on the line every time you sign a big contract or fire an employee.

      I now work for a public utility. Regular hours, no worries, and a regular paycheck. Yes it's half of what I used to make, but I have half the hours and a quarter of the stress.

    4. Re:Financial Industry by jcr · · Score: 2

      Back in my NeXTSTEP road-warrior days, most of the customers were financial firms, and I also found that there were pockets of Smalltalkers and Lispers doing modeling and trading systems. The work I was doing then wasn't very exciting, but they paid well. The downside is that the body shops would often drag their feet on paying me, and on several occasions I had to get the customers to threaten them to make them pay up.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    5. Re:Financial Industry by swalve · · Score: 2

      No shit. People have no fucking clue how much it costs in raw dollars to employ someone. It's basically double.

    6. Re:Financial Industry by EatAtJoes · · Score: 2

      It's not hard to get to 300-400k in the financial industry as "just a programmer" (ie not a quant), you just have to become a manager and work up the ranks a little.

      The good news there is being in management doesn't mean you stop coding. Depending on the project, tech work can consume upwards of 70% with the rest dealing with PHBs.

      The bad news is ... it's the financial industry, which means you're surrounded by workaholics with no sense of how much money they're making. There's a lot of stress surrounding productivity that isn't necessary from a profit-making point of view. Still, it's not as bad as partner-track litigation, and the strategic need for tech makes programming much more rewarding than in many other industries.

      So no, you don't need PhDs. In fact if you're good you don't even need a tech degree. You just need to build solid systems.

  3. Gotta be careful when. by Sir_Sri · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know a few guys who a decade ago were in the million a year range, and are now in the 250-300k.

    If you're working with people databases, financials, or just on a product that happens to do crazy awesome (minecraft) you can make a pile of money. But expect 100-200k range if you're really good these days it seems like.

    That's not to say you can't make money in direct offshoots of programming, for example becoming a producer on a project, where you may touch some programming still but are now more managerial, or design.

    1. Re:Gotta be careful when. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In theory, managers make more than leaf nodes because they have more responsibility in a financial sense. It is true that in most cases, they are not personally liable for the budget they manage, but it's still stressful. Say you have a team of 5-6 working for you.. that's an annual burn of a couple million or so. Someone else is always asking you "can we make that 1.8 instead of 2" or "can we add these 7 new features, but keep the cost the same". Then, there's the hassles of finding work for your team. Relatively few managers actually just sit as a service provider with work flowing through the door. No, you have to make sure others know what you can do for them, get them to commit to projects, manage the project and the people, all while hoping that you have enough (interesting) work to keep your team together but not so much that they burn out.

      Now multiply that til you've got a organization of 100-150 working for you. You've got 2 or 3 levels below you. You've got a couple dozen "customers" on the business side who are consuming the product of your hopefully talented group. But nobody can find 100 talented people all in the same place, so you've got some stinkers in the mix. You work with your direct reports to find a "safe place" for them where they can at least not be net-negative and hopefully actually do something positive. Just fire them you say? Sure, but HR wants to know what specific job competencies that they fail to meet, and what is the status of the performance improvement plan that you put them on. And then, in our "do more with less" corporate culture, you might wind up firing the worthless excuse for a human, but not be able to backfill the opening because "we're in a hiring hold, right now". and after 6 months, some other management team decides, hey, you were able to work with 99 instead of your allocated 100, so I guess you really don't need that extra headcount, do you.

      Then, throw in regulatory oversight. Congress or the Legislature makes some rule about financial services, and right now, within 30 days, we have to figure out how to change our process to accommodate the change, while still processing however many thousands of transactions a day; the work load for which was already fully occupying your team.

      Good thing that headsets for cellphones only take up one ear, so you can dial into two telecons at the same time. Not because you're expected to actually make a contribution in them, but because all 40 people in each conference are "stakeholders" in someway, and gods forbid that you should be in the next teleconference that day, and find out that you missed an action item assigned to you, for COB today.

      Oh, you get unlimited vacation time? Not really an issue, because you never get to take vacation anyway. Want to tour Europe on vacation? That works fairly well, , because you can do all your tourist stuff during the day, and dial into the telecon at 10-11PM, just as the afternoon gets rolling on the West Coast, and you can find out what you missed in the morning that was hinted at in the emails you see flying across your Blackberry.

      Yes, those managers earn their $200-300k/yr pay, at least in the middle tiers.

      You could say, "I'm just going to chuck it all and go back to being an 90k/yr coder in a cubicle", but you know, that drop of more than 50% in income is a pretty big pain. And since you're currently a manager hiring those 90k/yr coders, you can also see that a) YOU might have trouble getting the job (I'm sorry, you're used to a higher pay and we're afraid that if you get a better offer you'll bolt) (I'm sorry, you don't have recent coding experience) and b) Those jobs are susceptible to being off-shored as the factory coder line keeps moving up.

      Let's not forget the "up or out" aspect too. You spend those hours, you're conscientious, your team (mostly) likes you, you deliver (pretty much) on schedule, and (pretty much) on budget, and your reward is a promotion to do this with 500 people under you, or a different division whi

    2. Re:Gotta be careful when. by radtea · · Score: 2

      If the worker fucks up, his salary is wasted. If a manager fucks up, his salary and the salaries of all his workers are wasted. And good managers are rarer in the marketplace than equally good workers.

      If any of that was true you would expect managerial salaries to vary with competency, which they don't. They vary with industry and with company based on overall management culture and productivity, but within companies they vary based on political connections.

      The reality is: a good worker can make up for the incompetence of a bad manager, and the manager will take the credit. But when a bad manager screws up, the worker takes the blame.

      So while economic rationality would dictate that what you are saying is correct, no one who has been paying any attention to actual facts in the past couple of decades believes that economic rationality is only--or even the primary--driver of human behaviour in the marketplace.

      It is irrational to believe that economic rationality is the primary driver of human behaviour in the marketplace.

      --
      Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
    3. Re:Gotta be careful when. by networkBoy · · Score: 2

      Just to add a touch to this.
      I have an awesome manager. Been with my company for 20 years (I've been here a little over 11.5).
      My previous manager was new to managing here and had only been with the company for about 5 years...
      What a difference.
      My current manager earns every cent he is paid. I don't know how much he makes (I'm ball park guessing about $150K/yr) but he's worth more. The team under him (about 30) runs very well, he spends most of his time making sure we get what we need (correct docs, support from other teams, etc.) and keeping most of the political BS out of our way. It makes my job easy. While the problems I have to solve are difficult and sometimes well above my capabilities, I know that I can focus on one thing (coding this ever evolving in-house app) and not have to worry about my back, because he's got it.

      A genuinely good manager is worth more than a programmer, because while I may be instrumental in making my two facets of this in-house app always work to the ever changing and evolving requirements*, without a good manager I would be spending vastly more of my time on other BS.
      -nB

      *this is normal. The app is used to test a product suite, so as the product suite grows, the in-house test app has to evolve.

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
  4. unheard of by vlm · · Score: 2

    It seems that $300,000 to $400,000 and up is not unheard of in the financial industry

    I've "heard of" people completing a couple week certification course getting a $75000/yr job in IT because they now have an A+ cert and there are huge shortages of personnel. Of course I "heard of" that exclusively in TV and radio commercials by for-profit schools charging outrageous fees. The reality of it is the typical BS degree holder can hope for and possibly even get a $8/hr helpdesk job; The cream of the crop will do better, but then again, they always do. Such is to be expected toward the end of the educational-industrial complex bubble. How reliable are the reports of $400K/yr cobol coders and $75K/yr A+ cert password resetters and what kind of numbers are we talking about? I can totally see a CEO's son getting a really special deal, but thats just an anecdote compared to the other 300 million citizens and non-citizens here.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    1. Re:unheard of by somersault · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm not quite the Director's son, but I am his nephew :p My dad actually used to be the IT Manager here until he died, and I ended up with the job a few years later. I'm not even making $75K a year, but then again the whole company is pretty laid back and a nice place to work. I do a mix of in-house web app development, maintaining a downhole drilling simulation app for clients, and typical sysadmin/IT support stuff. I know I could be making more if I got a bunch of certifications, or worked on a lot of projects with loads of different languages and frameworks to help buff up my CV and look for another coding job, but I don't really have the motivation for it. I'm making more than enough to get by, and I'm still enjoying helping people out here. I do wonder from time to time if I should be making "more" of myself, like developing mobile games or utilities, but I prefer to have free time for other things right now.

      --
      which is totally what she said
    2. Re:unheard of by danlip · · Score: 2

      The CEOs get paid a lot even when they clearly made the wrong decision.

  5. bonuses and stock options by OutputLogic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The article doesn't differentiate between base salary and "extras", such as bonuses, stock options, and other forms of compensations. Stock option grants can easily amount to a yearly base compensation in large Silicon Valley shops. And bonuses at Goldman Sachs is even more.

  6. Finances gigs high paying, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes, finance gigs pay higher but there are LOTS of buts.

    First, there is so much legacy code and systems that your skill set might end-up lagging behind the market by 10 years. So if you ever want to escape the frigid NYC winters and move to California then you'll find your skill set obsolete. And realistically you need to work in NYC to make money in finance.

    Second, the big money only occasionally sweeps by your star. The trends in the market come and go. So the $400k Russian coder at GS might only make that for a few years. Then he's back to $100k year. This was probably part of the reason he moved to a new venture.

    Third, for the long term gigs require specialized knowledge of finance or markets which can be mind numbingly dull for top engineers. It is soulless work only for the black-hearted. Lucky if you get to work on interesting algorithms. Most work is in excruciatingly painful market data or regulatory related work.

    Fourth, some the personality types which are considered splendid in tech are unwanted in finance (think Richard Stallman, James Gosling or other folks you might meet at a science fiction convention). They don't appreciate the odd ball creative genius or the pedantic sorts.

    Did I mentioned that the winters in NYC are freaking FREEZING!? If you have the choice, take the $100k you can make in SF or LA. California has a much better quality of life than the NYC rat race.

    1. Re:Finances gigs high paying, but... by Chad+Birch · · Score: 2

      Did I mentioned that the winters in NYC are freaking FREEZING!?

      Sorry, but I laughed.

      - Canadian

      --
      Sturgeon was an optimist.
  7. Salary per hour is more important. by Per+Wigren · · Score: 3, Informative

    Personally I think that $/h is more important than $/y. I earn around $75k per year working 40 hours per week. If I could make $112.5k per year working 60 hours per week (same hourly wage) I wouldn't take it. I enjoy work but I value my free time more.

    --
    My other account has a 3-digit UID.
  8. Testing? by TheLink · · Score: 4, Informative

    If your bosses know the right people you don't need testing.

    They just cancel the transactions if you screw up:
    http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/07/markets/explaining_wall_street_turmoil/

    Or prosecute the humans who beat your algo:
    http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3244186/norwegian-traders-convicted-for-outsmarting-us-stock-broker-algorithm/

    Technical know-who trumps technical know-how.

    --