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

Ah, but

[Hognoxious]

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

His primary duty was keeping his mouth shut.

Re:Ah, but

[chord.wav]

Same as any well-payed job.

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

Re:Ah, but

[NNKK]

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.

Financial Industry

[ThomasFlip]

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.

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.