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The $200,000 Software Developer
itwbennett writes "You can make a decent living as a software developer, and if you were lucky enough to get hired at a pre-IPO tech phenom, you can even get rich at it. But set your sights above the average and below Scrooge McDuck and you won't find many developers in that salary range. In fact, the number of developers earning $200,000 and above is under 10%, writes blogger Phil Johnson who looked at salary data from Glassdoor, Salary.com and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. How does your salary rate? What's your advice for earning the big bucks?"
Make a time machine, and go back to the 80's.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
If you can get them, security clearances seem to be a popular way of not getting outsourced and competing with a rather smaller(if alarmingly large, on a per-capita basis) pool of applicants.
How do you get started in that field? Do most of them have a financial background with some computer science, or the reverse?
Well, it's a big field. A good place to start is wilmott.com and get into their forums. I have found the community there to be very helpful. I have seen postings with requirements for developing in C++ and C# and some places, if they can see that you have the programming ability, will teach you (or pay for your education) to take you further. It's a field where companies look SO much to get the edge that there are whole companies building straighter fibers (or microwave links) to the exchanges across the US to shave milliseconds off the time of a transaction.
I made 50K doing IT for a department at MIT.
I made 120K for exactly the same work at a hedge fund.
THat's a 70K price to pay for the intense satisfaction that comes from helping scientists engage in science. Worth it IMO.
except that is only true if intelligence is a purely straight line going from dumb to genius, which it is not.
Or any curve with half the area on each side of the midpoint.
So, it would be true if intelligence were a bell curve too, which it is generally considered to be the case.
there isn't a number 1 most average person, but a large group of people that would all fit in the group.
Yes, but no matter what test you devise, there will be a median, and half the people will be below it.
The people above and below that level are going to be much less than ~50%.
Have you seen a bell curve? Yes, the majority of the population is within a standard deviation of the midpoint, but half of them are still below it.
Parroting a saying without understanding I'd guess puts you in that group.
Where does that put you?