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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?"
I would imagine most jobs paying $200K are in areas where $200K does't go as far as it would in other places. It is somewhat arbitrary to look at a dollar figure without looking at what it will cost you to live within a reasonable distance of said job.
Only a few people make 2.5x the average...
Also news:
Only a few people have substantially higher than average intelligence,
Only a few cars have much higher maximum acceleration than the industry average,
Only a few people have substantially lower sprint or marathon times than average,
Only a few drisophila have curlier wings than average...
Only a few people have substantially more acute hearing perception than average,
I'm not sure if it's just the summary, but it seems the author may not understand the nature of the bell curve and why it's a decent model for population distributions.
How do you get started in that field?
1) Develop strong mathematics, physics, and software development skills.
2) Take away your sense of reason and accountability.
According to:
http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/
200K in Brooklyn is equivalent to $101K in Austin, TX.
Not that hard to make 100K in Austin, the only issue is that is surrounded by Texas.
Same message but with a more positive spin. (And yes, I'm in that 200K+ category).
Do it better Make sure your code works right, on the first try. When you have to pick between a band-aid and a permanent fix, choose the permanent fix - and deliver it just as fast as the person proposing the band-aid - because you know the system well and can deliver a fix faster than the outsider who is trying to be conservative. Design defensively and plan for debugging - make sure that when something goes wrong, it's very obvious where the problem started. Don't fear bugs in your code - optimize the process of them being assigned back to you and fixed. Do it faster When you know in the back of your head that something you wrote isn't up to par, invest the work immediately. Don't wait for somebody to tell you to do it better. Be a generalist: if you are waiting for another team to deliver a feature, learn how to add it to their area, add it, and unblock yourself - what you are doing will get done 10x faster that way. (It's a lot more work for you, but see: $200K+). Work longer hours Longer productive hours, need not be longer total hours. Don't goof off during the workday - no reading Slashdot, no kitten videos on Youtube, etc, do all that after you leave work. Most people only work 2-4 productive hours a day, and have a raft of excuses (meetings, interruptions...). If what your company does cannot keep you interested in your job for 6+ hours a day, you aren't going to be a $200K+ developer working for them. Bullshit. Kiss ass Invest in and maintain social relationships. That group you depend on for your new feature? It takes them 2 weeks to deliver when you are a person with a face they see every week, but 2 months to deliver when you are just an e-mail address. And talking to them frequently helps ensure that dependency works right when it arrives, instead of being a technically-correct-but-useless mess. You say it's your manager's jobA witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
Lol, no, I don't think so. I took a job that pays $20K/yr less because there weren't assholes in the office. Having actually worked somewhere that was devastatingly dehumanizing* I realized the value of happiness.
-nbr
You know it's time to quit when you're in the dentist office, getting a root canal, not numbed because it's infected so badly the *caine's don't work, and that is preferable to being in the office. Moment of clarity.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I object to the part of your posting where you make it sound as if only money can do that sort of thing to you. In academia, you can easily find similarly defective personalities, who gleefully ruin everything for everyone around them.
What makes these people even more pathetic than the slime you find in the finance world is that the uni jerks don't even get large amounts of money out of it. They just do it to make people miserable, and to make sure no-one notices that they themselves are actually not nearly as smart as they pretend to be. There is a reason that something like PhDcomics exists, and parallels Dilbert to such a degree. PhDcomics is actually much less nasty than the real world. Unfortunately.