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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?"
Financial engineering. Wall street is sucking them up to implement high frequency and not so high frequency trading apps. Doesn't hurt to have a mathematics degree on top of that which would probably jack you up even further.
You'll never make that much money as a salary. High annual rates are usually the exclusive province of contractual obligations and performance bonuses.
Make a time machine, and go back to the 80's.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
I work in IT for a large multinational company and the issue I see with our approach to developers is better, faster, cheaper. In reality what this boils down to is cheaper and good enough. Projects tend to drag on for longer then they should but the development expense from a salary perspective is fairly minimal because the bulk of it is being done offshore.
I think if you want to earn the big dollars as a programmer either need to be the best in the field working for one of the big tech guys like Apple, Google, Etc... Or you need to go work for a start-up for bad starting wages but a percentage ownership in the company.
The only other option I see is going out on your own and starting your own development company but then if you earn big dollars it's because your business is doing well not because you are programming most of the time.
Do it better. Do it faster. Work longer hours. Bullshit. Kiss ass. Draw a firm line when everyone is so dependent on you that they can't survive without you. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Sabotage the competition. Don't ever settle. Sue. Keep your heart on your sleeve at home. Nail people to the cross in business. Cheat. Lie when you can get away with it. Bend the rules until they break.
The Blade Itself
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.
Posting anonymously only because I know my employees read Slashdot but:
I make a very decent living (not 200k but well above the median income for the area) working managing data analysts using SAS and R. This field is rapidly growing and without enough graduates coming out of college with the appropriate mix of programming, math, and business skill we find ourselves looking for anyone with any relevant knowledge combination.
This void is being filled at a nearly alarming rate of high salaries for what amounts to somewhat limited skill. The average salary for someone with 3-5 years of related experience is just under $100,000/year + benefits, which is pretty impressive for an area which has a median income of about $53,000 a year.
Want to get money as a developer? Learn to write SQL, SAS and now especially R and be able to do simple statistics, generate explanatory charts on queried data, and have decent communication skill.
Always strive to get the most you can, but honestly don't worry about not making over $200k. Doing something you can enjoy is more important.
I was making $50k/year or so, saved money, avoided credit card debt, but I also had a car payment, house payment, etc.
I then made it up to $100k/year or so, saved money, avoided credit card debt, but I also had a car payment, house payment, etc.
Which was ridiculous! I'm making double the money but my debt ratio is the same!
I now have no car payment, investing money into retirement, giving, and I'm on goal to have my house paid off this year - at age 30.
Yes I know cost of living varies, but if you budget your money, stay out of restaurants, and get out of debt you'll live great even earning well below Scrooge McDuck.
(Dave Ramsey's baby steps...)
In fact, the number of developers earning $200,000 and above is under 10%,
In other news, water is wet.
Was anyone under the delusion that it was ever over 10%?
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.
In Taiwan, I make about twice what the average person with an equivalent education level in a different field would make, but that's still way, way lower than $200000usd a year. Adjusting for the cost of living, I'm actually pretty well off, but this pay would suck in the US.
$200K? That's crazy talk. Maybe in San Francisco but not back East...
Computer engineer working on Aerospace control system software: less than half of that. Much less than half.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I hear an NSA contractor has an opening in Hawaii. Pays $200,000.
you know you can get free versions of all of those?
The #1 advice I can give is NOT to take a "full time" job. Work as a contractor. Contractors have always gotten paid significantly more than "full time" developers, and have the added benefits of being able to move between jobs much more quickly.
I don't respond to AC's.
Two factors to consider: Location and risk/reward ratio.
The "$200,000" figure -- as mentioned earlier in the discussion -- is extremely location-dependent. Let's say you live in Salt Lake City, UT and make $100,000 per year. I'm from the area, and $90K-$110K seems to be a very typical pay rate for sysadmins and programmers with 10 or more years of experience in their field, if you include health and other benefits in the W-2 (all the employers do!). Then let's cross-reference that with the Cost Of Living calculator at http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/ . To enjoy an equivalent quality of life, here's what that guy needs to make (these are all area averages, not the specific cities referenced):
San Francisco, CA: $171,987
Los Angeles, CA: $140,380
Seattle, WA: $123,784
Raleigh, NC: $99,154
Austin, TX: $97,991
Washington, DC:$151,479
New York, NY (Manhattan): $231,289
New York, NY (Queens): $162,684
Advice for earning the big bucks? If you want to earn a high-end "salary", move to one of the technology hubs. Get an education in finance and high-end mathematics. Or get a security clearance, shine up your resume and skills, and plan to have no life outside of work due to travel abroad. Get some solid experience, get in on some high-profile projects, and job-hop when you're at the apex of your visibility in your company for much better pay.
If you don't want to live in Silicon Valley or New York, then be your own boss. Write your own products. Innovate in a field that lacks innovation. Develop software nobody has really thought of before. Monetize it and make a living. Cash out by selling the company to a bigger fish, and start working on your next idea. My company, for instance, buys small companies who create innovative software a LOT and integrates that software into its other offerings. And that strategy works very well for continually expanding the customer base and revenue. Sometimes it works out well for the little guy, sometimes not. It's a risk of running your own business.
Working for someone in a "typical" IT or software engineering field is typically not gonna make you rich. It can make you a good living with solid pay and far less stress than running your own business or working in high-pressure financial and security markets, though. And you're less likely to lose several fortunes on your way to making a fortune if someone else takes the risk, and you get paid the salary. Risk/Reward.
For me, quality of life matters a lot. I've been on both sides of the fence (trying to make it in business for myself vs. drawing a salary), and right now in my life it makes more sense to draw a reasonable salary doing a job that I love in a great environment working with quality people and making a positive difference without feeling that my job is my life. But I know I'm probably not going to strike it rich doing so... and I'm OK with that.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
If you don't take into account geographical issues, saying "$200K" means very little.
I am a Mexican software developer. I consider myself well paid, and while I am far from living a life of luxury, I get enough to even set some aside to make some savings. My salary? Somehwere around US$25K a year. And I find I am a bit over the average in my country — Take as an example the study on salaries for 2012 published by Software Gurú, a national software development magazine.
(For reference sake, the US dollar is currently at ~MX$12, and we usually talk about our payment in monthly periods... so for your convenience, you can even read the numbers presented as if they were yearly salaries in US dollars ;-) )
I would imagine that anyone wanting to earn over $200,000 per year (and not living in some of the super high cost of living cities like NYC or LA) would need to:
1) Have a PhD and a proven record in developing marketable, patentable technology. Basically advanced knowledge and experience that makes you extremely valuable AND very, very difficult to replace.
2) An ownership stake in whatever the business is beyond being a minor shareholder. This means partner or substantial investor in the business where you get to make decisions.
3) Management involvement, and this probably removes you from the programmer or "do-er" category.
I think salaries over $200k in most of the country would be extremely unusual for people who actually do work and aren't management, highly educated/professionally credentialed or owners.
I think senior management generally doesn't want to pay that kind of money for people who actually do work. I think it violates cultural norms in business by altering the status quo hierarchy. Pay is used to enforce the hierarchy and someone making that much money might feel a little too independent for his actual place in the system.
It's also an open question why you would need to spend so much money for someone in that role. I'm sure there are a small handful of "superstars" who might be that valuable, but there's only so many of those people, jobs and managers who recognize that.
And even if you found a job that would pay like that, I'm sure it would come with horrible deadlines, terrible travel, bad working conditions, etc.
If you go to work for the money, you will probably cap out at the 80%-90% percentile in your given field. Which isn't bad, but you won't set the right-edge of the curve.
Inspirational speak Zig Ziglar had a story that illustrates this point pretty well. I'm going to try to recall the details, but the gist is pretty simple.
Some railroad laborers were out working on a track one day when a luxurious single-car train pulled up. A voice called out from the car and said "Dave! Is that you?". One of the laborers looked up and said "Yea, I'm Dave. John, how are you?"
Dave was invited into the car and the two were in there for nearly an hour before Dave emerged and the two men embraced as old friends would do.
When Dave got back down and picked up his tools to begin working again, the luxury rail car pulled away. One of the other laborers asked Dave, "Was that John Abrams, president of the railroad?" Dave replied "Yes, sure is. He and I started on the same day in the same job 30 years ago." When the man pushed a little further and said "Well, if you two started on the same day in the same job, why is he running things and you're out here with a shovel?"
Dave thought for only a moment before answering.
"When I went to work for this company 30 years ago I went to work for $3.25 an hour. When John started, he went to work for the railroad."
Maybe a tad cheesy, but the point is pretty simple.
THIS
You're either the ho or the pimp. Pimps don't have bosses.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I hear they even have an opening in Hawaii.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I work in IT for a large multinational company...
Now you have n! problems as a developer.
$0.05 worth of free advice to anyone out there:
#1 - _NEVER_ do software development for a large company as an employee. There's too much bullshit, politics, and brain dead process to get anything done. Also, you're nothing but a replaceable part. Go small to mid size, or (better yet) be a contractor. Which brings me to my second point:
#2 - _NEVER_ do software development where your efforts do not generate revenue unless you're taking the job to try and learn something. If the project/organization/whatever isn't making a profit off of every line of code you write, GTFO. Otherwise, you are simply an expense to be fucking MBA'd and "managed" as opposed to a source of revenue. When those goddamned suits look at you, make sure they smile and see dollar signs & black ink.
#3 - Contracting let's you violate rule #1 & #2 for fun and profit. BDC's (Big Dumb Companies) are so fucked up, most competent hands-on developers don't want to touch them with a 10 foot pole. That's where contractors & contracting firms come in. When you're not an employee of BDC, Inc. you get to go work for HotShit consultants LLC. When some project is fucked and some idiot CIOs neck is on the line he'll shell out a metric ass-load of cash to get it fixed. Enter you and your friends as HotShit LLC to come in and do the dirty work. Since you work for HotShit LLC, you're of course not a direct employee of BDC Inc. (or directly involved with the politics and BS thereof ) which fixes rule #1 and most importantly, as a consultant you're putting money in the pocket of HotShit LLC thus fixing rule #2 at the same time. Fun. Profit.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
I know a lot of very senior managers, including c-level execs, that don't do it "for the money".
The money's good, and they like it, and they don't turn it down, but most people do actually enjoy their work.
Not really. Develop something cool and pretend to sell it, reference that (and more importantly show it to your interviewers and talk about it).
A $200K developer is $190K arrogance and $10k effectiveness.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
As I've written before: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847578&cid=34100224
The circle of knowledge, a poem by Paul D. Fernhout
All philosophy is anthropology; :-)
All anthropology is psychology;
All psychology is biology;
All biology is chemistry;
All chemistry is physics;
All physics is math;
All math is philosophy.
See my website for lots about the future of economics. I passed on my change to work on Wall Street at J.P. Morgan Chase doing Smalltalk around 2000. Back then I didn't think it worth the commute there (which my wife had hated earlier), as well as the risk for a Japanese-style subway gassing. Little did I imagine someone attacking the WTC, but I guess otherwise it is possible I might have been at a meeting in the WTC as the group met over there sometimes.
Still, as imaginary as fiat dollars are, if enough people believe in the idea, that gives it a sort of reality. And, like most US Americans, I have to deal with that collective fantasy as a way to ration the fruits of production. But it is hard also to look past how the abstractions related to the fantasy of money often hurt so many people. "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips is great down-to-Earth book on money by a creator of MasterCard, and reading it around age 15 was a formative experience in my life -- helping me avoid an early pursuit of fiat dollars and instead working towards ideals I cared about (with what limited success I've had).
But really, almost all financial engineering is pointless zero-sum gambling work, as interesting as it may still be as an abstract game. As it was explained to me by a friendly mathematician at IBM Research over lunch when I was in the speech group there (which was a group constantly being poached by Wall Street), it rally is picking up nickels before a streamroller (Buffet's analogy). You bet other people's money in such a way as you have a high chance at getting a small percentage increase on a big sum, and you (legally) skim some money off the top as a fee (or reward), while cleverly "managing" the risks, including those black swan events that most everyone ignores and you probably will too. If you are lucky, you do this for a bunch of years and then retire. If you are unlucky, you have a bad year (either badly managed risk or a black swan?) and maybe even lose your job as the company folds, but you don't generally have to give back previous years profits -- plus you get to learn "How to Speak Hedgie": :-) ... ..."
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2007/08/how_to_speak_hedgie.html
"In these days of market volatility, hedge-fund managers and executives at all types of money management firms have been forced to explain why their funds are shutting down, losing money hand over fist, and freezing investors' funds. When they do so, however, they frequently lapse into a strange euphemistic dialect. And so we thought it would be helpful to provide a handy Hedgie-English glossary.
Hedge-Fund Phrase: Unprecedented, unique circumstances
Translation: Stuff happens. But we had no clue.
But, and I only realized this much later, by indirectly raising issues about systemic risk in the 1980s around the Princeton University Operations Research group, I pretty much ensured I would not get a PhD, at least there. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
But, like hedge fund managers, do those professors have to give back decades of salary because they were in some sense
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I've been meaning to put up the comments I had on Ray Dalio's principles somewhere for a long time. I finally just put them up here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sent-to-Bridgewater-on-Ray-Dalio-Principles.html
As I note there, obviously, writing stuff like that must not be the way to get a high paying (>$200K annual) job programming in the financial industry. :-) But this may be of interest to others looking at Ray Dalio's "Principles" or in Bridgewater Associates (the world's biggest hedge fund in 2011) as a place of employment. Or perhaps it may be of interest in trying to understand, from a psychological perspective, some of the potential limits of Bridgewater's financial models if they reflect only that version of "Principles"?
From what I sent: :-) I'm supplying some of the results of my having read widely for many years on a variety of topics related to evolution, technology, psychology, and social change. Maybe someone at Bridgewater will read this, maybe not, but it was also interesting to write it and try to get a message through the filters all organizations have. It's a first draft, and it could be a lot better, a lot shorter, and so on were I to spend a lot more time on it, or were I to have better tools with which to communicate it (which I can aspire to create someday, like supplying a semantic web to your inbox).
----
I guess one might say that from the outside, with this cover letter I'm trying to upgrade Bridgewater in my own way, even as Bridgewater would probably upgrade me in some sense if I worked there.
The key points here are that: ...
* "Evolution" does not mean "progress" as humans normally think of it (this from someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time),
* All reasoning depends on emotions (which give us reason to reason),
* Bridgewater has reached the size where it has a significant effect on the exchange economy that supports it and needs to consider the broader issues in its modeling and responsibilities to stakeholders;
* There can be many overlapping senses of "self" (body, family, philosophy, company, state, etc.) and models (including financial models) may need to take that in account, but that is not reflected in "Principles";
* There is a pressing need for sensemaking tools and I feel I can help create them (and have helped create some in the past);
* such tools might, through the FOSS gift economy, even be a way to take aspects of Bridgewater's self-improvement culture (like through structured arguments) and make that available to the general public, as if things like openness and rationality are true for Bridgewater, they must be true for the rest of the world, and maybe Bridgewater try to help the rest of the world achieve those things too (while also increasing its potential employee pool of people learning such tools);
* Bridgewater can probably better promote health among its community in terms of vitamin D, eating more vegetables, understanding the "Pleasure Trap", and having treadmill workstations;
---
Realistically, I'd have probably been a better match for the Dalio Family Foundation perhaps, directing time and money to open source sensemaking software efforts? :-)
Anyway, thankfully I found some other way to earn ration units (fiat dollars) that I can exchange for food and shelter, in the absence of a "basic income" and given pretty much all the land is enclosed and privatized, and even if it was not, it takes a village and lots of specific skills to live well in the wilderness...
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.