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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.
I make 200+k a year working in Washington state, I'm a devops(aka a seriously good generalist).
To be blunt, I am better than most people and no I don't know everything. The problem with most people they have ZERO initiative in improving themselves. The fact is I'm a high school dropout which started coding for cash when I was rather young. I torched my childhood for education and experience, I regret nothing. I'm always in a state of learning, keeping up with new tech, OSs of all types, security and even find time for a personal/sex life.
TL;DR: stop playing video games and hit the books continuously.
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.
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.
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.
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.