What the Highest-Paid Programmers Earn

http://adtmag.com/articles/2011/05/27/what-highest-paid-programmers-earn.aspx

by msredmond • 15 years ago

58 43 15 years ago

rick888• 15 years ago

I think you probably have a better chance at making 1.2 million from your own company than finding a job that will pay you that much.

maigret5• 15 years ago

Yes. You also have a much better chance of getting broke with your own company than getting a six fig salary at an existing company - so at the end it is just basic risk management.

skarayan• 15 years ago

The person making 1.2 million isn't just a programmer, but he/she also understands the business well. More so, he/she is an integral part of the business.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Thus is probably something more like top management than a "programmer/developer" - and would probably be described as such. Good point.

brosephius2• 15 years ago

programmers at high frequency trading firms can make well into the six figures and still spend most of the day coding. firms like these usually don't have much in the way of management tiers. though I wouldn't expect a programmer to make money like that unless they were closely involved in developing the trading strategies themselves.

gaius3• 15 years ago

That person was probably Sergey Aleynikov, who made $400k at Goldman Sachs then jumped ship to Teza for $1.2m - salary. He was doing high frequency trading code in C++. This is a matter of public record. Unfortunately he's now in jail having been accused of stealing said code from GS.

EDIT: I have now read to the last page of the article, and I guessed right!

bhickey• 15 years ago

Aleynikov was convicted, not just accused. Teza came in with a low offer and then bumped it up to $1.2m when he offered to give them Goldman code.

patio112• 15 years ago

I've said it before but I'll say it again: the highest paid programmers don't call themselves programmers. There are a lot of things you can do which involve slinging code that pay rather substantially more than the equivalent amount of undifferentiated code slinging.

saturdayplace• 15 years ago

I've apparently missed this in the past. Would you mind elaborating?

actionbrandon2• 15 years ago

quantitative traders is one.

yannickt• 15 years ago

Basically be a domain expert, rather than an implementation technology expert.

patio112• 15 years ago

Sure. If application of your code a) demonstrably makes a business more money at the margin and b) you are sophisticated about extracting that value, the amount of money transferred from the business to you will not be judged against the programmer pay yardstick, it will be judged against ROI on strategic initiatives yardstick. You really want to be paid according to that second one.

There are many examples of this. Quants. People who do risk pricing for Citibank. The kind of people who work on credit score algorithms. There are comparative peons in Google/Facebook/Zynga who will make millions upon millions because they are really good at twirling a few knobs which are attached to a faucet that spits out money.

Last March I wrote server-side logic, some Javascript, some HTML/CSS, a bit of Ruby goo, and some documentation justifying my choices. For that my employers paid me $3,000. This May I wrote server-side logic, some Javascript, some HTML/CSS, a bit of Ruby goo, and some documentation justifying my choices. I made a wee bit more than $3,000 this time, largely because the punch line was "Project partly successful, sales up N%."

malkia• 15 years ago

This omits bonuses, and other out-of your salary payments, that programmers usually take. I've heard about minimum 15% bonus at google for example. (and 15% meaning not very good performance)

alexgartrell• 15 years ago

Even for a new employee at Google, Facebook, etc. bonuses and stock make up a significant percentage of pay

eta: new as in "unproven and fresh out of school." The statement because trivially obvious when you're talking about VPs acquired from PayPal, etc.

msort• 15 years ago

The highest-paid programmers usually become rich via: 1) Founding a business or startup. 2) Becoming an early employee of an averagely successful startup, or a per-IPO employee of hugely successful startups (Facebook, Google). 3) Becoming an IT manager or quants/traders at IB or Hedge funds 4) Becoming world-leader in open-source technologies (e.g. Scala, Hadoop, JQuery). 5) Writing books, giving lectures: teaching others how to become great programmers.

brosephius2• 15 years ago

I would say only 1) and 2) would actually make you "rich". the others would just pay very well (though for many that's rich enough, I guess)

nostrademons• 15 years ago

Quants/traders make massive amounts. Own your own hedge fund and it can be like selling a startup every year.

dstein• 15 years ago

4) and 5) definitely don't make you rich.

gaius3• 15 years ago

Some of the Agile mafia have done very nicely out of selling Scrum Master certificates.

veyron6• 15 years ago

What does 'rich' mean?

If you mean upper-middle class then 4 and 5 are out of the question

If you mean upper class (top 1%) even 3 is out of the question. 500K a year is upper-middle-class in jersey and middle-class in manhattan. And after all of those expenses, you would be lucky to save 100K of that after taxes

If you mean `rich` (i would define rich as having enough money not to need a paycheck from another company -- maybe 10M in the bank is a good threshold) then 1 and 2 are the only ways to go

One thing to note: taxes are a pain. Most people in that 200-500K range are stiffed by the AMT (why I had to pay AMT at 22 is beyond me)

usaar333• 15 years ago

What is someone (I assume we're talking an individual) is spending on to be left with only 100k? After taxes you should have earned something like $280k to $300k; $180k to $200k is a hell of a lot to spend a year.

I also imagine you are using a high standard for upper middle class. If you use even top 10%, you are talking professionals earning > $75,000 which most programmers hit at any company (at least in the Bay Area).

maigret5• 15 years ago

250k/y is rich, even in NY http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/09/even_in_...

hkarthik• 15 years ago

I imagine some of the top level programmers at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc probably earn in the mid six figures.

But just like executive pay, there's a point where the bonuses and profit sharing make up the vast majority of your compensation. Base salary stats don't really apply then.

_b8r0• 15 years ago

Incidentally I can't say for the US but in the UK our industry pays the equivalent of $125k - $190k for security testers in the app space.

We (mandalorian) don't, but instead focus on more freedom and better jobs. Not hiring right now, but check back in a couple of months.

rorrr• 15 years ago

Google Offers Staff Engineer $3.5 Million To Turn Down Facebook Offer

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-enginee...

gcb• 15 years ago

isn't staff engineer a manager?

rachelbythebay• 15 years ago

A staff engineer could just be someone who's one level above senior. Someone like that in Mountain View probably makes around $200K/year.

munificent• 15 years ago

No, you can be staff and not have direct reports if you just want to code. Some staff engineers do manage but it isn't a requirement. There's a separate job title track for non-coding pure managers.

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

...some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million per year to programmers who can code them better than anyone else.

Correction: some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million/yr to a programmer who can bring them source code representing the cumulative effort of a team from one of the most 'respected' firms in the industry.

joshz• 15 years ago

If you look at that H-1B table that was up here a while ago, there are at least 24 software engineer, analyst, programmer type entries that paid more than $500k and up to $1mil and 52 entries between $200k and 1mil. Those exclude managerial or executive job titles. Although given how many errors that table had, I don't know how accurate that information is. I'm sure there are plenty more non visa people that earn in that range or above.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

I've always felt that some people were 'coders' who given an algorithm or a task can craft an elegant piece of code which implements that algorithm tweaked in any of a number of directions (fast, robust, testable, portable, Etc.)

Other were 'analysts' who took problems and solved them with a combination of coding and process and perhaps hardware.

Then there were 'techs' who, given a set of steps, translated those steps into something a machine could consume.

Analysts seem to have the widest range in pay, coders are pretty bunched up around various levels of experience.

What the Highest-Paid Programmers Earn

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