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Ask HN: How to make more than $1mn+/yr as a software engineer?

67 points by zump 10y ago

Don't have social skills and want to make more money. How can I make pull in $1mn+ as an engineer? What industries and what companies make this happen? I don't want to have to be in the top 1% like Jeff Dean, but top 25% and still get these results.

dandelany 10y ago
Step 1: grow some social skills. Coding skills alone won't make you a millionaire unless you get lucky and invent a unicorn. Sidenote: the 75th percentile isn't making anywhere near $1M.
- deleted 10y ago
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- rockdino 10y ago
  Unless you make the new Minecraft game...
gigatexal 10y ago
Doesn't anyone else think this post is full of arrogance? Sure you don't have to be the best programmer in the world to earn millions but this just screams "I want to be mediocre and make much, much more than others." But yes, the quickest way to millions is starting a company as others have said.
- zump 10y ago
  It's real talk partly fueled by the anonymity HN offers. Some people, like me, may find themselves wanting to maximize their pay. Period. I don't believe people making this money are one-in-a-kind super geniuses, our system doesn't optimize for that. They are people who made a series of decisions, I want to know what they could be.
  - bshimmin 10y ago
    Why? Do you think it will make you happy? I used to think money would at least make life easier, but past a certain point (and that point is vastly less than $1m/year), it really doesn't - you just end up spending it on stupid and pointlessly expensive things that mean you have to make more of it in order to be where you were before. And when you look at the really rich people, like Zuckerberg, Buffett, or Gates, what do they do with their money? Why, they give it away.
  - warent 10y ago
    You can easily see what decisions highly successful individuals have made. Executing them doesn't guarantee success. The decisions are a byproduct of a more important abstraction, which is just a mindset. Be persistent, work exceptionally hard, and think very big.
  - karyon 10y ago
    Well, "real talk" doesn't contradict "full of arrogance". In my opinion, maximizing pay just for the sake of accumulating/spending a lot of money is quite unsympathetic, and indeed to some extend arrogant. Unless of course you plan to make a positive impact on others or our planet with that money, but to me your posts don't make that impression.
    - zump 10y ago
      > Unless of course you plan to make a positive impact on others or our planet with that money, but to me your posts don't make that impression. I consider this a non-sequitur. Making a lot of money is considered the primary goal in our capitalist society and the sheer mechanics of our economy would guarantee it to be a net positive in all but 99% of cases (i.e burning the pile of money).
      - karyon 10y ago
        > Making a lot of money is considered the primary goal in our capitalist society It might be the goal of people lacking empathy and people who think happiness comes with money, which is true only up to an amount far below 1M. Unless, again, the money is meant to be given to others. I am not sure what you mean by considering my argument a non-sequitur, could you elaborate? > the sheer mechanics of our economy would guarantee it to be a net positive By "Making a positive impact on others" I didn't mean making a positive impact on the economy. I meant helping actual problems like hunger, diseases and pollution.
        zump 10y ago
        > I am not sure what you mean by considering my argument a non-sequitur, could you elaborate? It shouldn't matter what I do with the money. I don't even have it. The larger point I disagree with is that it's a losing battle to somehow tune their career to fix all the ills of the world, it's better to make as much money as possible to hope that our economy will efficiently distribute the resources for the greater good.
        10y ago
- frinxor 10y ago
  I always see a post like this questioning a posters character in various random posts, and it bugs me to no end. 1) it's not relevant 2) why bother judging?
- jdoliner 10y ago
  Brimming with arrogance and a complete lack of self awareness. There are a lot of programmers in the top 25% that are willing to work for a lot less than 1 million a year. Why would anyone hire this guy who has no social skills, is arrogant and expects to be paid more than everyone else who brings the same value as him? There isn't some magic set of decisions you can make which will circumvent the rules of supply and demand, and if there is I don't think you're going to find it in an Ask HN post.
  - vostok 10y ago
    > Why would anyone hire this guy who has no social skills, is arrogant and expects to be paid more than everyone else who brings the same value as him? I think OP is asking how to add enough value as a top 25% programmer to justify getting paid this amount. That strikes me as a very fair question.
    - jdoliner 10y ago
      OP isn't quite asking that imo. If you want to add enough value to justify that salary there's an obvious answer: get better at your job. I.e. don't be in the top 25% of programmers, be in the top 1% or .1%. If OP was asking how do I get good enough at programming to justify this high of a salary then that would be a fair question. If you're asking how do I get more money without getting better at my core competency then you're essentially asking "how do I beat the system," which isn't a particularly fair question at all.
      - vostok 10y ago
        I guess I'm just not convinced that going from a 25% programmer to a top 0.1% programmer is an efficient way of making $1 million per year. I think you are far better off working on your social and business skills. Maybe that's "beating the system", but an incredible amount of money has been made by people whose technical abilities did not go beyond mediocre PHP skills.
        jdoliner 10y ago
- RestlessMind 10y ago
  If you shoot for 1M+, you may gather enough good advice and land up around 500-600K. Not a bad outcome I'd say.
quasiuna 10y ago
The only industry paying developers this much is the game industry. It's not uncommon for AAA game developers (e.g. Developers for call of duty, GTA etc.) to have a profit share in their employment contract. When a new game goes live and sells hundreds of millions of copies in a single weekend, the rewards for some developers can be huge. In a nutshell, learn C++.
- zump 10y ago
  Interesting, I've heard the opposite about the game industry. But I suppose you need to join an AAA studio. But it makes sense that a game would live and die by the performance of the rendering engine for example. EDIT: I heard Valve engineers make serious coin.
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- adamnemecek 10y ago
  This is the first time I'm hearing about the game industry cuts, I've only ever heard that the salaries were lower compared with other programming fields. Does everyone on the team get a cut or only from a certain level of seniority?
  - marclittlemore 10y ago
    From my experience, the percentage share of the profit was normally based on time at the company and seniority of role. It was normally given to everyone who worked in the team but as I said in another comment, actually seeing a large profit related bonus was rare.
- trome 10y ago
  On the flipside, quite a few developers working in that industry are getting paid peanuts since there are so many people looking to work in that industry.
- marclittlemore 10y ago
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Tharkun 10y ago
Start by learning SI units. Then social skills. Then realism. There is no realistic way for a "25%" software engineer to net 1M. Many don't even net a tenth of that.
- zump 10y ago
  Let's say if I was top 1%, what companies would pay me 1M?
  - myrandomcomment 10y ago
    Base salary as a software engineer? None. Top 1% that has made a name for themselves, complete package, a few.
  - sz4kerto 10y ago
    Top 1%? Not many. There might be few tens of millions of software devs in the world; let's say 30M (in reality this number is probably higher). 1% would be 300k people -- of course they don't earn above 1M. So maybe you should be in the top 0.01% or so, and be a top dev/lead at a large company (Google, MS, IBM, etc.).
ashurov 10y ago
built something to sell or try to find a job in the algo trading business.
RichardHeart 10y ago
This question is quite similar to "How do I play basketball as well as Michael Jordan?" You're more likely be able to make $1M a year with something that works for you while you're sleeping, than by trading your hours for dollars. I made a youtube video on this idea.
patio11 10y ago
Most of the more straightforward answers to this question end up with you making the majority of that million from your entrepreneurial skills rather than software development skills. (For example, "Found a software development consultancy and grow it to 8~12 employees.") In terms of straight up W-2ing without taking entrepreneurial levels of risk, I think you're looking at either finance or (restricting 25% to ~10%) AppAmaGooBookSoft. Note that you're not aiming to have the engineering skills of Jeff Dean but rather looking to have the business impact of the guy who coded the credit card processing for AdWords. (An identifiable person who actually exists, or I would be more explicit about the returns to that example.) There's also "Join a startup as a very early engineer" but you're primarily compensated for picking the winner there -- there's many great businesses in the ranks of e.g. YC companies but if you had joined as the first non-founding engineer the majority do not result in the outcome you're looking for. I'll leave the obligatory disclaimer "What motivates this goal? There are probably more interesting goals if you consider your values carefully."
- zump 10y ago
  I doubt top 10% at Big 4 are getting $1mn/yr in wages.
  - patio11 10y ago
    Pay packages are structured as base salary, bonus, and RSU grant. The RSU grants can be almost arbitrarily generous. Google paid out ~$6.7 billion in them last year. You're welcome to your own estimate as to the percentage -- I suppose it's quite sensitive as to whether you're thinking "percentage of engineering staff at AppAmaGooBookSoft" (which is weighted towards < 5 years of professional experience) or "my percentage odds of reaching that level mid-career given 5 years of competent execution at one of AppAmaGooBookSoft."
- chipperyman573 10y ago
  What is the "book" in AppAmaGooBookSoft?
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adamnemecek 10y ago
You need to build a service/app. It's generally about the business aspect of things rather than the programming side. Indie Hackers has a bunch of interviews with people who managed to make something like this happen http://indiehackers.com/ http://indiehackers.com/
lsiebert 10y ago
Social skills are skills, not talents, and develop with practice. That said, be a boss, a CTO, or technical founder. Engineers are well paid professionals, but as with any high paid profession, you make a lot more owning your own company then working for someone else who is extracting value from your efforts.
jankotek 10y ago
$1e6 / (10 hours/day * 6 days/week) = ~ $330/hour. As a consultant you might be able to get to this salary. But you will be able to bill only a fraction of your time.
austinjp 10y ago
Talent, grit, luck. All are important, only some can be optimised. Why engineering? If money is so important to you there might be other industries better suited. You sound Machiavellian, or that you may edge towards it. Be careful with that. Money is no good if it can't buy you what you want or need.
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justincormack 10y ago
You should be able to make that in computer crime, and it sounds like that would fit with your world view. At some point your lack of social skills might cause a problem but probably not for a while.
myrandomcomment 10y ago
I know software engineers at one of the startups I was at that went public pulled down $2-10m depending on when they joined (and sold). They all are top 1%. Also they spent 4-6 years pre-IPO. Top 25%? Yah no. You best bet is a steady job at the big 4 with a good RSU plan.
lutusp 10y ago
> How can I make pull in $1mn+ as an engineer? > I don't want to have to be in the top 1% like Jeff Dean, but top 25% and still get these results. That's a contradiction in terms. If you made a million dollars, that outcome would place you in the top 1% among software engineers. If the Efficient Market Hypothesis is valid and in operation in the software marketplace, then to make a million dollars, you will have to earn it. It's really as simple as that. Speaking as someone who made plenty more than a million dollars -- by earning it. > Don't have social skills and want to make more money. But people without social skills end up working for people who do have social skills. The latter collect the money, the former do the work.
- risingintonatio 10y ago
  If the Efficient Market Hypothesis is valid ... More like Efficient Market Fallacy. Information asymmetry, propagation delay, and feed back loops in the dynamical system that is the economy almost surely forbids for such a grand Hypothesis. But people without social skills end up working for people who do have social skills. The latter collect the money, the former do the work. Amen.
  - lutusp 10y ago
    >> If the Efficient Market Hypothesis is valid > ... More like Efficient Market Fallacy. Yes, maybe. We'll probably never know, since it can't be science. The EMH is one of those things that stands as an icon, a principle, a discussion point, that may or may not have any bearing on the world, but that we often use as a ruler to compare against reality -- like truth and beauty.
nvarsj 10y ago
Don't be an engineer? If you're purely in it for the money, I would suggest the way to get 1mn/year is to join a hedge fund or prop trading firm as a trader. Steps: 1. Graduate from an ivy league school with a good GPA so it's easy to get in the door 2. Pass rigorous math based interviews - lots of guides on studying for these 3. Make money on your desk, which requires the ability to learn financial concepts, and quick thinking on the job - if you can play Starcraft well, or multi task online poker, you can do this. You don't need social skills or anything for this, apart from the interview process, it's almost purely analytical. Making that kind of money as an engineer is much more of a crap shoot. Just be the best engineer you can and have big influence wherever you work. Then get very lucky and work on the right project at the right time at the right company. On a more philosophical note - if you spend your life chasing money, odds are you're going to end up pretty unhappy. Try not to succumb to the capitalist rat race - I know it's hard, but it will make you happier :). edit: Updated to be less hyperbolic. It's still tough to make a lot of money even going the trader route.
- zump 10y ago
  I was waiting for this post... are you saying traders at hedge funds can make this money... but engineers don't? I thought algo traders required engineers, or is there a systematic split from the pure traders who look at funky graphs and the engineers who work on the backend systems?
  - nvarsj 10y ago
    Yes, for the most part. It really varies of course, but traders are traditionally the top dogs. Engineers at a hedge fund / prop firm will generally get paid very well, but 1 million+ would be an extreme outlier, even for a quant dev unless they are also actively trading what they build. Traders are usually the ones coming up with the strategies and executing them. They also take the most personal risk, since they can be held directly liable for mistakes. That is, the SEC can directly prosecute them, fine them, take away trading credentials, and so on - basically ruin their career if they make a stupid mistake. Very few engineers at these firms are credentialed traders or take any personal risk at all.
- 10y ago
yami 10y ago
It's not about money. It's about time AND money ! You should read "the 4 hours work week" by Tim Ferriss (or at least listen it https://youtu.be/ojgsw8IGT2o https://youtu.be/ojgsw8IGT2o)
ryankennedyio 10y ago
Learn kdb+/q, move into trading, be lucky.
xiphias 10y ago
Build a company that cures cancer, it can make you much richer, than just the low ball $1M/year.
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vostok 10y ago
This kind of pay is very highly correlated to excellent social skills. There is also luck involved and you need to be at the right place at the right time. I agree with Patrick that you are far more likely to achieve this through entrepreneurship than through working in technology (or finance for that matter).
risingintonatio 10y ago
I've become more and more convinced that $1M+ per year is not realistic as an engineer. There are compensation spreadsheets floating around and I've been privy to Facebook's and Google's. Assuming the numbers there are accurate (and anecdotally they are), even the "top 5%" engineers getting discretionary equity and bonus don't make more than $600k. Meanwhile, executives easily make twice that in yearly cash bonuses. I've grown a disdain towards said execs for being paid incommensurate with their actual value generated. Perhaps that's just my naïveté, and indeed they are that valuable. But I don't think so. In short, to command astronomical salaries you need a pyramid of people working beneath you, so that you can garner part of their productivity for yourself. Charisma will help you get there.
- zump 10y ago
  Great answer. I have noticed that because of the extreme focus on technology, our community is tuned to finding ways of becoming a better engineer, but not how to climb the corporate ladder the old-fashioned way.
  - lj3 10y ago
    For all the other flaws the SV startup game has, it's probably the only place you can realistically become a CTO or CEO in your mid-20's.
amorphic 10y ago
It sounds like you want to get rich by earning wages. A wise man once said to me: "Nobody ever got rich by earning wages."
monodeldiablo 10y ago
You want to get rich, but aren't willing to invest in your social and technical skills? Good luck with that. If anybody's looking for a textbook definition for "lazy and entitled", the attitude implied by this question is as close as I've ever seen. Please keep in mind that I don't mean that as an insult. Now, with that out of the way, I will say this: There's a pernicious myth in the industry that you need to be "brilliant" to create something valuable and successful. Which is bullshit. You just need to be competent, persistent, and extraordinarily lucky. Here, in order, are the modern keys to wealth: - Know rich people. Be someone they enjoy hanging out with. People want to work with people they like, so this greatly increases the odds they'll throw you a project or put you on their team. See: Balmer, Steve. (NOTE: This requires social skills.) - Create a business product. Be a middle man. Build a product that identifies and ameliorates a common business pain point. Find a major, underlying cost that is industry-wide and create a service or app that reduces this cost for the user. As quickly as possible, put competent people to work under you. Scale quickly and gets lots of smart people in your corner quickly. (NOTE: This requires social skills, observational skills, persistence, technical skills, and a generous helping of luck.) - Create a consumer product. Be a founder. Build a business that satisfies a base human desire (entertainment, sex, greed, etc.) and charge money for it. See above. (NOTE: This requires all the same skills as above, plus more luck. The consumer space is packed with competition.) - Be indispensable in a lucrative, but unpopular, niche. Specialize in MUMPS or COBOL or FORTRAN. Pick an industry that many avoid, like porn or gambling or spam. There's less competition, sure, but there's also higher risk to your long-term employment. And you have to live with yourself, so be sure you're OK with your choice. (NOTE: This seems to be the most compatible with your skill set and attitude, but might not be an ethical/moral match.) - Grind away in a decent job, save aggressively, and invest. Be boring. Get a $120k/yr job and live like a student, putting at least half your income into savings. After a few years, start investing that money in people more motivated/skilled than yourself. This has the highest likelihood of working out -- assuming economic stability -- but is the least sexy option available to moderately talented engineers because it takes a long time. (NOTE: You'll still probably need social skills to be successful at this.) - Get profoundly lucky. Be in the right place at the right time. Be the founding engineer or a stupid startup at a time when VCs are throwing money at everything and asking no questions. Be an early hire at a unicorn. Stumble on the next Angry Birds or Pokemon Go or whatever. (NOTE: This is entirely beyond your control. Almost everybody in The Valley of Dreams is pursuing this goal. You're still better-served by having technical and social skills.)
gadders 10y ago
I didn't know who Jeff Dean was, but I found this page enlightening: https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts
_dax 10y ago
The world isn't so simple that pay scales with skill. There's definitely a base level of proficiency that you need but it's not so high. It's more about making the decisions, choosing industries where this is possible, and managing to stay interested. I know a few people between ages 40-50 that make this much working at a hedge fund as pure engineers. None of them are incredible, to be honest I could do their job and I'm half their age. They've just put in their time there, didn't get distracted by more interesting opportunities, and don't mind a typical office job with no perks.
lscore720 10y ago
The idea of this question being taken seriously is worrisome. These were the exact types of questions I saw made by entry level finance folks 10 years ago before the bubble popped. The level of immaturity, entitlement, and arrogance made me think it was a troll post, but the serious responses make me question the HN mindset sometimes.