7 ms·
> high 6 figures a year without working too hard Wow, like $800-900k?
by acchow 10y ago
> high 6 figures a year without working too hard
Wow, like $800-900k?
- Johnny_Brahms 10y agoIt's not unheard of. But you must understand that these are people that have a pretty decent job security in an often huge codebase that has been aquiring cruft for 30 years in language most people don't understand. I would like to be able to claim that the code is good, but some of the people writing it in the first place were not programmers. It is not strictly bad, but some parts are just mine fields. A bit related: I spent 2 years of my life on a C codebase written by mathematicians that would much rather have written it in APL. I don't know if you have seen C written as APL, but that is 2 years of my life I will never get back. I left for a lesser paid, more fun job. Upon leaving the manager offered me a 60% pay raise (yup, I should have had higher demands, but at least I proved myself :) ). Unless you enjoy torturing yourself, legacy COBOL programming is not very rewaeding, and at least in Sweden, most of it is slowly being moved to other languages.
- UweSchmidt 10y agoBest story I've heard is one of the old programmers commenting his COBOL code in latin. It was a different time...
- endgame 10y agoMalus est?
- H4CK3RM4N 10y agoI feel like that's a play for job security more than anything else.
- eru 10y agoAnd different times: these days with Google Translate Latin doesn't add much to your job security.
- bad_login 10y agoIt's common practice in Vatican Bank.
- dghughes 10y ago"Mea culpa" over and over?
- int_19h 10y ago> COBOL programming is not very rewaeding, and at least in Sweden, most of it is slowly being moved to other languages. Which would imply that there's a demand for people who know both COBOL, and whatever's the popular migration target for such systems these days (I assume Java?).
- viraptor 10y agoMigration target like visual cobol (not a joke). Just look at those smiling hipsters writing cobol.net on their laptop. https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/visual-cobol-for-visual-studio/ https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/visual-cobo...
- CyberDildonics 10y agoI can't wait until I can compile Cobol for webasm
- nickpsecurity 10y agoNah, go with terminal apps in Visual COBOL distributed as Electron apps.
- WorldMaker 10y agohttps://xtermjs.org/ https://xtermjs.org/ is here for you.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoOh my goodness... why do I keep making jokes about how a ridiculous world would function and then reality is already halfway there?! It's been happening too often past two years.
- gambler 10y agoThis seemed surprising to me on the first read, but it makes sense. An average senior software engineer probably makes ~$120K in US. They often work on systems that aren't in any way critical and are more or less replaceable. Anything in COBOL these days is by definition is crucial and highly expensive infrastructure. The talent pool to work with that tech is small. They are by definition very experienced and probably highly specialized even within that pool. So upper six digit salary actually makes sense. To be honest, the idea of companies paying through their noses because of decades of short-term thinking makes me smile. Karma in action.
- ternaryoperator 10y agoI expect he meant the high range of 100K-200K. It's a colloquialism I hear periodically. I took it to mean $180K-$200K.
- acchow 10y agoHow can "high 6 figures" mean high 100-200k? Ugh, I hate english.
- stickfigure 10y agoIt can't. This is not reasonable English, it's (presumably) a misspeak by the OP. People make these kinds of mistakes in every language. It is highly unlikely that that the OP is making $800k/yr consulting as a programmer. That's $400/hr sustained for more than a year of fulltime work.
- mseebach 10y ago$800k/year is possibly unusual, but these are unusual people. I see nothing unlikely about a highly skilled contractor with 30 years of experience, a good network and in the right location to be pulling down $800k/year.
- stickfigure 10y agoDo you know anyone who does? "Without working too hard"? The chance that the OP is billing $800k/yr is vastly smaller than the chance that the OP used a bad figure of speech. The number of technology professionals who can sustain $400/hr billing for a full year is tiny. The number of technology professionals who are bad at communication is huge. Bayes' Theorem is relevant here.
- mseebach 10y agoI know someone who makes half that and who is utterly unremarkable (nice guy, competent - but unremarkable, he's just played his card very well. Not playing politics, but being a consultant, not FTE, in a lucrative niche, and possibly having a nose for ending up on good projects). So I can believe that a tiny number (which is what we're talking about, they can make this much exactly because there is only a tiny number of them) can make this much. "Without working too hard" is quite subjective. I suspect they are quite disciplined and works quite hard, but are very rarely in the office after 5, nor working much more than 35-40 hours a week. As to (bad) communication, $200k/yr is high but unremarkable for SV/NYC careerist professionals. The notion that someone with decades of rare, in-demand experience should somehow be capped at what a (lucky) 35 year old engineering manager makes is just silly.