You actually just broke down quite a few skill sets that can be qualified by experience or interviews. * Build a system from the ground up => Understands how t

You actually just broke down quite a few skill sets that can be qualified by experience or interviews. * Build a system from the ground up => Understands how to build custom solutions with or without frameworks and pre-established libraries in order to reach the optimal business solution for the company/client which may include time and resource constraints * Capability to handle requests at high capacity and performance => Understanding of development operations including but not limited to linux, networking, automation, cloud solutions, databases Now the extent to which a developer has trained those skills would greatly effect earning potential however having them at a basic level would certainly qualify one for most dev jobs. Machine learning and data science are particularly valuable because their is simply so much unexplored territory and so few candidates. $500k could easily be the salary of some of the primo researchers working for Uber, Google, Etc.