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What the Highest-Paid Programmers Earn
- rick888 15y agoI 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.
- maigret 15y agoYes. 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 15y agoThe 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 15y agoThus is probably something more like top management than a "programmer/developer" - and would probably be described as such. Good point.
- brosephius 15y agoprogrammers 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.
- stcredzero 15y agoprogrammers at high frequency trading firms can make well into the six figures and still spend most of the day coding. What's the intellectual kit needed to become a programmer at a high frequency trading firm?
- actionbrandon 15y agoMath/stats + ultra lean code + plus understanding market micostructure. From the CS side some of the more cutting edge stuff I've heard of being worked on involves hacking graphics cards to get a speed edge and building data centers in the middle of the ocean for the same reason. http://www.nvidia.com/object/computational_finance.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/computational_finance.html http://io9.com/5784758/the-speed-of-light-could-turn-the-middle-of-the-ocean-into-a-stock+trading-center http://io9.com/5784758/the-speed-of-light-could-turn-the-mid...
- gaius 15y agoThat 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 15y agoAleynikov 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.
- gaius 15y agoInterestingly, for a while I used some of Aleynikov's code myself, he wrote Oracaml. It hasn't been touched since 2006, doesn't build with the current OCaml or GCC without some hacking, and he's probably not going to be uploading patches from jail! So I restarted the project as OCI*ML on Github.
- patio11 15y agoI'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 15y agoI've apparently missed this in the past. Would you mind elaborating?
- actionbrandon 15y agoquantitative traders is one.
- yannickt 15y agoBasically be a domain expert, rather than an implementation technology expert.
- jgmmo 15y agoNo - basically, have your contribution be measured in how much value you added to the business. EX: App redesign makes sales go up 10k then the work was worth 10k
- patio11 15y agoSure. 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 15y agoThis 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)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- alexgartrell 15y agoEven 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 15y agoThe 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.
- brosephius 15y agoI 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 15y agoQuants/traders make massive amounts. Own your own hedge fund and it can be like selling a startup every year.
- dstein 15y ago4) and 5) definitely don't make you rich.
- gaius 15y agoSome of the Agile mafia have done very nicely out of selling Scrum Master certificates.
- veyron 15y agoWhat 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)
- hkarthik 15y agoI 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.
- iuguy 15y agoIncidentally 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 15y agoGoogle Offers Staff Engineer $3.5 Million To Turn Down Facebook Offer http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-engineer-3-5-million-to-turn-down-facebook-offer/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-enginee...
- gcb 15y agoisn't staff engineer a manager?
- rachelbythebay 15y agoA staff engineer could just be someone who's one level above senior. Someone like that in Mountain View probably makes around $200K/year.
- munificent 15y agoNo, 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 15y 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 15y agoIf 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 15y agoI'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.