I know an Engineer at Microsoft who makes in the $500k+ range. Trust me, none of you would envy him (okay, some of you might). The way he does it is he's the gu

I know an Engineer at Microsoft who makes in the $500k+ range. Trust me, none of you would envy him (okay, some of you might). The way he does it is he's the guy who solves tough (not necessarily interesting) technical problems in the shortest time possible for x important feature. When .NET 4.5 was shipped you couldn't use the `await` keyword in a try-catch statement, because there was some issue with the debugger. He created a proof-of-concept in one month, but he threw an ungodly amount of hours at it. He's divorced and he lives at work. He's gets huge stock bonuses every time he does something like this, but, IMO, it's cost him a lot to get that money.