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.
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."
I would even be skeptical of the ~10% estimate. Even accounting for contributions in cash machines like AdX and Adwords, commanding one million dollars in engineer's pay seems to be a matter of having a rare set of skills in working on outrageously difficult problems (deep learning, managing complex networks, or large-scale cloud computing setups).
I am not too sold about cashing on "creating business value". It's not like Google lacks technical expertise to understand the scale of their problems. Likely, if you are working amongst super-technically-able people, the only way to reach that figure is pushing yourself to gain expertise in a valuable domain or move into management where your product decisions have a direct impact.
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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Were those people who made incredible amounts of money without technical abilities beyond mediocre PHP skills making their money as salaried software engineers? OP specifically asked about making a $1MM/year while still working as a programmer without social skills.
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.
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.
Your perspective is odd and not based on evidence. Happiness does not scale linearly in relation to earnings. It tops out around £40k in the UK, if I remember the stat correctly.
Of course, there are outliers, people whose happiness does scale linearly with their earnings. More importantly, I feel, is the vertigo associated with income, the fear and worry of taking a cut in earnings. Lifestyle expands to fit income.
It does not seem that you have considered the why, only the what. Why do you want $1m? Several others have raised this question here. You will be far, far more satisfied if you spend a time considering this in detail.
They give it away while still keeping millions/billions for themselves. Money is the worst if you give your life for it, but otherwise it's pretty good.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
> 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.
> it's better to make as much money as possible to hope that our economy will efficiently distribute the resources for the greater good.
This is inaccurate on several levels.
Trickle-down capitalism does not work well. Current mechanisms ensure that an increasingly elite few own the vast majority of resources and means of controlling those resources.
Making a ton of cash personally does not equate with distributing wealth. Taxes and the tax system are poorly organised for this purpose.
If you are serious that you want to work hard in in order to benefit society then perhaps consider health care, politics, farming, irrigation, renewable energy, or even space travel. You can be an engineer in these fields. Don't kid yourself that simply by becoming rich personally that you are a benefit to larger society. The evidence indicates quite the opposite.
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.
Note that this is not guaranteed or even expected at a prop shop or hedge fund either. I know of a very large hedge fund where pay is not as good as you think. I will just say that I have never seen a trader who makes $1 million per year claim that this is a good way of doing it.
You're probably better off as a SWE at Google than as a trader at this hedge fund.
Yeah it's not guaranteed at all. You have to be at a profitable desk to make it happen. I don't want to give any numbers since it's too variable, but I would guess it would still be a minority of the traders who pull 1 million+ even at the most successful firms. But I think if you are aiming for that number it's the most straightforward way - it has the least amount of variability and just relies on your own personal skill generally.
Having worked as a trader, a lot of it comes not from personal skill, but just from being in the right product, at the right firm, at the right time.
Even at firms/desks that are in the right products at the right time, few people actually make 7 figures. If I'm not mistaken, you should be aware of this for a variety of reasons. I'm not convinced that making this kind of money is easier or more likely in finance than in tech.
Thanks for the insight! My experience is, admittedly, based on a limited sample size. I think you're right though, there is still huge variability for traders, and a lot of it is luck.
I think that a sufficiently motivated person could find a leaked list of bonuses from that firm and check for themselves if there were any new grads that made $1 million+ and also check how many such persons there were.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
> 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.
While having profit share in a game developer's contract is sometimes true, I'd say that it's definitely not a common occurrence to earn that much money. Profit share is based on royalties made after paying back development costs and the game being extremely successful. Due to rising development costs, and most games not being multi-million sellers, most developers earn minimal bonuses beyond their contractual wages, from my experience of the industry.
I'm based in the UK and wrote console games for 19 years. I'm estimating that I saw around £15k in game related bonuses over that time. I did hear rumours of the Tomb Raider team getting a £40k bonus back in the mid 90s but I'm not sure if that was true.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.)
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.
> 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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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."