261–270 of 372 posts
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Congrats on the pay grade! but you need to look at averages not anomalies like yourself 300k is definitely not the tract most programmers are on
>not anomalies like yourself Several people I know are in that range. But they all specialize in one thing or another.
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Here's a tip: never bet on something proprietary.
Here's my 20+ years of experience working as a contract in Australia. In all that time I've only ever worked with proprietary tools and have never had trouble getting high paying contract work. I would say I've done very well betting on something proprietary.
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I should have mentioned that there is an alternative to "X Who Programs," which is an elevated title at a known company, e.g. Distinguished or Principal Engineer at Google or Amazon. People know that Google Fellows are rare and that it's hard to get there. There the X is "really good engineer". It's harder to get that, for most people, than to get another X.
Software as practiced today, as the province of firms who do nothing but software engineering rather than a back-office function of giant enterprises, is only ~25 years old. The software industry of the 1980s was led by companies whose flagship products wouldn't attract much attention as open source today. It's not surprising that there aren't that many "distinguished engineers". If you'd entered the modern field at…
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">As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau." There are two problems with hitting a plateau @ 300K: Housing costs and College Tuition. At the traditional 3x debt to gross income metric, your home mortgage would be capped around ~$900k, vs the $1.3-1.5MM range of current trading prices. Which is not terrible if you lock something in. However, once you are at 4x paying for schools becomes a far greater challenge. Yo…
Just throwing this out there: if there's a problem with developer salaries being capped at $300K, think of how hard it is for all the families who are making the U.S. median household income of $53K/year, or hell, the Santa Clara County median income of $45K/year. I understand that everybody wants more money - hell, I want more money too. But a lot of that is because everybody wants to be in the top 1% of nice neighb…
Don't listen to what anyone who says that you can make as much as a programmer as a manager. The best programmers in the world with no management experience are going to cap at much less than a million a year in 99.9% of cases. Usually 400k or less. That's still good, and if you are happy with that stay a programmer! Just don't justify it saying that's the most you could make. People who go into management literally…
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">As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau." There are two problems with hitting a plateau @ 300K: Housing costs and College Tuition. At the traditional 3x debt to gross income metric, your home mortgage would be capped around ~$900k, vs the $1.3-1.5MM range of current trading prices. Which is not terrible if you lock something in. However, once you are at 4x paying for schools becomes a far greater challenge. Yo…
Just throwing this out there: if there's a problem with developer salaries being capped at $300K, think of how hard it is for all the families who are making the U.S. median household income of $53K/year, or hell, the Santa Clara County median income of $45K/year. I understand that everybody wants more money - hell, I want more money too. But a lot of that is because everybody wants to be in the top 1% of nice neighb…
It seems that they go a few directions: The most common seems to be to try and generalize, because relearning most of your job skills every few years starts to get annoying the 20th time you've had to do it. It's different when you are younger and everything is new, you just chalk up a major tooling change as just something else to learn. But when the next hot platform or architecture or whatever comes out you get ti…
This is a great post. Another path is into sales. If you have a deep understanding of technology, are able to help people use it to solve their problems, and you can communicate the value to buyers, then you can do quite well in sales. (It's also helpful if you know a thing or two about how to dress and you like to drink.) Another friend started out in programming and IT, but he migrated to a sales engineer job where…
I'm almost 57 and still write real code that people use and employers make money from. The trick is to continuously learn new stuff. My whole career has always been spent at the leading edge of whatever was most important at the time. Sure, people sometimes don't want to interview you because they assume you are old and pointless, but that's usually when they don't even read your resume, blog, linked in or whatever y…
As time goes by, people should be publishing interesting blog posts, getting involved in interesting projects, amassing followers in social media and generally making a name for themselves.
Ideally, you want to get to the point where people ask you to work for them, rather than the other way around. Learning and showing that learning applied is a very effective route.
Ever go to Wally-mart? Have you seen the greeters at the door? Just ask them. Most of them are old cobol programmers. ;)
These guys pull down big money, have very flexible working hours (2 days a week from home) and are set financially. I know them from the very start of my career. Every 5 years or so someone comes in, sees the pays and freaks out and has them terminated. Within a couple of months they are re-hired, usually with an increase in pay.
There are tons of legacy COBOL systems running in big companies. Whether it is keeping them running, or helping plumb up various middleware solutions, a top-quality COBOL guy can make lots and lots of money.