301–310 of 372 posts
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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.
Parent comment had to be qualified a bit: Never bet on anything proprietary which doesn't offer significant advantages over non-proprietary competitors.
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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…
Problem - the school systems are funded by property taxes. Live in a low rent area, your kids will be at a crappy school. It's why a family needs to be earning at least 200k, preferably 300k. Rent for a family of 4 is at a minimum of 5k - 6k. The alternative is to live in the midwest, with snow. And a lot of people who don't understand working in tech. And less opportunities.
I'm 60+. I've been coding my whole career and I'm still coding. Never hit a plateau in pay, but nonetheless, I've found the best way to ratchet up is to change jobs which has been sad, but true - I've left some pretty decent jobs because somebody else was willing to pay more. This has been true in every decade of my career. There's been a constant push towards management that I've always resisted. People I've known w…
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It's funny: I was betting on WPF at the time but it seems dead now, with only some XAML knowledge transferable. Still have to do JS, but at least Angular doesn't suck too much.
Here's a tip: never bet on something proprietary.
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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…
Over 25 years on both coasts, I have yet to see someone strictly coding (no exec or mgmt duties) break $200K. All the families I know in SV are either lawyer/finance/medical, 2-income households, or cashed out.
There are in fact lots of developers doing nothing but development making well north of $200k. That's less than a $100/hour bill rate, which is not at all uncommon as a contractor. If that's something you want, know that it absolutely is attainable.
I think you'll find that, in all walks of life, people who make lots of money tend not to post on internet message boards (or salary surveys) about how they make lots of money. Definitely don't take the lack of people spouting off here about their 1%'er incomes as a sign that those people don't exist (or aren't, in fact, here reading this thread).
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What is a TSC and how do I get one?
It's a "Top Secret Clearance," a certificate saying that you are trustworthy to perform top secret government work. Based on what I've heard from others, getting one includes taking a lie detector test, having family members, neighbors, and colleagues interviewed, and hopefully not too many other probing things. My impression is that any warm-bodied US citizen who doesn't have much of a record, and who knows the righ…
Wikipedia has a decent breakdown of the various clearances btw: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_clearance
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>As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau. Mine seems to keep climbing. I'm hearing reports of >$300k, and have received an offer in that range myself (counting signing bonuses and stock grants). Granted my pay might plateau there , but honestly that's enough money to keep me happy without having to see it go up every year. I'm a total generalist, but I also have a few areas where I would qualify as a specialist;…
">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…
Can someone give more information/source on this?
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…
Great post -- I want to throw out another option though, which I am exploring myself. Your post seems to, like most posts on HN, be a very "web application" centric view of things. There are obviously vast worlds of software engineering outside of web applications. Embedded/real-time systems, programming languages & tools, robotics, graphics, bioinformatics/computational biology, machine learning, machine vision, the…
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>$50k employee == $100k subcontractor That's false. You can figure out out directly. Paying your own social security tax: +7.5% (say $7500 out of $100k salary) Health Insurance: $700-$1000 per month (say $12k annually) 2 weeks paid vacation + paid holidays: +7% (another $7000 out of $100k salary) So, $100k contractor is equivalent to ~$80k as a full-time employee with benefits.
I know, that's why I said I can't figure out why places would be willing to pay me the equivalent rate of $100k as a subcontractor, but only $50k as an employee. It's very obviously better for me as a subcontractor.
Another issue is that it's embarrassing to pay a low-ranking programmer employee more than a manager in a non-technical division. That messes up the corporate hierarchy.