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Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

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Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#61

Post by solutionyogi »

SecConsult wrote: post #26
goldenkey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am already getting downvoted for putting the truth out there. These fools like the idea that their web development job can turn into a 300k a year salaried job but its a pipedream. I am not saying those jobs don't exist. But they usually are anomalies or due to other things like a PhD.

I would say even with a PhD you can't make 300k/yr for web or any other development. Top notch developer's salary won't exceed 220k/yr

I am really happy that you make 420k but I guarantee you that there are plenty of developers who make more than 220k. (I make more than that and in my know plenty of folks personally who make that amount) One easy to way more money than this is to work in finance space in NYC.

Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#62

Post by stormqloud »

ropiku wrote: post #30
stormqloud wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right up until the time the companies are asked to pay taxes. Anyone can give out $300K per year jobs when they are global monopolies that pay no income taxes in any jurisdiction. These are short term anomalies not structural jobs indicate any kind of long term trend.

Companies pay profit tax, not income. Since employee compensation is an expense, the tax rate has nothing to do with it. The employees do pay income tax, quite a lot of it.

You are funny.

Clearly you never owned a company before and had to do taxes and accounting.

You better vote for minimum wage increases too!

Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#63

Post by prodigal_erik »

pyb wrote: post #60
patio11 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppAmaGooBookSoft want few things more in life than for their engineers to remain really, really smart at developing distributed databases and really, really stupid at salary negotiation. They want to avoid further repricing of their entire engineering workforces at once, as that costs (literally) billions of dollars. They take substantial measures to avoid this, including (in recent memory) at least two of those com…

Mmmm... it's not clear how salary inversion would build up, when I assume every single Mountain View Googler gets multiple job opportunities a week in their inbox, presumably with salary ranges. Having said this, I'm looking at this from a distance, so who knows.

I get a ton of recruiter spam about positions which may or may not exist, but they pretty much never specify compensation.

Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#64

Post by hamburglar »

pyb wrote: post #54
patio11 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many people on HN who agree with you on this. It has a certain appeal to it; I know folks whose sense of justice is offended that some programmers make $30k while other programmers make $300k, even programmers living in the same city. There exist tens of thousands of engineers at AppAmaGooBookSoft who have pay packages which top $300k. There exist thousands whose pay package approaches $1 million. These are…

If AppAmaGooBookSoft are happy to spend that much on talent, why don't they let it be known, rather than complain about a talent shortage ?

It's not actually all that hard to find out. You apply and if you pass, you get a silly offer. It actually does happen. A year ago, I could have written the dismissive, "individual contributor engineers making that kind of money is a pipe dream" comment myself, but in the meantime I happen to have interviewed at one of the bigs and more than doubled my take-home overnight. And I was reasonably well compensated before.

Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#65

Post by jordanb »

patio11 wrote: post #43
goldenkey wrote: post #14

This is a fucking joke guys. Programming is not the career job that will get you those kind of figures, if it does it sure as fuck will be more of a management position. Look guys, salaried work will never make you 'rich.' Believing it will is the same belief that a startup will succeed. You need to get out of the salary game and work for yourself or do consultantcy if you want big bucks

There are many people on HN who agree with you on this. It has a certain appeal to it; I know folks whose sense of justice is offended that some programmers make $30k while other programmers make $300k, even programmers living in the same city. There exist tens of thousands of engineers at AppAmaGooBookSoft who have pay packages which top $300k. There exist thousands whose pay package approaches $1 million. These are…

patio11, I love your articles on salary negotiation and totally jive with what you're trying to do, but seven figure compensation for salaried software engineers is completely inconsistent with any evidence I've ever been able to gather. If you have actual evidence of this I'd love to see it.

Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#66

Post by pyb »

hamburglar wrote: post #64
pyb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AppAmaGooBookSoft are happy to spend that much on talent, why don't they let it be known, rather than complain about a talent shortage ?

It's not actually all that hard to find out. You apply and if you pass, you get a silly offer. It actually does happen. A year ago, I could have written the dismissive, "individual contributor engineers making that kind of money is a pipe dream" comment myself, but in the meantime I happen to have interviewed at one of the bigs and more than doubled my take-home overnight. And I was reasonably well compensated before…

Maybe not for you ;) The rest of us usually need a few weeks to prepare for these algorithms-heavy interviews. I'd rather know in advance if it's worth the trouble!

Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#67

Post by nazka »

solutionyogi wrote: post #61
SecConsult wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say even with a PhD you can't make 300k/yr for web or any other development. Top notch developer's salary won't exceed 220k/yr

I am really happy that you make 420k but I guarantee you that there are plenty of developers who make more than 220k. (I make more than that and in my know plenty of folks personally who make that amount) One easy to way more money than this is to work in finance space in NYC.

I guess working at an hedge fund, HFT, or doing some C++/ASM may be the only way to earn such salary.

Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#68

Post by cookiecaper »

jordanb wrote: post #65
patio11 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many people on HN who agree with you on this. It has a certain appeal to it; I know folks whose sense of justice is offended that some programmers make $30k while other programmers make $300k, even programmers living in the same city. There exist tens of thousands of engineers at AppAmaGooBookSoft who have pay packages which top $300k. There exist thousands whose pay package approaches $1 million. These are…

patio11, I love your articles on salary negotiation and totally jive with what you're trying to do, but seven figure compensation for salaried software engineers is completely inconsistent with any evidence I've ever been able to gather. If you have actual evidence of this I'd love to see it.

While people with outrageous pay packages exist, I seriously doubt they're your everyday resume submitters. The company has to want you to bid you up like that.

Google has hired many industry luminaries that they want on payroll at least as much for their own PR as for the work those people actually perform; it's almost like an athletic sponsorship that way. I'm sure some of those guys make 500K-1000K from their "employers". In that sense, even if you're an employee, you still have to go out there and do something special and noteworthy to raise yourself to the level of a "programmer" that makes 500k+.

I don't think you can demand more than 170K-200K in a moderate COL area (plus or minus as appropriate for COL adjustments) for being a normal salaried programmer, and you'd have to be quite good to get that.

Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#69

Post by jrs235 »

jordanb wrote: post #65
patio11 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many people on HN who agree with you on this. It has a certain appeal to it; I know folks whose sense of justice is offended that some programmers make $30k while other programmers make $300k, even programmers living in the same city. There exist tens of thousands of engineers at AppAmaGooBookSoft who have pay packages which top $300k. There exist thousands whose pay package approaches $1 million. These are…

patio11, I love your articles on salary negotiation and totally jive with what you're trying to do, but seven figure compensation for salaried software engineers is completely inconsistent with any evidence I've ever been able to gather. If you have actual evidence of this I'd love to see it.

I think we keep having the same misunderstanding in these HN comments. patio11 says "pay packages", not salaries. From my understanding there are loads of folks making $150,000 / yr salary with $150,000+ stock/options which means there are in fact people getting $300,000+ pay (read compensation) packages.

Re: Ask HN: Who's making $300k to $1m as a cloud engineer?

#70

Post by stonetomb »

goldenkey wrote: post #14

This is a fucking joke guys. Programming is not the career job that will get you those kind of figures, if it does it sure as fuck will be more of a management position. Look guys, salaried work will never make you 'rich.' Believing it will is the same belief that a startup will succeed. You need to get out of the salary game and work for yourself or do consultantcy if you want big bucks

Truth. Ran a dev shop at an F500, salary + bonus I would get $170 in a good year. Learned the game after a few years and struck out on my own (began moonlighting to reduce the risk). 1st year was $150k and fast forward to 2015 - $430k. I soon found that W2 is the absolute worst method to take compensation (topic for another day).

I am far less stressed from the dev shop days, but 80h/w still happens at times when projects go long and another kicks off. I travel 1-2 weeks month (sometimes 3) though that's an unavoidable fact of life no matter which path I take.

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