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Ask HN: Is it possible to make $200K/year base salary?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make $200K/year base salary?

#11

Post by danial »

AmaGooFaceSoftApple will pay senior developers in excess of 200k per year.

You can't ignore stocks because they will often cap your base salary and pay the rest in stocks. For example, a VP at one of these may have their annual compensation at $X,XXX,XXX per year but only receive $1XX,XXX in base salary. This is true for developers as well, but the ratio of base to total compensation is skewed more towards base compared to a VP.

Also note that there are some very distinguished engineers at these companies whose role isn't people or business manager who would receive as much as, and sometimes more than, a highly compensated VP.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make $200K/year base salary?

#12

Post by jandrewrogers »

I know many people that are paid like this, most outside of Silicon Valley even, and the common factor is that they are exceptionally skilled and proven domain experts in their field. The specific field of software is less important.

Obviously market demand does influence the salary, but there are many fields in software development where top skill will command this wage. Generally though, you have to really love what you specialize in to develop the kind of skill and expertise that will earn you this salary, it is not something you do by rote.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make $200K/year base salary?

#13

Post by late2part »

Yes. Start broadly, then become broadly competent, then become specifically talented in a particular area. You want a niche that is big enough to be interesting (cassandra, biology machine learning) while not being so large that Universities are churning out thousands of specialists (java, oracle, mysql).

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make $200K/year base salary?

#15

Post by bsvalley »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #12

I know many people that are paid like this, most outside of Silicon Valley even, and the common factor is that they are exceptionally skilled and proven domain experts in their field. The specific field of software is less important. Obviously market demand does influence the salary, but there are many fields in software development where top skill will command this wage. Generally though, you have to really love wha…

What are those fields?

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make $200K/year base salary?

#20

Post by bsvalley »

gizmo wrote: post #6

I'm not sure why you wouldn't care about stocks or bonuses, but 200k base salary is entirely possible at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Oracle, most hedge funds, and so on. 200k per year doesn't even put you in the 1%. 200k per year isn't even an infinite amount of money -- larger house and nicer car and poof it's gone. Right now software engineers with AI and Deep Learning experience or Big Data experie…

I've been there, there is not such things for an individual contributor unless you're an old employee (10 years at the same company).

I'm talking about +200K/y base salary, no stocks, bonuses etc.

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