I am surprised no one has suggested the traditional and still very popular way which is marry someone wealthy.
Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
11–20 of 191 posts
Re: Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
#12I'll answer the questions you asked, then give you a better question: AppAmaGooBookSoft are probably not what you're thinking of when you say "startups" and 5-10 years in any of them will make you quite wealthy indeed, by the standards of e.g. the American middle class. Do some devs make north of $1 million a year? Yes, for a value of "some." (If you put a gun to my head, I'd say "Maybe 5% of the engineering workforc…
What exactly is AppAmaGooBookSoft?
Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft.
i.e. the big tech players that employ a ton of people and pay high, predictable salaries.
Re: Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
#13I'll answer the questions you asked, then give you a better question: AppAmaGooBookSoft are probably not what you're thinking of when you say "startups" and 5-10 years in any of them will make you quite wealthy indeed, by the standards of e.g. the American middle class. Do some devs make north of $1 million a year? Yes, for a value of "some." (If you put a gun to my head, I'd say "Maybe 5% of the engineering workforc…
What exactly is AppAmaGooBookSoft?
Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook,Microsoft
Re: Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
#14Contracting! Many people, most of them non-contractors or people who have limited contracting experience will tell you contracting is risky. If you are good it's actually much more secure than getting a "real" job, once you get going. You can't really get fired and as long as you are able to juggle a few clients at a time you will always have plenty of work. If you can consistently deliver results faster than the average deskjocky you can earn a lot of money too.
Re: Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
#15I'll answer the questions you asked, then give you a better question: AppAmaGooBookSoft are probably not what you're thinking of when you say "startups" and 5-10 years in any of them will make you quite wealthy indeed, by the standards of e.g. the American middle class. Do some devs make north of $1 million a year? Yes, for a value of "some." (If you put a gun to my head, I'd say "Maybe 5% of the engineering workforc…
What exactly is AppAmaGooBookSoft?
Apple-Amazon-Google-Facebook-Microsoft would be my guess.
Re: Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
#16I'll answer the questions you asked, then give you a better question: AppAmaGooBookSoft are probably not what you're thinking of when you say "startups" and 5-10 years in any of them will make you quite wealthy indeed, by the standards of e.g. the American middle class. Do some devs make north of $1 million a year? Yes, for a value of "some." (If you put a gun to my head, I'd say "Maybe 5% of the engineering workforc…
What exactly is AppAmaGooBookSoft?
[deleted]
Re: Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
#17I'll answer the questions you asked, then give you a better question: AppAmaGooBookSoft are probably not what you're thinking of when you say "startups" and 5-10 years in any of them will make you quite wealthy indeed, by the standards of e.g. the American middle class. Do some devs make north of $1 million a year? Yes, for a value of "some." (If you put a gun to my head, I'd say "Maybe 5% of the engineering workforc…
What exactly is AppAmaGooBookSoft?
[deleted]
Re: Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
#18Solve problems for rich clients.
Or steal bitcoin.
Re: Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
#19Here are a few ideas:
- Selling enterprise software (you can make 10%-20% of an 8 or 9 figure deal)
- Selling securities in some form or another (you make ~5% of deals worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars)
- high leverage consulting (solving very hard tech problems for lots of people. for example: I have a friend who helps a whole bunch of computer vision companies and makes a ton. Another friend is an SEO expert.)
- Patenting core technologies and selling those patents (A buddy of mine sold his patent for $10M)
- "platform based land grabs". Think of the people who bought tons of domains early in the Web's history. Or the first guy to make an emoji app on iOS. These are different than "starting a company" as you really only need a product and can pull it all off on your own. I suspect there will be more of these in the future.
All of these require creatively navigating business as well as being an awesome dev.
Re: Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?
#20Devs rarely make $1 million a year, startup or big company. Now if you are 10x better than the average Google/Facebook engineer and can prove it, I think you could negotiate that kind of compensation package as a principal engineer.