Beside a startup, what are the other ways to significant wealth for a dev?

I realized a) that I was unlikely to get a tenure-track position, and b) that even if I were to get one, I didn't really enjoy the work of a tenure-track professor, which tends to be more about fundraising and having meetings, and less about doing research.

(More flippantly, I realized that the life of a modern, tenured academic looks a lot like the life of a small business owner. So why not just go into startups, where there's a chance of making real money for the lifetime of effort?)

That's the reason. Europe is not really the place for making a fortune. It has the "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" mindset, which leads to the fact that starting salaries for software devs (even after a PhD, as in my case), in the country where that motto is official, are within a standard deviation from bus drivers. Magnitude of this varies, but unless you're a no-life breathing for the bonus in a hedge fund, you're not going to earn 10x.

BTW, typically you don't need an accident to know what others are earning. I easily got samples of different pay grades, in different companies in two European countries, just by asking them directly. People are surprisingly open about that.

May I ask how many years of real world experience running a business you have under your belt? Do you really believe that none of the non-engineering google employees contribute to the profit? Do you really believe all Google employees contribute equally? All the Google Plus employees create negative value; Paying them $200K guarantees someone gets LESS than they could have been paid -- and that assumes google actually gives in and pays everyone the maximum they can, which is unlikely cause they have cheaper talent pools to draw on. They pay less in London than they do in Mountain View.

> If you asked me in the early 2000s whether TV would be around in 10 years I would've said definitely.

It is 2015, and TV is still around and profiting nicely. Or, are you living in 2030?

> Which one sounds more unrealistic to you? Bringing down the entire television empire or forming one goddamn union for one company that fits my ideal?

Ah, but that one company will just shutter their R&D. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

> The power is with the 99%, and it's a thin line stopping us from acting on it.

Yes, but as a software engineer you are part of the 1%, not the 99% (literally - the "1%" Occupy talks about are actually the 0.01%). If the real 99% applied the same rule, you effectively get communism. And that worked very well as an incentive for talented people

> You from canada or something?

I left the US and I live in Israel these days. Where Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel and various other companies you have heard of have their largest most prolific campuses outside the US. They do this because the talent pool is large, and is cheaper than the US. The unions already exist; joining them is as simple as declaring "I want to join" and paying a small percentage of your salary (1%-2%, I think) as union fees; There are, in fact, multiple competing unions. And yet, over 90% of software engineers are not union members - and those that are make much lower salaries (correlation, not causation of course - but it definitely isn't random).

Not where I live it's not.

>May I ask how many years of real world experience running a business you have under your belt? Do you really believe that none of the non-engineering google employees contribute to the profit? Do you really believe all Google employees contribute equally? All the Google Plus employees create negative value; Paying them $200K guarantees someone gets LESS than they could have been paid -- and that assumes google actually gives in and pays everyone the maximum they can, which is unlikely cause they have cheaper talent pools to draw on. They pay less in London than they do in Mountain View.

All ventures are a gamble. But all the losing gambles need to be made in order to find the successful one. Therefore the profits need to be split evenly. Additionally google engineers can move between projects.

>Yes, but as a software engineer you are part of the 1%, not the 99% (literally - the "1%" Occupy talks about are actually the 0.01%). If the real 99% applied the same rule, you effectively get communism. And that worked very well as an incentive for talented people

90k average sw salary in america is at the 95%-tile. Please note that the 1% control half of the worlds' wealth. Also, who says we need communism? I'm still talking about capitalism just with a greater balance of power.

> The unions already exist; joining them is as simple as declaring "I want to join" and paying a small percentage of your salary (1%-2%, I think) as union fees; There are, in fact, multiple competing unions. And yet, over 90% of software engineers are not union members

If there was a union that negotiated 200k. Over 90% of those engineers would join. You guys just aren't desperate enough to form one.