In general, work in finance. I have a friend who works as a systems engineer (sysadmin who can code) at Bloomberg and makes just that. His total comp is > 300.
Remember if you work in finance you will most likely live in NYC or London which are not cheap.
It depends if you are willing to give up luxuries or not. My girlfriend and I rent a cosy, but modern studio apartment in East London for about ~£800 p/m. Obviously that money would get you a lot more in most other places in the world, but if you are in finance (or a similarly-paying job) then it's really not a push. It takes me about 50 minutes to cycle to my job in central London - it keeps me fit, and saves an awful lot of money that would otherwise be spent being packed into the tube like sardines for a similarly long, but significantly less pleasant journey.
I second work in finance. It is very easy to reach that level with experience in this industry.
Does he have a lot of experience? My Bloomberg offer was low and the Bloomberg engineers who put their comp on the salary spreadsheet seemed to be paid much less than their experience would get them at a Big 4.
Bloomberg starts low (especially as a junior out of school) but pay can ramp up quickly if you deliver.
holy shit. what do they do all day in bloomberg??
Maintain large kafka clusters, futz with mesos, and futz with kubernetes. Same as all of us really. The difference is that a lot of startups will talk about their "hard big data problems" and might have 500T. A firm like Bloomberg's "big data problems" might be 400+ Petabytes. They also generally speaking totally shun the cloud as at that scale it tends to be cheaper to build on-premise.
They also shun the cloud because they have one of the largest physical datacenters on the island with real heavy iron (IBM and Sun/Oracle boxes)
Bloomberg has some of the best tech departments I've had the pleasure interviewing with. Besides being a media company, they also run a few exchanges, such as one of the largest bond exchanges in the world, and their tech people are on point. Totally to rate. I completely underestimated them until the recruiter I was working with set me up with them, and I was completely shocked at how good they were. Their top group at least was very very talented.
Sell those terminals and connections that are tens of thousands of dollars per year (per month?).
For Bloomberg, it is $20,000 USD per user per year. One user == one traders. Most firms have more than one trader.
It's more than just traders. On the sell side, you'd also see salespeople with terminals (and often the middle office guys would also have a terminal).