Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

It's sad that the comments here mostly fall into a few categories:

- "This is only a few people, so not something that could affect the rest of us"

- "Those people had a specific skill, so the rest of us couldn't possibly make that much"

- "This is only happening in the Bay Area, so anybody living anywhere else shouldn't expect to make that much"

It's maddening. How about, instead, when we see another datapoint showing how ridiculously valuable we developers are to employers and our potential earning power, we talk about how to get one of those million dollar salaries. Because that is in fact doable, and this article highlights just one of the many ways a smart guy in his 20s could position himself so as to be making that million dollar salary within the next few years.

That would be much more productive than trying to prove to everybody that the market does in fact only ever pay $70k/year because that's what you see on that Java job ad on Monster.com.

This is a reality that developers need to take on board. And sadly, most people here are actively fighting against doing so. To their detriment.

I applaud the positive spin, but the responses are due to the headline which suggests these salaries are normal.

If an article said “supermarket checkout clerks are earning over $1m” and the article explained that a couple of retired property investors decided to work at a supermarket, would you respond the same?

The harsh reality is, very few people will have the tenacity, intelligence, and opportunities to become a top 20 AI researcher, especially in their 20s.

Agreed. At the same time—believing one can do something is something that can help people continue to be persistent when it doesn’t come right away? It gives a goal even if never achieved. I never made it to the Olympics but I did become a scholarship-college athlete by dreaming of being an Olympian(hopefully this doesn’t seem boastful). I like to know who the people are at the top of their game. It’s a good way to measure how much I may be able to improve. I can create a gap-analysis of how to get there.

You're doing it again. If you truly believe you can't bring in that kind of money unless you're "top 20" then you're never going to try.

And it's to your detriment, because there are a lot more than 20 people making that kind of money in software today.

Note further that AI is in fact a subset of software. There is nothing magic about it that somebody like yourself or anybody else here can't pick up.

You seem to grudgingly accept that doing so can make you a lot more money. But still you go out of your way to insist that you, personally can't do that.

Why?

I don’t believe your statement that AI is just a subset of software. It’s almost entirely math. Furthermore, “somebody like yourself or anybody else can’t pick it up” is wildly untrue. You realize that the people in the articles are researchers, not practitioners, right? They’re the Albert Einstein’s of the industry dreaming up new deviations and architectures. I think you’re severely downplaying what they’ve achieved.

You might as well say that Michael Schumacher just drives a car pretty well, so most of us could spend a bit of time in training and win F1

The reason I go out of my way to insist I can’t do that is that I’m not in my 20s, and it would be delusional of me to think AI is “nothing magic” and I can watch some YouTube videos to become the worlds best.

> How about, instead, when we see another datapoint showing how ridiculously valuable we developers are to employers and our potential earning power, we talk about how to get one of those million dollar salaries.

In the case of the original article, those million dollar salaries go to researchers, not to developers. I haven't heard about developers making a million a year.

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