Ask HN: Where is the money? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where is the money?

3 pointsarmagon4 comments

Yesterday, I saw an article[1] stating that many programmers are earning $200k USD, or even $300k or $400k.

I thought I was doing good making $75k, and now I think I've been playing this game wrong.

So, where is the money?

Where is it geographically? (Is this just a US thing? San Fransisco-bay area only?)

What field is it? (Are we talking generalist programming? web development? app development? data analysis? machine learning?)

Who offers this sort of compensation? (Is this just Facebook, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix?)

Thanks for any insight. I think I could do this, but I can get there from here if I don't know where 'there' is.

[1] "Are we in the middle of a programming bubble"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18961173

DC area. SF Bay of course. Atlanta/Birmingham and Austin are both markets I've heard of.

All of the above for fields -- I know web devs making well over 100k. The more specialized you go the higher you go salary wise.

Lots of companies. Defense / gov is huge in DC area.

Can't speak to out of the US, it seems that salaries are significantly lower.

I think the 200k+ salaries are probably limited to very senior engineers in regular companies, or people in the FAANG companies -- note that those companies are not exclusively in the SF Bay area.

Rule of Thumb #1 : The closer you are to affecting the marginal profitability of the company, the more you make.

e.g. Updating actuarial tables on a 20 yr old insurance system = low pay. Using ML/AI to re-build the actuarial tables into more profitable products that someone else loads = high pay.

At some point it changes into "The closer you are to the money, the more you make". The pattern since the 80's is, folks who can write checks for the company, write them for each other.

Understand the business goals. Understand the _customer's_ goals.

Bring better ideas to the table on how to achieve them using your understanding of what is the ideal mix of easy/hard and long-term/short-term.

Track your efforts against the bottom line financials. Earn the raise you seek.

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