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Comment by high_byte | Hacker News Reader

was it the highest paying? I think the pay is usually higher for cyber security, ai engineering, algorithm developers, some niches and I see blockchain salaries rising fast.

but in all of CS you got so many niches you could get astronomical salaries, cryptography, algotrading, advertising. and that's all before stock options or ownership. highest pay is when you own something.

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I’m getting my data from the StackOverflow surveys and just talk around the Net. See the 2019 survey (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#salary) and 2020 survey (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-salary-b...) as examples.

Any more insight into blockchain stuff? It was my (admittedly basic) understanding that most of the money to be made there was from getting some initial supply or speculative price increases.

I wasnt talking about investing, I was refering to salaries. writing contracts and definitely auditing, which is basically cyber applied to crypto. and then there's all layer 2 solutions and products on top/side of Blockchain.

I think highest here means highest salary floor for the job, not the ceiling. I think it was at one point, at least according to my recruiters who want me to do DevOps.

I agree. I dont remember it ever being the highest paying.

Unfortunately, Stack Overflow decided to use Survey Monkey to store their old survey results so I could only find an easily accessible one as far back as 2015 (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015#work-complang) but even in that one, it notes that niche areas and cloud computing pay well. Cloud computing specifically was said to pay 126% above average. Just wanted to prove I’m not failing sanity check yet.

Ah, I guess that makes sense when it was still niche. It looks like the others above it are mostly big data and ML related.

That makes a lot of sense: niche areas in general pay higher so it’s not anything about cloud architecture or devops but rather when it was still niche that made it lucrative. I don’t think it’s anywhere niche anymore so I would assume the salaries will gradually lower but then again who knows, it’s hard to lower salaries that have been high previously.

It's likely they just haven't paid raises or made cost of living adjustments. Even with low inflation, a lack of COL adjustment would be substantial over 5 years.

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