Some senior engineers at big tech companies make more than a million US per year, so someone with an excellent diverse C++ skill set and an entrepreneurial bent could well make much more than that.
I’m being nit picky. But big tech isn’t THAT insane. 7 figure TC is incredibly, incredibly rare. It’s not just “senior engineer”, it’s “senior senior senior senior” or more.
Still rare, though, but the C++ market has lots of weird little very high paid niches.
I would say that C++ expertise is often actually “underpaid” compared to its level of difficult. If you’re doing OS stuff in C++ you’re working on something embedded. If you’re doing embedded, you’re probably selling hardware, which has low margins (compared to pure software plays). Meanwhile a Ruby on Rails dev who can iterate their web app quickly can start getting PMF and basically print money.
Meanwhile I've yet to see a Rails job that pays enough to be worth my while, despite Ruby being by far my favourite language.
I get to use Ruby a lot (rarely Rails; don't like the thing), but because I am typically in senior enough positions to have autonomy in what I choose for my projects - the moment a job is advertised as a Rails job, the pay is accordingly low.
Are there just tons of smaller fish paying peanuts?
But Rails does best in a chunk of what used to be the PHP market for quick and dirty websites. Once companies scale, only a relatively small portion of their dev work tends to be Rails related, and not the most interesting/best paid parts of their dev work.
The roles you can use Ruby in are wider and there is some juicier stuff there, but most of that isn't advertised as Ruby. E.g. in a lot of devops roles you may come across quite a bit of Ruby tooling.
If you think electrical engineering is underpaid, check out chemistry.
If you think chemistry is underpaid, check out biology.
But seriously, outside of quant work or certified actuaries mathematicians do not make as much as one would think.
...is this a pile of hot air? Genuine question.
My understanding is that most of these really high wages are more strategic than anything else.
If they are an IC, they probably wouldn’t be leading anything except maybe thought leadership.