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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty easy to work for FAANG and make ~$500k. It's less easy to do it for yourself (with the same amount of hours).

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I'm sorry but the idea that it's "pretty easy" to make 10x the median personal income in the US by just working for FAANG is just plain idiotic. Even just among software developers, most make $120k or less. You're in the top 10% of software developers if you make over $170k. Even at FAANG, for example Google, you're going to be L6/L7 before you hit $500k TC. I don't know anyone serious who would say that getting to L7 at Google is "pretty easy," certainly nobody who's done it.

There's plenty of people making $500k at L5 level...

>plenty

dozens of us!

You gave me some real medical vibes here. "Its rare", "like 1/10 rare or like 1/10000 rare?"

plenty? Like 1000, or like 100,000?

Maybe, if you're on the tail end of a particularly well-timed stock grant and you have a really crazy definition of "plenty." But Levels puts recent L5 offers much closer to $350k, which to be clear is still more than a lot of physicians and most lawyers make.

Google is not the only high paying company. Some companies are paying a lot more for equivalent levels.

You said FAANG, so I picked the one that has the reputation for best work-to-pay ratio. Rather than nitpicking specifics perhaps try to justify that it's "pretty easy" to make half a million dollars a year typing JavaScript into a computer.

>You're in the top 10% of software developers if you make over $170k.

Mind boggling. You wonder how much value they are creating. Software scales so easily.

Quite a bit I'm sure, but I'm sure there are a lot of developers making less than that barely breaking even on the "providing value" front. We don't talk about it here often but a lot of developers are pretty bad at what they do.

Unfortunately I've seen these people, but I would hardly call them developers/programmers, even if their work title is that... I guess I can't be choosy with national statistics.

I'm so close to doing this though. I imagine its really hard to do this for most people, but I personally fell into a expensive niche and I knew how to program.

The corporate ladder will pay me $200k for 1M/yr(compounding) of value. I imagine I can capture more of this, and potentially have employees.

I never thought I'd do this, I thought I'd be a desk drone forever, but with every project, I stare at the numbers and realize its possible. (The last time I did this, my wife started a 6 figure company, where her non-mathy friends thought it was going to be impossible)

Wish me luck on marketing, hopefully the thought of a compounding 1M/yr for a company sells itself.

Everyone wants to do that though. So you there’s going to be stiff competition on the ladder.

Some people are energized by that. I find it exhausting and a waste of life.

“Pretty easy” lol - could you be any more out-of-touch?

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