Hacker News Reader

To be fair, compensation in banking is very related to performance. Investment bankers get paid on the size of their deals, traders get paid based on how much they make, money managers get paid based on how much they bring in. The majority of people get pushed out within a few years if they aren't top performers.

The key thing to realize is that value to the customer isn't part of the performance equation. It doesn't matter if a hedge fund manager is beating the market. His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on.

Which brings me to your point--it's not that pay isn't correlated with skill. It's that the skill it's universally correlated with is salesmanship.

His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on.

Indeed, and if these people are his high school friends, then the task of bringing them in the door "just got a whole lot easier"...

So going back to a parent's point, it seems being born into wealth just happens to give certain valuable, uh, "skills"...

    compensation in banking is very related to performance

The last four or five are conclusive proof that this is not even remotely true.

Those bankers that helped caused the collapse were making money hand over first for their companies, and even with the reduced profitability during the recession the banks came out way ahead.

There's a quote I can't quite place right now (maybe from a TED talk?), but a metrics-oriented guy went to one of these top salesman companies and calculated the inter-year correlation of performance bonuses. Most of the salesmen figured it would be low - it turned out to be almost exactly 0.

Bjourne -

Notice the OP mentioned "promotion, estimation, and pricing" as part of being great.

Thomas Fuchs quotes clients at $800/hr ( http://script.aculo.us/thomas/ ). Thunderbolts labs is quoting $277/hr for their consulting rates ( http://thunderboltlabs.com/ ). And these are people that publicly advertise their rates. I know several other individuals at these levels that just don't publicly advertise.

Skills in this context includes (self)promotion; it's not enough to just code. No one (usually) comes knocking on your door after a great commit. But if you put yourself out there, stand by your work, talk to lots of people and show that you're a problem solver, by all means, you can triple even quadruple your income as a developer.

Honestly, it sounds like you're a good developer, so you're probably already half way there. Put up a site that outlines your major open source commits, your ability to cut through the BS and distill the problem to it's necessities. Tell the client that you ship on time.

Your world will open up with (financial) possibilities my friend.

It's pretty clear that top preformers don't look at averages. They look at what others have done and from there figure out how to get there in a reasonable time.

A developer who makes 10x a regular developer happens often, but what they are doing is taking on a lot of the risk that companies take on and knock your salary for. Your project is 2x over budget and 4x behind schedule? Oh, that's just Software projects in corporate IT. This has nothing to do with the developer actually being better of course, but the developer willing to assume the risk that results in 10x payouts.

Instead of complaining about Stock Brokers, it might be more effective to look at what they do (transactional work) and try to figure out how to place your self in a position so that you can take advantage of transactional work.

And a minor correction, it should read: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

The only way you can claim that a developer can make 10x the regular salary, is to have that developer do something other more profitable than development and claim that that makes him or her more excellent. It's a circular argument: "you are doing something that makes lots of money, therefore what you are doing is more excellent than someone making less money." No, making money is about being good at making money. Not to perform outstanding work.

The quote is right, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is for Communism, which has a different slogan than Socialism.

"I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average."

Programmers who are making that kind of money know enough to keep it quiet.

I have never met a programmer making 10x the average salary ($500k - $1mm depending) excluding liquidity events.

That says more about who you know than the real distribution of programmer salaries. It's not common, but those kinds of compensation scales definitely exist?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828538

Here's your model programmer who makes a lot more, although you'll probably call it an unfair comparison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson

He's not trying to make a point about the justification of society's wages in general, he's describing what an individual can do, which may or may be representative of general trends. Do you deny that it's possible for an individual to reach a point where they're well-compensated for being a skilled craftsman?

You've never heard of a developer who made a mil in a liquidity event? This is Hacker News dude.

To be fair s/he did include marketing of your services among the set of things that were requisite that you be good at to pull it off.

Never did I suggest the world was fair or that trust fund babies don't have a better chance at a high income than someone born into a iron-workers family.

I was suggesting that there's good money to be made in every discipline - you may need some creativity and personality to get to that money, but no one should ever look at the field they're in and say "Oh, ho hum, I'll never be rich because of my field."

And your socialist quote was misquoted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abil...

Finally, if your open source code is good in that it is solving problems for people, then you should have a very fertile network of possible consulting clients. Those who use their open source work to feed their consultancies can make very very good money.