I'm with you there. The chances of self-taught web monkeys in companies that are loss leaders making a multiple of the salary of PhD level automotive software engineers in established companies with profits in the hundreds of millions to billions range are pretty slim, so I think we can just write this off as mostly fantasy.
In my experience, this is exactly the type of thing that PhDs generally don't know, and are often no longer curious enough to learn.
Whenever I am a hiring manager, I am pretty openly biased against hiring PhDs. They definitely start at a disadvantage compared to a highschool dropout in a hiring interview with me.
I sincerely hope whatever fool placed you in charge of hiring learns of this fact, and soon.
Someone who knows what they're doing, presumably.
Being a PhD student myself, I am of course biased on this. But it's frustrating to be generalized as an out-of-touch ivory tower type when that is simply not the case.
* Of course you can. But should you?
After having interviewed thousands of candidates over 15 years, if I see a tilde in your URL on your resume, I'm immediately a little bit less interested.
If we take the $300K+ figure as an outlier, what I see are pretty much peaks at around where I get LinkedIn spam telling me I can make $x. [Edit: to clarify, by "peak", I am referring to peaks if you were to plot the responses in a histogram, not a dollar amount.] I'm going to guess which peak someone is likely to fall in varies with factors like years of experience, when you entered the workforce, how often you changed jobs, luck or whatever. Then I see a significant amount making more and a significant amount making less. I don't think that's all that unbelievable. I don't think it makes sense to overemphasize that the poll is informal and not scientific - the poll still tells you something, even if not really that much, so why dismiss the messenger?
This reminds me of when I lived in Seattle, worked for MSFT and used to read "Mini Microsoft" threads around bonus/promo time. People would post level/base/bonus and how they were evaluated. That too was unscientific, but the company was pretty standardized around titles and how well you could do at bonus time, so it didn't take much to figure out that most of the data was probably accurate - and seeing that, even if it was totally unscientific, served as a reminder of how the place worked and where you fit into it. But then you got a lot of commenters who I think were bitter, jealous, or in denial that it was possible that the guy down the hall was doing better than them. So in a reactionary fashion, they start attacking the other posters, calling them liars, non-employees, whatever.
Edit: it occurred to me that I left the definition of "peak" unspecified. By peak I mean amounts with the largest amount of respondents, not the highest dollar amount.
It's not about how you learned it, it's what you know and what you can do. Some of the best programmers I know were self-taught. They keep learning and getting better everyday, and that pays off. It seems silly to write them off based on how they learned.
an oracle DBA/engineer with 10 years of experience can easily clear a quarter million a year.
same with SAP or anyone who has done large Microsoft installations / integrations.
your ego is not allowing you to believe that people make this much money because it means you have somehow been unable to achieve that level of financial success despise your (probably pretty good) tech skills. it pins the blame on you, and your ego can't accept that. it just can't. it would rather deny reality than hurt itself.
just because you don't believe it doesn't mean it's not true.
the main difference between people like that, and people like you, is they know what they're worth, and have the balls to tell someone insulting them with low paying work to fuck off in exactly as many words.
I don't buy "easily" for a second. "Often" - yes.
Just remember how the fallout from the last bubble (which included inflated salaries) affected real industries with hard working real people having real families that did not have anything to do with the ridiculous entitlement and greediness of the entrepreneurial culture. They are the ones that ultimately pay for folks like you. If you are not creating sustainable revenue with your line of work but rely on bean counter tricks you are dead weight in terms of economic value, regardless of your nominal salary.