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Comment by starmole | Hacker News Reader

It really depends on skill and motivation. If your motivation is only money you are unlikely to succeed.

Personally I am a big corp dev and making >600k/year on track to retire at 40.

But you do not get there by trying for the salary. Try to be good, no exceptional, at what you do. Become valuable and you will be paid. But your motivation should be your craft and not money.

I believe the same applies for startup founders too. As a dev in startup land you are at a disadvantage though - the fail or rise of the company is much more about sales and biz than tech.

I think as a dev big corps are the way better bet. Not much to loose, but possibly high payout. Startups very rarely pay out for devs.

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If what you say is true about your own situation, you must realize that you are an extreme outlier, and no general advice you give is going to allow someone to repeat your immense luck. "Be valuable and you will be paid" sounds like vague happy-talk, not concrete, repeatable steps that one can put into practice and replicate your success.

Most people who are "exceptional at what they do" are putzing around at a corporation making a competitive, maybe above average salary. They are not on track to retire at 40.

I've also noticed that it's always people with money who say, "don't be motivated only by money". Easy to say. It's called "compensation" because it exists to compensate you for doing something you otherwise wouldn't be doing. Plenty of successful people are motivated by money, and there is nothing shameful about it.

No, being motivated by money is likely to make you less wealthy, because it leads you to the same behaviors as other people seeking money. You are then competing with them, which lessens your likelihood of success.

Read Peter Thiel's Zero to One. He talks about competition vs. monopoly. You want to do things that other people aren't doing. He talks about the Harvard MBA grads who chase the last bubble, i.e. getting your timing exactly wrong.

People don't get rich by doing things other people told them to. And people don't get rich by doing "prestigious" things either. Read the parts here about prestige -- it's dead on:

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

(BTW this is also coming from someone who "got lucky" -- can retire in my 30's but never thought about money.)

The problem with the simplistic "do what you love, love what you do" advice is that it is not reliable or repeatable. I can point to tons of people who love what they do and are still somewhere between solidly middle class and struggling to get by.

You're right that the "do what you love" advice is crap. However, I think -- and as Chubot points out -- you have to also avoid the same behaviors as others and offer something "rare and valuable" if you desire money. For those people that you can point to, do they offer the latter and do they have a good sense of when to cash in?

This post from Cal Newport elaborates further[1]. I highly recommend his book So Good They Can't Ignore You.

[1]http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/01/23/beyond-passion-the-sci...

Of course it's not repeatable. There's no repeatable way to get rich quick.

I think of it this way: Suppose you don't have exceptional abilities. If you do what is prestigious, what "seems" like it will get you rich, what other people tell you to do -- then you have roughly a 0% chance of getting rich.

If you take a slightly unusual path, enjoy it, and get the flywheel/positive feedback loop going, you have maybe a 1-3% chance of getting rich.

So if you want to increase your chances of getting rich, I would do something that others aren't, and do it to the point past where others would give up, because it's not making them any money.

The thread is over if you want a repeatable way to get rich. There is something analogous to the "no arbitrage" principle for personal income. If there were an easy way to get rich, someone smarter/earlier/luckier than you has already taken it, and they didn't tell you about it until afterward. You have to find your own way.

Depends what you want. There are repeatable ways to get richer.

Probably not repeatable ways to get extremely rich.

Repeatable way to get richer => "normal job" :)

Thiel's premise is not to do things other people aren't doing.

That would have ruled out Google (AltaVista) and Facebook (MySpace).

Thiel's premise is to be the last search engine, the last social network, etc. It's not: don't enter competitive fields; it's: compete, best the competition, and become a monopoly. There's no such thing as avoiding competition, there is no scenario under which Google was going to not have to compete, and have the entire market handed to them. The question is: can you acquire market dominance or not?

His premise is: "What valuable company is nobody building?" [1] That sounds like avoiding competition to me.

If Google had wanted to compete, it would have gone for Yahoo, and become a portal, and tried to maximize user time on the site. The conventional wisdom was that Yahoo was far more worthy of competition than AltaVista. AltaVista wasn't even a company; it was almost shut down by its parent company IIRC. And it didn't make any money. Nobody wanted to compete with AltaVista. Search was viewed as a feature, not a company.

Facebook also avoided competition in its early years by being closed to the public and signing up one college at a time. They formed monopolies on social networks within specific colleges, and leveraged that position to expand to the rest of the world.

The idea is not to compete "head on". Don't just try to do same thing, but better. Do something different. It's hard to imagine what the world was like before Google or Facebook, but they were both doing something radically different early in their lives.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l...

I admire these guys, but the probability of getting rich by going into banking or consulting or big law, for example, is quite high compared to almost any other career.

He's not that much of an outlier as you may think, he's exceptional though to be making that kind of money and openly talking about it.

It's hard to see beyond your circle.

If you know a dozen people making 500k, it doesn't seem that uncommon to make 500k.

And yet 40% of Americans earn under 20k.

40%! http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2012

Lots of developer salaries are around 60k, some lower, some higher, almost none exceed 100k if you actually look into percentages.

HN is a strange echo chamber with regards to money, it feels like everyone is making a killing, and really, almost no one is.

I've heard this said. However, I'm pretty sure most of the companies I've worked for have nobody in this category, at least among developers.

I work for small tech companies (generally under 50 devs) though. I can believe it's more common in big tech companies, where I just don't know.

I totally see your point about the advice being douchey. But in this case it was somebody specifically asking for how to make the most money as a dev. Not a struggling single mom making ends meet. In his context I think I made sense. But I would never tell that to somebody trying to get by.

My issue is not that it's "douchey". It's that it's not repeatable. I can change my mind and go into work tomorrow not motivated by money but that alone will not change my career path.

A more useful answer would be something along the lines of: "Get N years of domain experience in X technology at one of A, B, or C firms, and learn sales."

I strongly disagree with the repeatable idea. Any progress comes from people NOT repeating things. Computers are good for repeatable stuff. Repeatable means institutional. It is the enemy of progress.

Progress != profit, for any value of "progress".

There are thousands and thousands of very successful businesses that mimic other businesses. Burger chains are a trivial example.

Yet, very successful burger chains aren't selling "burgers," just like Starbucks isn't just selling "coffee." If that were the case, every business would make average burgers.

Why does money motivation reduce your chances? I don't think being exceptional is enough, there are several open source projects created and maintained by exceptional devs, but they don't make >600k/year. Being exceptional working at anything but the right company won't make you money.

Why do you thing "dev big corps" are better? What does that mean to you? I think of Microsoft, Google, IBM, Apple, but even after you get in there moving up to exceptional in a room of exceptional people is even a more meteoric task.

Maybe it's late, but I thought he answered your Q1 and Q2.

It is late, I can't think super clear either, but I just read that he says money should not be the focus, but doesn't address why that is an issue.

As to why big dev corps are better he didn't give any reasons for his belief, no examples. Person y makes $1 million a year at company x, but they aquihired their startup to get there. If I started at big dev corp as a senior developer and made $100k, what path does it take to get $600k, which company offers those incentives? I really just want some more detail.

For Q1, he said that money shouldn't be the ONLY focus.

For Q2, I "think" he's saying that CorpDev > StartupDev in terms of expected wealth creation. In your example, you don't appear to be accounting for the volatility of your future CF's of $1M (StartupDev) and $100K (CorpDev) figures. Startups are risky bets compared to stable increases with CorpDev.

100% agreed.

I agree with you. I work in one of those which you mentioned in Germany, and I've less than 3 years experience. By accident I saw the payroll of a top-dev (top engineer actually), and it is "just the double" of mine.

That makes makes for a good living with many luxuries Germany standard's but those guys are the ones who have to dance in front of the local CEO every week and can't enjoy weekends and work in the afternoon. They can afford sometimes low level luxury cars but for sure they can't stop working and just retire.

For them work developing or implement something is a hobby they can do after a whole day full of meetings.

Not a dream dev life, not a way to become actually rich. And I'd add: not a way to enjoy life (if you hate meetings and empty technical discussions which are not about the technical topic but about a political reason which usually sucks).

Was in the same place as your top-dev. Was exhausted after a day of coding, without getting real appreciation, neither monetary, nor in terms on mindshare. I was always looked upon as an "IT guy" or "technical staff" that gets in the way of implementing great business and marketing ideas created in the heads of great minds, that were so great that it wasn't even possible to write them down accurately.

Then I switched to management path, I found out that although I do only a very limited amount of coding at work right now, I'm enjoying it much more. As an added benefit, I am not mentally tired anymore when I come back home, since at work I only do blah-blah social, blah-blah report, blah-blah management. This leaves me with enough time and energy in the evening to work on really interesting projects for an excellent hourly rate, or on my own hobby stuff. The drawback? I don't watch TV anymore.

> I was always looked upon as an "IT guy" or "technical staff" that gets in the way of implementing great business and marketing ideas created in the heads of great minds, that were so great that it wasn't even possible to write them down accurately.

As someone else who works with people with self-proclaimed great ideas but are strangely reluctant to put any of these ideas on paper, it's comforting to know there are others out there who have to work amongst such nonsense.

Edit: I'm curious....do you find now that you've made the move to management, have you had to adopt this same "less than honest" culture in order to be accepted within the middle management ranks?

> I work in one of those which you mentioned in Germany

That's the reason. Europe is not really the place for making a fortune. It has the "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" mindset, which leads to the fact that starting salaries for software devs (even after a PhD, as in my case), in the country where that motto is official, are within a standard deviation from bus drivers. Magnitude of this varies, but unless you're a no-life breathing for the bonus in a hedge fund, you're not going to earn 10x.

BTW, typically you don't need an accident to know what others are earning. I easily got samples of different pay grades, in different companies in two European countries, just by asking them directly. People are surprisingly open about that.

Is the $600k salary, bonuses, stock options or? Sounds quite incredible to me. I haven't heard from any dev making this kind of salary, not even in the big companies.

It's not unheard of for really exceptional devs at big tech companies to make a million or more.

"A million or more" in what? Base salary, salary + bonuses, or salary + handcuff compensation (e.g. options)?

That's what I'm trying to figure out. $600k salary+bonuses is C-level executive territory. The idea of an engineer making that kind of money in straight compensation sounds ludicrous to me.

If it's in the form of options, you'll forgive me if I treat that as pretend money until it's transformed into real wealth.

fintech dev on wall street / the city probably can

600k including bonuses. Vested RSU bonuses. So real cash in hand. And those usually keep replenishing over time so after an initial delay it's compensation.

Ah, so base salary plus vested options, aka handcuffs.

And you're getting, on average, what, 400-500k a year in RSUs vesting?

Am I wrong is that basically bonkers as far as compensation goes? That feels at least a few standard deviations outside the mean... Which is great for you, and congratulations!

But "win the lottery" doesn't make for very compelling early retirement advice. :)

That's alot of vested bonuses! Is this fintech?

Yes 600k is including bonuses. 600k base would really be crazy for dev.

There are people at Google making > $1M a year if you include RSUs.

That is amazing. How did you work your way up to that? How old are you? AMA?

I think the number one people arnt well off is because people only dream about money, aren't actually really dedicated to working out how to get it.

I've significantly increased my salary, job happiness, and working conditions by actively trying to shape my life and my job(Changing jobs as necessary). I've significantly cut down expenses. Resulting in me being fairly well off.

Being fairly passive about may work, or may not work. I know plenty of brilliant people who love their work but get paid terribly for it.

My strategy is actually fairly reproducible, instead of relying on luck.

I've also found that all else being equal(same industry etc) salary is the number 1 indicator of respect on the job.

good point. Now tell us what is your strategy?

Well done sir.

I think you are a little dismissive of the value of tech in start-ups though. Start-ups will typically need both better tech and better distribution to displace an incumbent. In my experience, the technology side of this is especially critical. Consumer start-ups, for example, often don't have sales teams at all.

That said, budgetary constraints and optimism towards equity grants keep salaries well below 600k at start-ups :)

Startups a great! I worked in few and learned a lot. I just tried to address op's pretty direct question on how to make money as a dev. Startups are a very bad odds lottery for devs in the end. Even if you are amazing it does not make the startup fail or work. You might save it for aquihire though :)

I agree that in many startups their technological prowess plays a very large part in their success. However, most startups (as far as I am aware) do not actually "replace an incumbent". Usually it's more a case of "hey, I got this great new idea that no one has seriously approached before". They develop that idea, create a new niche-market and then get bought up by an incumbent of the main market.

> I think as a dev big corps are the way better bet. Not much to loose, but possibly high payout. Startups very rarely pay out for devs.

I disagree. These days the founders are devs more and more often. However, usually you have to get out of your comfort zone and do also other than dev work in a startup. Meaning also learning the business stuff. It isn't rocket science, but for many devs it can be quite uncomfortable.

Kind of my point. As a startup dev you have to learn biz. And a really great dev should not have to do that. It is a waste of time and talent. OP was asking how to make money as an engineer. Engineers can play the startup lottery. But they are unlikely to win it. You need a Jobs for every Woz. But as a Woz it is hard and unlikely to find a Jobs - and not get fucked over. Hence my advice.

I think you missed out on the point of compensation. Even as a first employee working at a startup, you're only expected to get 1-3% equity, but you're as you stated doing many things outside of dev work. Big Corp Devs perhaps don't have as many tangential responsibilities, but they will often start with a significantly increased base salary which can be a serious opportunity cost to consider.

I would really love to pick you brain with one or two personal questions.

No idea how to send a PM on HN. There should be an email in my profile though.

The email in the profile isn't public, you'd have to add it to the about field.

or you can ping me at GreyPhilo on reddit. Hope to chat with you :)

what do you mean by good, not exceptional...?

He is trying to make his sentence natural. As in, he is talking, and correcting himself by saying "good, hmm, uhh, no!, exceptional!"

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