What the Highest-Paid Programmers Earn

I've said it before but I'll say it again: the highest paid programmers don't call themselves programmers. There are a lot of things you can do which involve slinging code that pay rather substantially more than the equivalent amount of undifferentiated code slinging.

The highest-paid programmers usually become rich via: 1) Founding a business or startup. 2) Becoming an early employee of an averagely successful startup, or a per-IPO employee of hugely successful startups (Facebook, Google). 3) Becoming an IT manager or quants/traders at IB or Hedge funds 4) Becoming world-leader in open-source technologies (e.g. Scala, Hadoop, JQuery). 5) Writing books, giving lectures: teaching others how to become great programmers.

I imagine some of the top level programmers at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc probably earn in the mid six figures.<p>But just like executive pay, there's a point where the bonuses and profit sharing make up the vast majority of your compensation. Base salary stats don't really apply then.

I think you probably have a better chance at making 1.2 million from your own company than finding a job that will pay you that much.

This omits bonuses, and other out-of your salary payments, that programmers usually take. I've heard about minimum 15% bonus at google for example. (and 15% meaning not very good performance)

The person making 1.2 million isn't just a programmer, but he/she also understands the business well. More so, he/she is an integral part of the business.

If you look at that H-1B table that was up here a while ago, there are at least 24 software engineer, analyst, programmer type entries that paid more than $500k and up to $1mil and 52 entries between $200k and 1mil. Those exclude managerial or executive job titles. Although given how many errors that table had, I don't know how accurate that information is. I'm sure there are plenty more non visa people that earn in that range or above.

Incidentally I can't say for the US but in the UK our industry pays the equivalent of $125k - $190k for security testers in the app space.<p>We (mandalorian) don't, but instead focus on more freedom and better jobs. Not hiring right now, but check back in a couple of months.

I've always felt that some people were 'coders' who given an algorithm or a task can craft an elegant piece of code which implements that algorithm tweaked in any of a number of directions (fast, robust, testable, portable, Etc.)<p>Other were 'analysts' who took problems and solved them with a combination of coding and process and perhaps hardware.<p>Then there were 'techs' who, given a set of steps, translated those steps into something a machine could consume.<p>Analysts seem to have the widest range in pay, coders are pretty bunched up around various levels of experience.

<i>...some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million per year to programmers who can code them better than anyone else.</i><p>Correction: some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million/yr to a programmer <i>who can bring them source code representing the cumulative effort of a team</i> from one of the most 'respected' firms in the industry.

Google Offers Staff Engineer $3.5 Million To Turn Down Facebook Offer<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-engineer-3-5-million-to-turn-down-facebook-offer/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-enginee...</a>