Brimming with arrogance and a complete lack of self awareness. There are a lot of programmers in the top 25% that are willing to work for a lot less than 1 million a year. Why would anyone hire this guy who has no social skills, is arrogant and expects to be paid more than everyone else who brings the same value as him? There isn't some magic set of decisions you can make which will circumvent the rules of supply and demand, and if there is I don't think you're going to find it in an Ask HN post.

> Why would anyone hire this guy who has no social skills, is arrogant and expects to be paid more than everyone else who brings the same value as him?

I think OP is asking how to add enough value as a top 25% programmer to justify getting paid this amount. That strikes me as a very fair question.

OP isn't quite asking that imo. If you want to add enough value to justify that salary there's an obvious answer: get better at your job. I.e. don't be in the top 25% of programmers, be in the top 1% or .1%. If OP was asking how do I get good enough at programming to justify this high of a salary then that would be a fair question. If you're asking how do I get more money without getting better at my core competency then you're essentially asking "how do I beat the system," which isn't a particularly fair question at all.

I guess I'm just not convinced that going from a 25% programmer to a top 0.1% programmer is an efficient way of making $1 million per year.

I think you are far better off working on your social and business skills.

Maybe that's "beating the system", but an incredible amount of money has been made by people whose technical abilities did not go beyond mediocre PHP skills.

Were those people who made incredible amounts of money without technical abilities beyond mediocre PHP skills making their money as salaried software engineers? OP specifically asked about making a $1MM/year while still working as a programmer without social skills.

If you shoot for 1M+, you may gather enough good advice and land up around 500-600K. Not a bad outcome I'd say.

It's real talk partly fueled by the anonymity HN offers. Some people, like me, may find themselves wanting to maximize their pay. Period. I don't believe people making this money are one-in-a-kind super geniuses, our system doesn't optimize for that. They are people who made a series of decisions, I want to know what they could be.

Why? Do you think it will make you happy? I used to think money would at least make life easier, but past a certain point (and that point is vastly less than $1m/year), it really doesn't - you just end up spending it on stupid and pointlessly expensive things that mean you have to make more of it in order to be where you were before.

And when you look at the really rich people, like Zuckerberg, Buffett, or Gates, what do they do with their money? Why, they give it away.

This perspective is common amongst people who are making "enough".

But most people in the world don't. Enough with the moralizing.

Your perspective is odd and not based on evidence. Happiness does not scale linearly in relation to earnings. It tops out around £40k in the UK, if I remember the stat correctly.

Of course, there are outliers, people whose happiness does scale linearly with their earnings. More importantly, I feel, is the vertigo associated with income, the fear and worry of taking a cut in earnings. Lifestyle expands to fit income.

It does not seem that you have considered the why, only the what. Why do you want $1m? Several others have raised this question here. You will be far, far more satisfied if you spend a time considering this in detail.

Seems to me like you're attributing motives to zump that you have no place doing.

Maybe zump is motivated by generosity. Maybe zump does have plans to share the riches.

You're just guessing. Don't judge.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They give it away while still keeping millions/billions for themselves. Money is the worst if you give your life for it, but otherwise it's pretty good.

You can easily see what decisions highly successful individuals have made. Executing them doesn't guarantee success. The decisions are a byproduct of a more important abstraction, which is just a mindset.

Be persistent, work exceptionally hard, and think very big.

Well, "real talk" doesn't contradict "full of arrogance". In my opinion, maximizing pay just for the sake of accumulating/spending a lot of money is quite unsympathetic, and indeed to some extend arrogant. Unless of course you plan to make a positive impact on others or our planet with that money, but to me your posts don't make that impression.

> Unless of course you plan to make a positive impact on others or our planet with that money, but to me your posts don't make that impression.

I consider this a non-sequitur. Making a lot of money is considered the primary goal in our capitalist society and the sheer mechanics of our economy would guarantee it to be a net positive in all but 99% of cases (i.e burning the pile of money).

> Making a lot of money is considered the primary goal in our capitalist society

It might be the goal of people lacking empathy and people who think happiness comes with money, which is true only up to an amount far below 1M. Unless, again, the money is meant to be given to others. I am not sure what you mean by considering my argument a non-sequitur, could you elaborate?

> the sheer mechanics of our economy would guarantee it to be a net positive

By "Making a positive impact on others" I didn't mean making a positive impact on the economy. I meant helping actual problems like hunger, diseases and pollution.

> I am not sure what you mean by considering my argument a non-sequitur, could you elaborate?

It shouldn't matter what I do with the money. I don't even have it. The larger point I disagree with is that it's a losing battle to somehow tune their career to fix all the ills of the world, it's better to make as much money as possible to hope that our economy will efficiently distribute the resources for the greater good.

> it's better to make as much money as possible to hope that our economy will efficiently distribute the resources for the greater good.

This is inaccurate on several levels.

Trickle-down capitalism does not work well. Current mechanisms ensure that an increasingly elite few own the vast majority of resources and means of controlling those resources.

Making a ton of cash personally does not equate with distributing wealth. Taxes and the tax system are poorly organised for this purpose.

If you are serious that you want to work hard in in order to benefit society then perhaps consider health care, politics, farming, irrigation, renewable energy, or even space travel. You can be an engineer in these fields. Don't kid yourself that simply by becoming rich personally that you are a benefit to larger society. The evidence indicates quite the opposite.

I always see a post like this questioning a posters character in various random posts, and it bugs me to no end.

1) it's not relevant 2) why bother judging?