You forget: Everyone on HN makes $300k, drives a Porsche and has a supermodel as a significant other. I’d regard the self-reported anecdotes as outliers. $300k (total including equity) is at least one, possibly two standard deviations above the mean for software professionals. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and work at one of these ‘top’ places and don’t make anything even close to that. These threads are always good for a morning laugh though.

this makes me sad... On paper i make 90k, but haven't been paid in > a month because of cashflow (dev firm with one major client (MLM Company) who's not paying recently and not happy).

Before that most I've made is 65k.. as a jr/intermediate web dev.

The rest of my company quit, because of the pay issues, so I'm now the sole dev trying to pull us back up from the void, as a bonus now I'm a partner and President of Software Development... with 10% equity should we succeed.

I'm always 'planning' on groking ai/ml but I never did algebra 2 or calculus, so I've got some math I need to brush up on before I get there.

Before I get there i'll probably have my own tech agency/consulting firm and just go the entrepreneur route, rather than become a level 10 developer working on ai, but I can always dream right?

Cost of living mustn't be too high where you're at or I wouldn't imagine you'd be able to make ends meet with the savings that $65K would afford. I hope the absent payroll doesn't last long for you. One has to wonder what your hours are if 'the rest' of your company quit. Good luck.

Lately it's about 12 hours a day... till I get us to launch day on the clients app. Then we should get all back-pay they're withholding...I can burn both company/client to the ground, if I'm not paid eventually, and I'll pull the nuclear option if I have to.

Hopefully after launch we can afford at least 2-3 more devs, as pres. of software, I'm planning on making us be more 'lean' and spend less money. We got rid of the office/went remote for one thing. We'll focus more on full-stack devs instead of having frontend/backend people who would sometimes sit around and wait for the other team to finish something that was blocking them... working the back/frontend of the stack can alleviate those bottlenecks some.

Lol, I know.

Amazon is a huge exception. You do well at Amazon when the stock price explodes upward and the equity value grows more than your total salary, because Amazon cuts salary and equity refreshes to cancel out stock growth as much as possible. Amazon stock price had been exploding updward on average for the past decade though.

Ignoring stock appreciation Sr. SDEs at Amazon have a total comp target of ~$250k-$350k. Same for L6 SDMs. It’s definitely “standard” for some levels/job families.

May I ask what's SDM?

Right now it's happening a lot actually, because of stock growth. There are a mountain of people making over $300k whose total comp should be lower.

It depends on position. Total compensations for AI positions in top tier technology firms are well beyond $1M mark, some go as high as $3M annually.

talk about an edge case. top of the top of the top.

What is the job title for one of these positions? Background required? What is the daily work like?

I donno. Research Scientist/Machine Learning Researcher?

They're probably tasked with analyzing data and create AI models to assist AI-assisted product features / apis, etc.

How many people are making 3M?

I think a PhD is compulsory at that level

Do you have data/sources?