Build a product, cover your salary. It's not easy, but it's doable. I've done it.

There is an option to go into consulting. Outside of the top of the IC ladders at the giant tech companies, they are the highest paid ICs around.

But that keep in mind you don’t have to keep progressing your career. There are risks to not doing so, but also rewards.

I always hear about these people but I never hear about the profile of the places that hire these people to do consulting.

Since you mention "Outside of the top of the IC ladders at the giant tech companies" which is about $600k or thereabouts, I am guessing this means they are billing for about $500/hr-$600/hr? So a week's rate is roughly $20k+. What kind of place is paying software engineer contractors that much?

Some ICs at top tech companies get paid much, much more than $600k.

If you think you have a reasonable chance to become a Google Fellow or equivalent, then by all means ignore everything I’m saying here.

600k is staff level TC, not even close to fellow.

Oh really, I guess I was misinformed. Figured that was closer to 500-600. I hadn’t heard of anything well above $700k or so for positions like “Senior Staff”

Well the other piece is that after senior staff there's distinguished and principal, and then fellow.

There are somewhere around 3.5-4 million software engineers in the US. What percent would you say will make $600k TC or more this year?

I was responding directly to a comment referring to Staff Google engineers. So in response to your goalpost moving question, I guess the percent would be (total number of staff engineers or higher at Google) / (your random estimate of the total engineering population)

I’m sure we are all very impressed by your insider knowledge of the details of a tiny portion of the industry irrelevant to most engineers. For the rest of us Google Fellow or equivalent is a reasonable way to sum up the entire niche.

It's not equivalent, unless you think that getting a job at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or any other reasonably large west-coast company is a "niche" that's completely out of reach for you. "Staff" is not some unattainable level that only a few people per company are lucky enough to break into.

There’s the patio11 way of doing things which he’s written plenty about.

But there’s also the more classic knows-where-to-put-the-screw consultant. Something is broken and bleeding money and after being jerked around by underlings for a few weeks some director is desperate to fix it.

There’s are many many companies out there that can be losing tens of thousands of dollars a day or more because something isn’t working.

I wonder how many of these shops exist. And if they're mostly solo operations?

McKinsey and such, I expect.