An org of a few hundred people at a big tech company many only have a couple of Individual Contributors making this much money.
I know it's unbelievable for those not in one of these companies, but this data is accurate: https://www.levels.fyi
but they are extremely rare
I make over $1m as a SWE. “Senior Staff” or “Level 7” role at a big tech company everyone knows.
I mostly write code! I am way faster than most others here, and I have encouraged and mentored the people on my team to be similarly efficient.
I also help decide technical direction but it’s far from the “architecture astronaut” stereotype that writes no code.
It’s an infra team so no significant influence on product direction, other than considering our frameworks and tools products. I do consider them in that way, but it’s still a big difference from being involved in the direction of the external product.
Timing gets a 10/10 for my $750k year at staff level though.
What were the main changes you introduced/points you mentored them on to get their productivity to also be similarly efficient?
I see people on other teams that seem to be stuck for days sometimes, on a really basic error that they haven’t really tried to debug at all. Seriously, just read the error message or dig into the code!
My team also has a strong culture of just pushing code changes. This is including tons of deletions and simplifications, it’s not just writing a million lines of code.
It’s also a very senior team, so I can’t take credit for everyone’s growth from junior engineers. Another part of it is creating an environment that productive senior coders want to join, so that they can avoid process-heavy teams and get stuff done.
There is an extreme level of trust on the team because everyone is senior and frankly extremely good at their job, which allows us to be even more productive.
With all due respect, you may have learned the wrong lesson — or missed some important context — and the above is a false dichotomy. Working code isn't just table stakes; it is virtually impossible to "grow harmonious systems" if you don't have solid working code, because without solid working code you cannot grow the system reliably.
The other thing to note is that just because someone makes a lot of money doesn't necessarily mean that they are good at their job, or that they are a good team player, or that the way they operate and the context they operate in applies to you. I know consultants who pull in a million or more every year, and you know how they do it? They write absolute shit software that, while fulfilling the contract requirements, ends up hamstringing the client down the line. Sometimes prioritizing short-term gains might be acceptable or even necessary (e.g. the auditor asks you to compile data from a bunch of sources and you need to do it fast), but for projects with longer life spans one should definitely not blindly "typey typey type".
I’d go further and say that in big tech, well factored well tested code is table stakes and the ability to produce it quickly is assumed. Junior engineers have to prove that to get their first promotion.
If that’s all they show, it will be their last promotion, and that’s perfectly fine too.
I grew up poor though and teaching myself coding moved be to earn more then I thought I'd ever earn without a college degree.
I knew about for loops almost a decade before I decided web dev would be my career, not just my hobby.
it's insane that you could get hired and not know how they work.
linked lists, sure. I still don't fully understand those lol, I was going for an associate's and that was in my c++ class but I've mostly only touched PHP, python, ruby, JavaScript... playing around with go and rust some as well, but I've never had to really think about linked lists, loops on the other hand is a daily thing.
hell, not knowing loops is like not knowing how to increment, like seriously, his to add 1 to an int.
Smh....
Even not-so-great-sounding contracts pay 50-65/hr, might be a confidence boost. Level up your skills on udemy, if necessary (wait for courses to be 80% off or whatever, happens regularly).
Could also go corporate at a non-tech for low stress and a decent salary.
I'm super obsessed lately w/ AI, on youtube, github, HN, reddit, etc... and working on actually building a clone of myself to do the mundane parts I don't like to do... hehe... this is kind of a green field, and the opportunities are huge, might be the last dev jobs when AGI hits -- training custom AGI's...
I've been watching the AI hype (again) and it's completely going over my head, I really really don't get it - I doubt {x}GPT would be able to analyze hundreds of thousands of project code across a big system (multiple languages, multiple services, interconnectedness of everything) and tell me what to do, even in the case I would want to paste in everything proprietary to a 3rd party service which I really don't.
Maybe it just works for a subset of programming, but then again I don't really see how it differs to reading docs for generating boilerplate or whatever it's useful for in greenfield projects. I was also not really impressed by it generating improvements to code when you ask it the right questions since that's the hard part of the job, not typing out the code.
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and dumb.
Currently, the Language Models (GPT or GithubCopilot) are mostly good as ... copilots. You bounce off ideas off them or use them to kickstart something you want to do. It's great for junior devs (me!) but it still cannot do big context or cognition (what you describe), that part will be done by humans for quite a while.
I mentioned that an approach would be a lot of work. His response:
“It’s just typing. Typey typey type (makes fingers on keyboard gesture).” Absolute lightbulb moment for me.
To become a senior engineer is to realize that the code writing part is inconsequential as long as there are no technical unknowns in the work.
It’s freed me to try out huge sweeping changes just for fun and generally detach from my code. Sometimes I delete large, intricate changes so quickly and ruthlessly that my colleagues have to ask me to reopen them.
We aren’t paid to write working code. We are paid to grow harmonious systems. Working code is table stakes.