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.