I did a back of the napkin estimate before from all of the sources I could find and the best numbers I could find was that the top paying tech companies employ around 10% of all developers in the US.

On the other hand, the average CRUD developer in any major city in the US can make $140K-$170K within seven years of graduating with strategic job hopping

They specifically select against folks like me (on multiple dimensions) so 0 * any-percentage still equals nada. I might be able to swing the second one when the market improves.

I myself didn’t get in through the front door. I got in via the consulting division at AWS (Professional Services). Yes it was a full time direct hire under Amazons usual 4 year offer with base + large signing bonus + RSUs. I am no longer there.

There are all sorts of non tech white collar jobs at all of the BigTech companies that pay top of market. My best friend was hired in the finance department at Amazon Retail. He is now a director at a smaller place and is just now matching the comp of an L6 at Amazon five years later.

There is a better than 50% chance I could get into Google (GCP) doing similar work if I put in the work and learned and could speak about the GCP equivalent of the AWS tech that I know well and where I lead large implementations.

But they only do hybrid and I have no desire to work in an office.

Warning, just kind of rat-holing on terminology a little. You've used the phrase "can make" twice now. I've always found that way of expressing it kind of weasel-y. Yes, a software developer "can make" $140-170K, by the definition of "can" meaning a non-zero possibility. A new grad "can make" $100K+. A senior software engineer "can make" $1M/yr. All these things are true. I "can win" the lottery, too, and my kid "can be" president of the USA one day. Also technically true. It's more interesting to talk about typical cases, rather than best-case aspirational ones, which I see you are doing in other parts of the thread (great!). I think HN very often mistakes the best case for the typical case, especially when we talk about salaries.

Even using typical case, salary means and medians don't tell the whole story, as the distributions can be wild.

I posted sources at salary.com where you can filter by city and is more applicable to most developers than levels.fyi. I also mentioned what non tech companies are paying like Coke, Delta, Home Depot , etc in non tech hubs.

Median is not “best case”. I’m also well aware of the bi modal distribution of comp in the industry where a “senior” enterprise dev tops out at around what an entry level developer makes at BigTech.

Before the current shit show of the last couple of years in the industry, as a senior enterprise CRUD developer, I could throw my resume in the air and get a “full stack developer” job in Atlanta making $150k within a couple of weeks. This was the norm in Atlanta.

I’ve moved on since then. But the last time I was looking last year, my old recruiters were still saying if I lived in Atlanta I could make around that as just a C# developer. None of those jobs required any more than 5-7 years of experience.

“Enterprise CRUD developer” was my plan B.

I’m probably one of the few people commenting here who has been in both worlds recently and now purposefully on the tip top end of “enterprise” dev and still on the low end of BigTech.

Making $140K to $170k as a senior CRUD/franework enterprise “full stack developer” is the norm. I’ve moved to strategic cloud consulting now making more.