Could you share some examples?

I'm a senior software engineer in the Bay Area and spend most of my days writing Javascript/Ruby. I don't manage anyone directly, but have technical/product leadership responsibility on my team.

My gross comp is ~$350k, 60% cash.

The 3 main learnings that I've leveraged to get that high are:

0) be the top performer on your team, no excuses

1) ask very explicitly for the things you want [0]

2) negotiate from a position of power (have a BATNA [1])

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[0] "I'd like a raise" != "I'd like my salary to be $X"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiate...

Would also be interested in some examples, just for curiosity sake. COBOL maybe? Wild guess at something specialized/scarce.

Personally, the only people I know in the 200+ club are in some form of management and rarely, if ever, code anymore. But then we are back into the anecdotal realm..

Example specialties of people I know in the $250k+ range:

* Machine learning + finance * iOS (I know several examples here) * Android * Enterprise Java * Embedded development * Specific scientific expertise (a friend is into optics and diffraction and makes $250/hour freelance, with some coding and some design)

I don't know any COBOL programmers. Or at least if I do, they're in the closet. :)

This is universally from big companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Ball Aerospace, etc.

In the Bay Area or New York?