I don't know whether the article is about income or wealth, but if one puts "big money" at, say, $250k of gross income, then it's clearly achievable in software. Options include a) get a job at AppAmaGooBookSoft and stay in it for 5~10 years or b) hang out your shingle as an independent consultant and charge $8k+ per week at 75% utilization.
For that matter, $8k+ per week at 50% utilization is still $165k at the same fudge factor for taxes & overhead. That's already well beyond my threshold for "I've increased this variable to the point that further increases are nice but not a primary motivator, and I'd rather that further optimization focus on quality of life as the primary variable."
The systems we create are complicated and require automation (PLCs, embedded systems, PCs) to function, so the company requires programmers. The money is fantastic for two reasons: they have a really hard time finding people and money for oil companies shoots out of the ground (most of the time).
The work is different from most systems someone would deal with at a startup. The systems range in age from new to 20 years old. Object oriented is a new and scary thing. I write and debug a lot of pascal and C. Also do a lot of sysadmin work on ancient systems, token ring networks etc.
The biggest difference however is work environment. Most rigs have an absolutely awful (think dial up) satellite internet connection, so there is no remote work. Everything gets done on site. This leads to a lot of travel, which is where you make the big money if you are willing to do it. The work environment is a lot different from a startup: Folding chairs and a table in the corner of a room if you are lucky, sitting on the floor if not. You get to see some interesting and scary parts of the world, police escorts from the airport, body guards on the way to the rig in really bad places, which can be very isolating as well as traveling for months at a time.
I would also add that the "billion dollar VC series-B startup or bust" is not the only alternative to grinding away under the yoke of someone else. If you find a nice little niche that isn't drenched with developers (non-profits, serving lawyers, etc.) - You won't be a billionaire, but you stand a much better chance of creating a $million+ sustainable product or service company in that space.
This is a very poor way of describing the risk / upside of joining a startup.
In the aggregate, the odds of any randomly selected startup may present odds similar to roulette, but practically, you have the ability to choose who you work with and which company you work on.
Given the ability to be selective, you can dramatically increase your odds of a successful outcome, assuming that you have the skill set to a) identify / evaluate market opportunity / team capabilities and b) utilize your technical ability to add significant incremental value to the company.
The early team at PayPal did not have a 1/48 chance of success; it was probably closer to 1/10.
Edit - (Not actually 1/10, but significantly higher odds than those of a startup selected at random) Odds were chosen to correspond to the given example of roulette.
In roulette, there is no competitive advantage between specific numbers or colors. In startups, that is not the case.
(1) You get the most by being a very early employee -- like #1 - #5. It's a hockey stick distribution here. The later you get in, the exponentially lower your stake will be.
(2) The most successful startups are outliers.
Getting in that early means you do not have a large team or a long track record to look at when making your decision. The big bucks will come from the coffee shop hobo or ramen-snarfing grad student outfit with 1-3 full time people (all founders), barely any capital, and no track record. People will laugh at you and they're probably right.
Probably.
But if they're wrong, you will laugh more later.
If it has success written all over it, it will look "hot" and "cool." That means there will be a ton of competition for those early positions. You will be edged out by someone with a Magna Cum Smartypants degree from an Ivy League school. It's also probably going to be so capitalized (since it looks "hot") that they'll just skimp on the equity and pay more, which invalidates the thesis here and makes it just a regular job from a purely financial risk/reward perspective. (It still might be worth taking for the experience and fun factor.)
That's why if this is the strategy you want to take you are more or less doing what seed stage angels do. You are looking for feral unicorns that poop unpolished diamonds. If everyone else thinks it's a good investment too, the market will behave "efficiently" and you will not get rich. The market doesn't "want" you or anyone else to be rich. Rich people are outliers.
Google and Facebook are great examples by the way. They both looked stupid: "another search engine?" and "so it's like MySpace and Friendster but with no capital and some Harvard dropout nozzle running it?"
Edit: the reason your equity/stake drops off exponentially the later you get in is precisely because of the stupid unicorn factor. Really early stage companies have to offer you a fatter option package because you're an idiot to work for them and they know it. There is no other way they can compete for talent. If they're successful, those options turn out to be very expensive -- they come out of the founder's equity pool.
You made my day.
Technical prowess, does not actually mean company success. Some really successful companies, have had some really bad software practices.
And companies with really good developers have failed.
Technical prowess does not mean company success, but if you are able to identify a company that with significantly higher comparative odds of success, in which your technical prowess can directly impact the success of the product, you are in a much better position to achieve a positive outcome than if you had joined a company at random where your talent didn't have significant incremental value-add.
With regard to your prowess adding significant value-add, I think it is easiest to give a counter-example / example.
SnapChat's success likely doesn't ultimately lie in their ability to create beautiful HTML5 landing pages for their app on the web, so their front-end web developers likely don't add huge incremental value.
Conversely, Google's success largely hinged on their ability to return highly relevant search results with great speed, so early developers with talents in these fields had a much larger impact on the eventual success of the company. - This is the kind of situation you should aim to find.
I might also add government, though you want to avoid lower-level contractor positions there and go for higher-end stuff or becoming a direct Federal employee. Also avoid sexy areas like space if your goal is to get rich, since these will have intense competition. This is part of why science pays so badly -- people want to do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs
> office equipment manufacturer
So, most silicon valley startups?
Startups are one of the only mechanisms doing that in our contemporary financial pyramid economy. They are one of the only true class mobility engines left.
"Yet on close inspection, the evidence suggests that the keys to success in the start-up world are not much different than those of many other elite professions. A prestigious degree, a proven track record and personal connections to power-brokers are at least as important as a great idea. Scrappy unknowns with a suitcase and a dream are the exceptions, not the rule.
...
That means the founders had held a senior position at a big technology firm, worked at a well-connected smaller one, started a successful company already, or attended one of just three universities - Stanford, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/12/us-usa-startup-con...
Class mobility at the highest echelons -- say hundred-thousandaires to millionaires or billionaires -- helps class mobility overall by introducing new ideas and by enriching people who still remember what it was like to not have near-infinite supplies of money and power.
If you have a society where the top echelons are locked down, it won't be long until this caste system trickles down to the rest of the culture.
It's not everything and class mobility at lower levels of society is probably more important, but it's not a bad thing either.
Put another way, if you can now afford to buy a brand-new Ferrari, does it matter that you had to drive a three year old Lexus to high school?
(1) Finance. They make so much "free" money that they can afford to just pay massive salaries and not blink. You just have to be okay with doing things that basically add no value to anything.
(2) As a very early employee in a hugely successful startup. But this is roulette, since most startups fail and some only succeed after so much dilution that your share ends up tiny.
(3) Working your way up to a CXO level (or near) role in a very large established company. This is hard and takes years of both work and corporate politics.
(4) There are some niches, like doing IT for oil and gas operations in remote areas, that I've heard pay very well... but these are almost like joining the army.
I'd say #1 and #4 are probably the most straightforward. If you want to pursue #2, you should approach employment with a super-early startup by thinking about it as if you are an investor. Would you take a small chunk in a seed round with this company? If not, pass, cause if you are taking a lower salary + equity you are making a seed investment.