Most people who are "exceptional at what they do" are putzing around at a corporation making a competitive, maybe above average salary. They are not on track to retire at 40.
I've also noticed that it's always people with money who say, "don't be motivated only by money". Easy to say. It's called "compensation" because it exists to compensate you for doing something you otherwise wouldn't be doing. Plenty of successful people are motivated by money, and there is nothing shameful about it.
Read Peter Thiel's Zero to One. He talks about competition vs. monopoly. You want to do things that other people aren't doing. He talks about the Harvard MBA grads who chase the last bubble, i.e. getting your timing exactly wrong.
People don't get rich by doing things other people told them to. And people don't get rich by doing "prestigious" things either. Read the parts here about prestige -- it's dead on:
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
(BTW this is also coming from someone who "got lucky" -- can retire in my 30's but never thought about money.)
I think of it this way: Suppose you don't have exceptional abilities. If you do what is prestigious, what "seems" like it will get you rich, what other people tell you to do -- then you have roughly a 0% chance of getting rich.
If you take a slightly unusual path, enjoy it, and get the flywheel/positive feedback loop going, you have maybe a 1-3% chance of getting rich.
So if you want to increase your chances of getting rich, I would do something that others aren't, and do it to the point past where others would give up, because it's not making them any money.
The thread is over if you want a repeatable way to get rich. There is something analogous to the "no arbitrage" principle for personal income. If there were an easy way to get rich, someone smarter/earlier/luckier than you has already taken it, and they didn't tell you about it until afterward. You have to find your own way.
Probably not repeatable ways to get extremely rich.
This post from Cal Newport elaborates further[1]. I highly recommend his book So Good They Can't Ignore You.
[1]http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/01/23/beyond-passion-the-sci...
That would have ruled out Google (AltaVista) and Facebook (MySpace).
Thiel's premise is to be the last search engine, the last social network, etc. It's not: don't enter competitive fields; it's: compete, best the competition, and become a monopoly. There's no such thing as avoiding competition, there is no scenario under which Google was going to not have to compete, and have the entire market handed to them. The question is: can you acquire market dominance or not?
If Google had wanted to compete, it would have gone for Yahoo, and become a portal, and tried to maximize user time on the site. The conventional wisdom was that Yahoo was far more worthy of competition than AltaVista. AltaVista wasn't even a company; it was almost shut down by its parent company IIRC. And it didn't make any money. Nobody wanted to compete with AltaVista. Search was viewed as a feature, not a company.
Facebook also avoided competition in its early years by being closed to the public and signing up one college at a time. They formed monopolies on social networks within specific colleges, and leveraged that position to expand to the rest of the world.
The idea is not to compete "head on". Don't just try to do same thing, but better. Do something different. It's hard to imagine what the world was like before Google or Facebook, but they were both doing something radically different early in their lives.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l...
A more useful answer would be something along the lines of: "Get N years of domain experience in X technology at one of A, B, or C firms, and learn sales."
There are thousands and thousands of very successful businesses that mimic other businesses. Burger chains are a trivial example.
If you know a dozen people making 500k, it doesn't seem that uncommon to make 500k.
And yet 40% of Americans earn under 20k.
40%! http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2012
Lots of developer salaries are around 60k, some lower, some higher, almost none exceed 100k if you actually look into percentages.
HN is a strange echo chamber with regards to money, it feels like everyone is making a killing, and really, almost no one is.
I work for small tech companies (generally under 50 devs) though. I can believe it's more common in big tech companies, where I just don't know.
Why do you thing "dev big corps" are better? What does that mean to you? I think of Microsoft, Google, IBM, Apple, but even after you get in there moving up to exceptional in a room of exceptional people is even a more meteoric task.
That makes makes for a good living with many luxuries Germany standard's but those guys are the ones who have to dance in front of the local CEO every week and can't enjoy weekends and work in the afternoon. They can afford sometimes low level luxury cars but for sure they can't stop working and just retire.
For them work developing or implement something is a hobby they can do after a whole day full of meetings.
Not a dream dev life, not a way to become actually rich. And I'd add: not a way to enjoy life (if you hate meetings and empty technical discussions which are not about the technical topic but about a political reason which usually sucks).
Then I switched to management path, I found out that although I do only a very limited amount of coding at work right now, I'm enjoying it much more. As an added benefit, I am not mentally tired anymore when I come back home, since at work I only do blah-blah social, blah-blah report, blah-blah management. This leaves me with enough time and energy in the evening to work on really interesting projects for an excellent hourly rate, or on my own hobby stuff. The drawback? I don't watch TV anymore.
As someone else who works with people with self-proclaimed great ideas but are strangely reluctant to put any of these ideas on paper, it's comforting to know there are others out there who have to work amongst such nonsense.
Edit: I'm curious....do you find now that you've made the move to management, have you had to adopt this same "less than honest" culture in order to be accepted within the middle management ranks?
That's the reason. Europe is not really the place for making a fortune. It has the "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" mindset, which leads to the fact that starting salaries for software devs (even after a PhD, as in my case), in the country where that motto is official, are within a standard deviation from bus drivers. Magnitude of this varies, but unless you're a no-life breathing for the bonus in a hedge fund, you're not going to earn 10x.
BTW, typically you don't need an accident to know what others are earning. I easily got samples of different pay grades, in different companies in two European countries, just by asking them directly. People are surprisingly open about that.
As to why big dev corps are better he didn't give any reasons for his belief, no examples. Person y makes $1 million a year at company x, but they aquihired their startup to get there. If I started at big dev corp as a senior developer and made $100k, what path does it take to get $600k, which company offers those incentives? I really just want some more detail.
For Q2, I "think" he's saying that CorpDev > StartupDev in terms of expected wealth creation. In your example, you don't appear to be accounting for the volatility of your future CF's of $1M (StartupDev) and $100K (CorpDev) figures. Startups are risky bets compared to stable increases with CorpDev.
If it's in the form of options, you'll forgive me if I treat that as pretend money until it's transformed into real wealth.
And you're getting, on average, what, 400-500k a year in RSUs vesting?
Am I wrong is that basically bonkers as far as compensation goes? That feels at least a few standard deviations outside the mean... Which is great for you, and congratulations!
But "win the lottery" doesn't make for very compelling early retirement advice. :)
I've significantly increased my salary, job happiness, and working conditions by actively trying to shape my life and my job(Changing jobs as necessary). I've significantly cut down expenses. Resulting in me being fairly well off.
Being fairly passive about may work, or may not work. I know plenty of brilliant people who love their work but get paid terribly for it.
My strategy is actually fairly reproducible, instead of relying on luck.
I've also found that all else being equal(same industry etc) salary is the number 1 indicator of respect on the job.
I think you are a little dismissive of the value of tech in start-ups though. Start-ups will typically need both better tech and better distribution to displace an incumbent. In my experience, the technology side of this is especially critical. Consumer start-ups, for example, often don't have sales teams at all.
That said, budgetary constraints and optimism towards equity grants keep salaries well below 600k at start-ups :)
I disagree. These days the founders are devs more and more often. However, usually you have to get out of your comfort zone and do also other than dev work in a startup. Meaning also learning the business stuff. It isn't rocket science, but for many devs it can be quite uncomfortable.
Personally I am a big corp dev and making >600k/year on track to retire at 40.
But you do not get there by trying for the salary. Try to be good, no exceptional, at what you do. Become valuable and you will be paid. But your motivation should be your craft and not money.
I believe the same applies for startup founders too. As a dev in startup land you are at a disadvantage though - the fail or rise of the company is much more about sales and biz than tech.
I think as a dev big corps are the way better bet. Not much to loose, but possibly high payout. Startups very rarely pay out for devs.