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by hardcandy
3762 days ago
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I know of 3 SD4/principal engineers at Amazon who are making $1m/year. I believe there are only about 150-200 engineers at this level in the entire company, so it's obviously a hard position to get. Anyone with experience building out cloud infrastructure has been a hot commodity given all of the companies that are entering the market. Remember that you don't just get a great engineer but you also get the years of experience that person has gained actually building out what you yourself want them to build out for you. Some other company paid for all of the mistakes, learnings, etc. No trade secrets or confidential information but just a ton of valuable experience that the new employer benefits from day 1. |
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We all know that there are actors who make a million dollar per episode, but most of them don't.
I think that unless you are in the "I wrote the Dremel paper for Google" or "I'm Doug Cutting and I wrote Hadoop" or "I invented MapReduce" or "I created the Xen hypervisor" then don't get your hopes up for a 1 million$ package from Google/Amazon/Microsoft.
In any profession you can find top notch people who are making a million dollar annual salary. But usually it's the very top.
If there are 200 engineers at this level at Amazon, let's say there are 200 like this at Google and 200 more at Microsoft Facebook and LinkedIn, e.g. there are ~1000 engineers who make 1 million dollars salaries.
Let's say there are between 1-3 million software engineers in the US (excluding managers) - sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph..., http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers
so only 0.03 to 0.1% of Software Engineers make a million dollar salary. e.g. the 99.9 percentile or higher.
Now compare it with doctors, lawyers, brokers, and you'll see that this is nothing to be proud of.
There are about 100 actors who make more than a million dollar a year:
https://www.quora.com/How-many-actors-make-more-than-a-milli...
And about 60,000 employed actors in the US
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes272011.htm
So about 0.166% of Actors make more than a million.
More likely to make a million$ a year as an employed actor than as a software engineer? I don't know, but it's not that different.
The main difference is obviously the width and height of the pyramid...
Bottom line, with even $300K total comp, even in SF, I don't think life is too bad.
But don't get your hopes high for much more than $500K unless you are really going to cost the company a lot if you leave to the competitors, or if you move up high into management.
If you really want to make tons of money, and can sell, then move to sales, (or even presales).