[existencebox]

Hahaha. I'm sorry if I was unclear, the statement was _slightly_ tongue in cheek. I'm not sure I could have made it in any field other than dev and I do mostly like that I chose it. Bio-engineering maybe? PERHAPS finance, but I don't play too well in that sandbox.

The gist I was going for was more that even in a dev's greatest successes, they will likely never see most of the returns they generate for others without taking on some sort of "other" role (founder, CTO, etc), while to the other side of that coin, we do often get hit by the fallout of a failure (slipping a deadline, etc) and certainly don't get a payout that I would consider MASSIVE.

I've heard many arguments that this is aligned with the respective risk we take, but as my original statement, I'd take a hell of a lot more risk if it meant never working again a day in my life, but that's not even a choice us normal schmucks can really make :) (I'm also not convinced the risk argument is even sound, as that one MONTH's pay at a top exec salary essentially frees me from financial risk for the rest of my life, whereas I'll be working for decades even at a top eng salary to achieve the same)

[slg]

On the flip side, what percentage of people who go down the management route actually end up as CEO of a company that can pay hundreds of millions? Is that number larger than the percentage of developers who strike it big by being one of the first devs at a unicorn? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I do know that both percentages are small enough to be virtually zero in the terms of a single life. Considering that, I am happy to be doing work that I like for a wage that something like 95% of people in this country would envy.

[gregpilling]

its a choice. Create your own startup, get lucky, sell your company for big money.

Easy.

[pikzen]

Getting lucky is a one in a million occurrence. And those who do get lucky had to have at least some base funds to make their startup. So getting lucky isn't available for everyone.

Also getting lucky is on another level than Mayer who simply got a job in the early Google years and surfed on that reputation ever since.

So: Live in the right place, have money, preferrably get out of a very well known school such as Stanford or MIT, get lucky.

Yeah, that's not an option for 99.99% of people.