[fgandiya]

I doubt the difference would be that dramatic (see Hollywood actors and athletes). Also, what's the point of 500K if you're prohibited from working on personal projects, open source and have non-competes, no vacation out leave time and NDAs to deal with? Maybe if you're willing to deal with it for a few years so you can retire early and loaded?

[esoterica]

There are no non-competes in California, and most of the best paying tech companies have decent vacation policies (though maybe not as good as the norm in Sweden). Lots of people have hobbies other than coding, so they wouldn't mind not coding on personal projects after work. Is it really that hard to imagine that people might be willing to make fairly minor sacrifices in exchange for several hundred thousand dollars a year?

[TACIXAT]

>There are no non-competes in California,

There are intellectual property assignment agreements though. These basically say "we're a giant tech company and work in a lot of areas, so if you work on a side project in any of those areas, we can assert rights over it cause it competes with us and you probably stole that knowledge from us, or thought about it on work time, or something".

>and most of the best paying tech companies have decent vacation policies

You get 15 days at Google for the first 5 years (even if you come in with experience). I'm not really impressed by this. I will probably never see 20 days of vacation from Google. Cisco had 20 for everyone. Other companies may vary.

>Lots of people have hobbies other than coding

This is not the case for me. I play some video games and I write code. I like programming more because it feels productive, games are fun though.

>Is it really that hard to imagine that people might be willing to make fairly minor sacrifices in exchange for several hundred thousand dollars a year?

It's not hard to imagine that (it's how I ended up where I am), but now that I'm in the situation I don't really like it.

[potato1234]

Correction: 0-3 years: 15 days 3-5: 20 days 5+: 25 days

[fgandiya]

Issue is will you actually get those several hundred thousands for just "fairly minor sacrifices".