[ryandrake]

It’s called salary-porn because like actual porn, its attention-grabbing, often tantalizingly exaggerated and phony. Everyone on HN knows someone who knows someone who makes $500K at Facebook, and therefore that’s a totally normal salary that anyone can achieve. Last week it was $450K. I guess next week, $3K a day is going to be the standard rate for developers here.

To a developer who makes, say, $120K (which at least in the Bay Area is around median based on Salary.com and Glassdoor), that kind of claim is an emotionally-charged fantasy: provocative, maybe a little humiliating, but ultimately empty and unattainable. Again, fits the “porn” theme pretty well.

I’m not saying you’re a phony. Maybe you do make an enormous amount of money. If so, congrats, you are an outlier among outliers. I don’t see how talking about it adds any more value than talking about how you’re any other kind of fortunate outlier, like a hotel heir or lottery winner.

[ryanmarsh]

Your comment really saddens me. There’s so much more you could have. There’s no reason why what I make has to be an outlier. I’m so so so not special. Many people have come on HN to say exactly what I’ve said and have achieved outsized results. Jesus, is patio11 really that incredible of a guy? I mean, he’s really nice and pretty smart but dude he made his start with a bingo card creator.

Our mindset is our greatest limitation.

[virgilp]

You are right in lots of stuff but you are probably underselling your skill combo. You are probably good (even if not great/amazing) at more than one thing - not just managing projects, but also sales, and maybe marketing too. You are probably right to say that there are other people better than you at any one of those things, but for the full combo, the story changes. It's easy to say "learn sales", and indeed it does not necessarily require very high IQ... but it may require that you change who you are. And that's extremely hard, if possible at all.

[ryandrake]

> Our mindset is our greatest limitation.

That, and the nature of distributions. Salaries are not exactly normal, but there’s still a long tail on the right, with only enough room for a few. Some people find it fun to read/dream about being over on that tail, just like some people aspirationally watch Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

If outsized results were achievable by merely applying hard work, adopting certain principles or following articulable steps, more of us would be able to show outsized results. Even for athletes, more training and better mindset means better performance but not necessarily outsized performance. There are only so many Olympians and pro ball players to go around and the farther right you go on the tail, the more of a factor random chance is.