[throwlaplace]

It feels dreary because you feel you have nothing left to strive for because you're only measuring your progress by your salary. Find another way to feel accomplished. 350k total comp is enormous and I don't know how you could expect to be even that valuable let alone more valuable to an enterprise (unless you're exceptional, in which case you would not be asking this question).

BTW I'm not judging you. I'm just saying I don't know why you would expect that that is not indeed your top earning potential given your skillset.

[kod]

> I don't know how you could expect to be even that valuable

I've had roles where I changed ~5 lines of code that resulted in at least my yearly salary worth of reduced operating costs. Programming can be a high-leverage activity, FAANG salaries aren't necessarily irrational.

[sorokod]

Is it possible that those ~5 lines of code where introduced by your predecessor who had a similar salary?

[kod]

No, they were introduced by the founder, and were getting the job done, just not anywhere near as efficiently.

[TurkishPoptart]

You should do a blog post about this.

[shoo]

thing kind of result may not necessarily be from doing anything particularly exotic, it may be largely a consequence of finding a situation where there's enough scale or leverage in making an change to a key component or bottleneck, finding something that is being done in a silly way, and improving it.

[rayvy]

> It feels dreary because you feel you have nothing left to strive for because you're only measuring your progress by your salary

This.

In your post you mentioned nothing but salary. Sadly I think you might find the hard way that the whole FAANG salary rat-race isn't/wasn't the best choice

[throw51319]

Do you mean "not the best choice" in that even if you do come out ahead with $1 mil+ net worth, if you ended up using your time just doing it to make money, you will regret that?

[ianmobbs]

> I don't know how you could expect to be even that valuable let alone more valuable to an enterprise

If your company is profitable, they can afford to pay you more, meaning no matter how much you're paid, you're undervalued.

[throwlaplace]

I've said this before too but it's not true because not all profits should always be paid out to stakeholders if the company is to survive longer-term. Even if it were true op isn't asking about increased earnings in his current role but in the broader labor market and, as someone else notes, op is at the tail of that distribution.

[ianmobbs]

I don't disagree :) I'm just trying to push back on the narrative that there's a cap on how much value an individual can bring to a profitable company.

[TurkishPoptart]

Is it OK if I judge him? God, what do people do all these days with all this money?