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If you want to become a millionaire some day, then you're already on that path as a software developer. You can get top dollar by working for FAANG and working your way up the levels.fyi. That's probably the peak you can get by working for someone else. If you want to make it to become a billionaire, then the only way is to not work for someone else, to become the boss (owner). Which means, taking a huge risk in starting your own company and working until it becomes big. You can try to become huge quickly, as a startup unicorn (which then will take many tries till you succeed) or go for a more traditional business and continuously build it over a long period of time. If you want to go somewhere in the middle and make tens of millions, maybe hundreds, then you can switch from the software developer track to the CEO track (note that i didn't say middle-manager track). In that case, you essentially prove that you can basically be a mini-CEO, but within the confines of a very large company, by heading up a department. Then you keep on doing this with larger and larger departments, until at the end you're the CEO of the company. And then from there you leap frog from company to company, being CEO of larger and larger companies. Of course, it's often very difficult to get to those chances within a company, so succeeding as the CEO of a startup and then getting acquired (and becoming the mini-CEO of your newly formed department) is kind a way to jump onto that track from the outside. Or, you could try switching tracks and going into finance. There, starting as an employee, there's a more clear path to make your way up the chain to partner. And since your salary is more along the lines of a percentage of revenue, as opposed to a flat salary, there's an order of magnitude more potential than as an engineer employee. |
The CEO track sounds nice. I've done the middle management stuff before and was quite successful at it. In my last job I was heading up the software team for a software/hardware startup, as well as taking on partial management of the support team and the data entry team. I have been C-level at two companies but both were early stage when they went belly up so this is more a bullet point on a resume than something I can point to and say "look there it is". Currently I work for a small enough company that there isn't any more upwards mobility here. I am basically working as an individual contributor directly with clients. The projects are boring but the pay is good and the people I work with are excellent. How would you suggest making a leap from here to something bigger? I live in an area with lots of banks and insurance companies, but not much in the tech world.
On the finance side, again, how do you go about this? What kind of companies do you suggest and what jobs in them? Are hedge funds a good idea? Or do I need to commute to something like NYC and apply for something with a large investor? What qualifications should I focus on before jumping into this? Is mostly reliant on knowing the right people? Is it about technical knowledge of the subject? Or is it about impressing the right interviewer?