[onion2k]

SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience.

I don't think that's really true.

I'm not arguing that there aren't SWEs whose total comp is $600k. There definitely are. However, those people aren't really SWEs. They're managers, architects, and strategists. They have a lot of people reporting to them, they make decisions about very high level things that are only tangentially related to code, and they work on guiding other engineers to find solutions to hard problems. No doubt being a developer before getting to that role is incredibly helpful and makes you better at it, but if you're earning $600k I very much doubt you're spending more than 25% of your time sat at a keyboard with an IDE open.

If you want to earn that much after a decade in work you'd be much better off polishing your management and strategy skills than learning how to write better code.

And yes, I realise I'm totally falling in to the 'no true Scotsman' trap here. But sometimes a Scotsman is just an MBA in a kilt. :)

[discobot2]

500-600K is L5-L6 at google CA, which is still a lot of coding and maybe some reports, but not necessary.