[ld_bic]

IMO the only way in this industry (without having your own company or something like that) to high-paying gigs is to become more valuable to a company than company is to you. and that you can accomplish only through DEEP specialization

[varjag]

The downside to this of course is the breadth of your next job search (should it come to that) suffers.

[ld_bic]

This on the surface sounds solid but I persobally think most job searches are narrow unless you are doing “career changing” moves. How many good UI/UX colleagues do you have that are good at anything else? How many compiler developers can center a div on the page? I think this “I know a lot of things” is just something we say - terms like “full stack” developer etc…

I mostly develop on a computer which isn’t connected to the internet (so no Google, Stackoverflow etc…) and I often think how miniscule fraction of “full stack” developers could perform even the most menial task in any of these “stacks” they apparently know

[chmod775]

If you make in a month what others do in a year, you can retire after 6-8 years and never worry about having to find another job if you play your cards right.

Accounting for taxes and moderate expenses, at the end you should be sitting on close to 2m USD. That's more money than the vast majority of people make in their lifetime (after taxes). If you don't plan to live to a hundred you'll be fine even if you don't do any higher-risky investing, slowly spending it.

[varjag]

Expecting a 12x of median industry rate via specialization is not realistic. I'm sure such outliers exist and you possibly know both of them but this is not an actionable advice.