If your title was Chief Architect then accomplishments like this are baseline expectations for an IC, and your comp would have reflected that. It would have been well into 7 figure territory.
I don't think "chief architect" is a title at Microsoft, and it's probably worth noting that unless you're at the partner level, your pay at Microsoft will be pretty terrible compared to the rest of the tech industry.
That said, Alex's title appears to be principal engineer at GitHub, which is roughly equivalent to principal at Amazon in both expectations and comp. I worked at AWS for just shy of six years, and I can tell you that the person who created Firecracker -- which underpins huge portions of AWS's technology -- was at the same level, and while they were promoted shortly thereafter, they didn't receive a bonus (because comp packages at that level don't include bonuses at all). So, yeah, Alex is justified in sharing these details publicly, but this is just how it works in tech. (And, frankly, all the underpinning infrastructure that supported him wasn't his work -- he might have come up with Copilot, but would he have been able to without the work of thousands of others?)
Exactly. He did his job, and was paid handsomely for it (and whether or not it became anything).
He leveraged massive resources to do it and was allowed to tap people with multi-decades of experience (even implicitly - you think he build the execution engine where his "test harness" ran?).
Not to mention that he essentially wrote a wrapper around an API..
If he put his total comp this pity party would shrink to one.
No matter the accomplishment, I doubt they would have been able to create copilot outside Microsoft and thus without Microsoft’s resources (computing infrastructure, engineering talent and software ecosystem).
And the “join a startup” is a dumb piece of advice as you’d be still making some one else profit.
Create your own company, and face the likelihood of bankruptcy.
Driving a brand new product from the ground up is not in the job description for almost all levels. Only maybe if you're one step below Distinguished Engineer.
It is (or was) explicitly in the role guideline at MSFT for principal level. There's lots of variation at that level. Some sit on their butt and only chime in when they have expertise, others prototype new ideas of their own. That's how a few things I know came to be.
That said, Alex's title appears to be principal engineer at GitHub, which is roughly equivalent to principal at Amazon in both expectations and comp. I worked at AWS for just shy of six years, and I can tell you that the person who created Firecracker -- which underpins huge portions of AWS's technology -- was at the same level, and while they were promoted shortly thereafter, they didn't receive a bonus (because comp packages at that level don't include bonuses at all). So, yeah, Alex is justified in sharing these details publicly, but this is just how it works in tech. (And, frankly, all the underpinning infrastructure that supported him wasn't his work -- he might have come up with Copilot, but would he have been able to without the work of thousands of others?)