[brianpgordon]

HFTs. This story hit HN a couple of months ago:

> A year into his new job he had a job offer from UBS, the Swiss bank, and a promise to bump up his salary to $400,000 a year. Serge didn’t particularly want to leave Goldman Sachs just to go and work at another big Wall Street firm, and so when Goldman offered to match the offer, he stayed.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...

But yeah, realistically only a few programmers in the world are probably pulling down the kind of salary.

[StavrosK]

This baffles me a bit. Why would you even want this much money? These sums of money are comfortably beyond anything I could reasonably spend, so after a certain amount it's all moot.

You could live in a nice, cheap country with a good standard of living instead, and spend a tenth of what you make while living very well with your family. People keep wanting more money and what do they do? Get a car. Get a house. Get a second car. Bigger house. Big whoop.

Few people spend their money on experiences, or enjoying their life, because they work too much to have any free time, just so they can go back to their stately home, which becomes "eh, my house" after a month anyway.

My "recipe for success" is "make enough money so you won't have to think about it, make sure you have many good friends, and try to make others happy from time to time". Most people don't even seem to know what makes them happy, really.

[mahyarm]

Money isn't just for spending, and money isn't just for your personal desires as you seem to imply. You can also invest and be financially independent, free to work on whatever projects you want without ever having to really worry about money again. A lot of money is a form of freedom.

Want to write good secure texting application that works on all major desktop and mobile OSes and make it fully open source? You could do that if you were financially independent. You could also hire people to do so if you wanted to.

Also real estate is expensive in NYC/SF where you would get these kinds of wages.

[rfnslyr]

Money is freedom. Simple.

[mahyarm]

Also finance machine learning guys making $500k/yr (so I've heard). That also might be HFT.

[seniorsassycat]

Which fits with the idea of "pay the price for the for the very best"