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patio11, I love your articles on salary negotiation and totally jive with what you're trying to do, but seven figure compensation for salaried software engineers is completely inconsistent with any evidence I've ever been able to gather. If you have actual evidence of this I'd love to see it.

While people with outrageous pay packages exist, I seriously doubt they're your everyday resume submitters. The company has to want you to bid you up like that.

Google has hired many industry luminaries that they want on payroll at least as much for their own PR as for the work those people actually perform; it's almost like an athletic sponsorship that way. I'm sure some of those guys make 500K-1000K from their "employers". In that sense, even if you're an employee, you still have to go out there and do something special and noteworthy to raise yourself to the level of a "programmer" that makes 500k+.

I don't think you can demand more than 170K-200K in a moderate COL area (plus or minus as appropriate for COL adjustments) for being a normal salaried programmer, and you'd have to be quite good to get that.

I think we keep having the same misunderstanding in these HN comments. patio11 says "pay packages", not salaries. From my understanding there are loads of folks making $150,000 / yr salary with $150,000+ stock/options which means there are in fact people getting $300,000+ pay (read compensation) packages.

> You need to get out of the salary game and work for yourself or do consultantcy if you want big bucks

This. Trading time for money does not scale. To belabor the analogy, vertical scaling (e.g. getting higher and higher positions in a company, climbing the ladder, high-end office politics) as opposed to horizontal scaling (multiple income streams, multiple revenue-generating disciplines, building your network) gives you no ownership.

If AppAmaGooBookSoft are happy to spend that much on talent, why don't they let it be known, rather than complain about a talent shortage ?

AppAmaGooBookSoft want few things more in life than for their engineers to remain really, really smart at developing distributed databases and really, really stupid at salary negotiation. They want to avoid further repricing of their entire engineering workforces at once, as that costs (literally) billions of dollars. They take substantial measures to avoid this, including (in recent memory) at least two of those companies illegally colluding against their employees to avoid those employees learning accurate facts about market clearing prices for their labor.

This also helps develop cultural norms like e.g. "We're here to organize the world's information. It is Ungoogley to collect a spreadsheet about Googler salaries. That information should never be organized... by you, that is."

Mmmm... it's not clear how salary inversion would build up, when I assume every single Mountain View Googler gets multiple job opportunities a week in their inbox, presumably with salary ranges. Having said this, I'm looking at this from a distance, so who knows.

I get a ton of recruiter spam about positions which may or may not exist, but they pretty much never specify compensation.

That "[employers] want few things more in life than for their engineers to remain really, really smart at developing distributed databases and really, really stupid at salary negotiation" is one of the most valuable career-enhancing lessons a developer could possibly learn. I want to etch it into CS101 classes. Learning it late is better than learning it never, though. Well put, Patrick.

It's not actually all that hard to find out. You apply and if you pass, you get a silly offer. It actually does happen. A year ago, I could have written the dismissive, "individual contributor engineers making that kind of money is a pipe dream" comment myself, but in the meantime I happen to have interviewed at one of the bigs and more than doubled my take-home overnight. And I was reasonably well compensated before.

Maybe not for you ;) The rest of us usually need a few weeks to prepare for these algorithms-heavy interviews. I'd rather know in advance if it's worth the trouble!

It's worth it. Don't worry, it took me weeks too. It really helps if you are the kind of person who actually likes doing the dumb algorithm exercises. I accidentally did something clever by interviewing at a handful of small companies I wasn't very interested in first, so I got to warm up the interview-question region of my brain.

I regularly hear these rumours, but the only actual datapoint I ever found is not that encouraging ... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aXboiWp...

Check Glassdoor, Payscale, etc for better data than that.

FWIW, Glassdoor mostly matches the 1 datapoint above (which was £45-65k) https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/Google-London-Salaries-EI...

The averages being, in my area: SDE £61,668 SDE III £64,190 Senior SDE £84,307

The salaries discussed in these comments are only valid for San Francisco / Seattle / New York. London has incredibly bad compensation for programmers, relative to the cost of living.

I spent every weekend for 2 months preparing. Best investment of time I've ever spent in my life.