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Comment by slackstation | Hacker News Reader

To put it another way, the only way Google, Apple or Facebook pay an engineer $1M+ is either because of an accu-hire, to stop them from jumping ship to one of their competitors or to stop them from jumping ship to start a startup.

Brilliant programming that creates even billions of dollars of value for one of those companies isn't even going to net the engineer 1% of the value they create.

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I'd really love to see a contribution from a single brilliant programmer that generates a billion in profit.

These kinds of profits are only made by teams, and that's why individual programmers only get a fraction of it.

> I'd really love to see a contribution from a single brilliant programmer that generates a billion in profit.

While I am not answering your question directly, Jeff Dean and Shel Kaphan come to mind, in their key, fundamental roles of building massive scalable systems - information search and retail selling, respectively.

http://research.google.com/pubs/jeff.html

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...

I have detected bugs that where costing several hundred thousands of pounds a week and back in the 80's I and the company accountant fixed a problem that ment we could collect over 3/4 million of uncollected direct debits.

Neither of us got even a thank you :-(

Not billions, but I've seen a small team of 5 clearly account for $10M+ before.

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