Ask HN: Is a career in software development the easiest way to maximize income?
I'm a "typical" software engineer working as a team lead in SF for a small startup. Reading a few threads on salaries, it seems the average compensation in the area for software engineers (employees, including salary and various bonuses and excluding startup stock options) is capped at about 200-250k. A smaller pool of employees is also able to pull in more (250k-500k) by working for several years in Google/Facebook/...
I've also been talking to many people who work in sales for tech companies (sales account managers and pre/post sales engineering) and, while the base salary of those people is on average smaller compared to the core engineers' one, I consistently see those people earning commissions that put them in much higher income ranges. It seems completely normal for them to consistently pull in about 500k a year or more.
At the same time, the entry barrier for those positions doesn't seem to be any harder than the software engineering one. For a sales engineer role, which is the one requiring the highest level of technical skills, it seems a matter of picking the right company (namely any successful B2B big tech corporation, mid size company or startup) and being able to have a reasonably technical conversation with a customer as well as doing some basic troubleshooting and support. This has been confirmed by pretty much all my acquaintances working in those positions in the bay.
I'd just love to to get some opinions from the wise HN audience on this matter.