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Comment by ternaryoperator | Hacker News Reader

I expect he meant the high range of 100K-200K. It's a colloquialism I hear periodically. I took it to mean $180K-$200K.

You can make $250/hr consulting for mobile app development. I have no doubt an expert in some ancient Cobol-based banking software can set their own price. When your entire business stops when it breaks paying $1000/hr is chump change by comparison.

How can "high 6 figures" mean high 100-200k? Ugh, I hate english.

It can't. This is not reasonable English, it's (presumably) a misspeak by the OP. People make these kinds of mistakes in every language.

It is highly unlikely that that the OP is making $800k/yr consulting as a programmer. That's $400/hr sustained for more than a year of fulltime work.

$800k/year is possibly unusual, but these are unusual people. I see nothing unlikely about a highly skilled contractor with 30 years of experience, a good network and in the right location to be pulling down $800k/year.

Do you know anyone who does? "Without working too hard"?

The chance that the OP is billing $800k/yr is vastly smaller than the chance that the OP used a bad figure of speech. The number of technology professionals who can sustain $400/hr billing for a full year is tiny. The number of technology professionals who are bad at communication is huge.

Bayes' Theorem is relevant here.

I know someone who makes half that and who is utterly unremarkable (nice guy, competent - but unremarkable, he's just played his card very well. Not playing politics, but being a consultant, not FTE, in a lucrative niche, and possibly having a nose for ending up on good projects). So I can believe that a tiny number (which is what we're talking about, they can make this much exactly because there is only a tiny number of them) can make this much.

"Without working too hard" is quite subjective. I suspect they are quite disciplined and works quite hard, but are very rarely in the office after 5, nor working much more than 35-40 hours a week.

As to (bad) communication, $200k/yr is high but unremarkable for SV/NYC careerist professionals. The notion that someone with decades of rare, in-demand experience should somehow be capped at what a (lucky) 35 year old engineering manager makes is just silly.

There is a steep power law in bill rates. It is not twice as hard to get $400/hr as $200/hr, but orders of magnitude harder. And my observation - as someone who bills more than these numbers sometimes - is that the higher the rate, the shorter the gig.

You have to look at this probabilistically. Contract programmers taking home $800k/yr are very rare, but folks misusing "upper six figures" to mean $180k are common. I'm not a gambler, but I would happily place bets on the meaning of the OP. This is classic Bayes' Theorem.

The fact that everyone here is jumping into this thread to justify how it could be possible probably says a lot about the psychology of HNers.

If the systems they build and maintain generate magnitudes larger revenue for their overload owners, then why not 800k salaries. Time for labor to actually be valued.

And the fact that everyone else is jumping in to categorically deny that its possible says a lot about the psychology of other HNers.

Nobody is denying the possibility that the OP spoke correctly. The realm of possibility is broad.

We can, however, assume with a fairly high degree of confidence that he misspoke.

This isn't your average developer banging out Rails or Swift apps. This is extremely specialized knowledge of huge and arcane systems that are decades old. Entirely different ballpark in terms of knowledge and skillset.

Not to mention the value to the businesses running these systems. $800k doesn't even qualify as an expense to a lot of these companies relative to what they lose if the system goes down. They probably think they're getting a deal.

It's not unlikely at all for a highly specialized skill set. Speaking from experience.

i feel like the terms quarter- or half-million (or million itself) are what people would use to describe salary once they've busted the "6-figure" descriptor where the first figure is implicitly "1".

"half-million" is much more impressive sounding than "mid 6-figure" salary.

I wouldn't call it that, but if I had to for some reason I'd go with percentiles. Within the group of people who make 100-999k, 200k puts you at about the 80th percentile. I think 80th percentile is good enough to call "high".

While I agree, I heard a similar thing on the weather (here in the UK, in degrees Celcius), when the weather woman said we would be in "mid double figures" tomorrow, clearly meaning around 15 degrees, not 50!

They don't use "mid-teens" in the UK?

Yes they do, but I guess she just mis-spoke (for those in the UK, this is Carol Kirkwood on the BBC)...

Yeah, we do. "Mid double figures" might make sense in the context of use, but my first evaluation of that phrase isn't a value less than 20.

Sounds like it was clearly a mistake, but as you mentioned in a very specific context, with a specific range of likely values (temperature near sea level on Earth) I could see how it could make sense.

I think since he wrote 'pays extremely well' it could mean 800k+

I don't think so. TFA references a rewrite that cost $750M over five years. Paying three or four experts $800k/year to keep it running is chump change in comparison.

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