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Early Google engineers are either not billionaires or became executives, divorced from architecture, long ago.

Otherwise, I think becoming a billionaire while purely working on software is extremely unlikely, bordering on impossible. Billion-dollar net worths necessitate leading billion-dollar businesses, and those aren't made solely with code.

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See, I'm not so sure about that. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat both joined Google when it was less than a year old, and still work in technical roles. If they each own > 0.1%, they would be billionaires. That seems possible for a very early hire, although I don't know how dilution/IPO would change that.

If not billions, I think it's fair to assume they're each worth several hundred million.

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