What kind of software engineers make the most money?

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A2A, the ones that are way more serious about it than I am.

One of the things you learn as your career progresses is that money is only one form of compensation you can receive. But salary is the most expensive type of it an employer can possibly provide. Software engineers are critical to the functioning of an enterprise, so they obviously will get paid well, but companies will save a buck whenever they can.

If you’re a savvy software engineer, you learn how to leverage an employer’s need to keep money in his pocket for compensation of other sorts. Lots of engineers, for example, decide they don’t like living in big cities where their employer can more easily locate talent, and trade what can sometimes be a lot of perks, including salary, for the ability to live out in the middle of nowhere. The market is just so hot that skilled, experienced, and savvy engineers (none of those imply the others) can have whatever kind of job they want, so long as they remain loyal and don’t demand the astronomical amounts of money that contracting firms are used to asking for.

Notice I said “contracting firm.” It’s these firms that tend to soak up a great deal of the cost of software development, not the actual talent. The talent gets paid, sometimes handsomely, but always just enough to where they are quite comfortable. But the talent, by virtue of being talented, usually isn’t savvy enough to know their full worth to the people that employ them, and don’t really care to. See, that’s work that’s outside of their wheelhouse, engineers just want to code. There’s enough excess desire and willingness to pay that it supports an entire industry just on that surplus.

This entire state of affairs has ossified to the point to where it’s hard to fight it. Demand to capture the surplus that the contractor would have captured, and they’ll look at you as a difficult prima-donna, best throw their lot in with the headhunters who will provide a more reliable service. It’s easy to just relax and get comfortable, why do you really need to make that much money anyway?

There are essentially two routes to making real money in software development. You’re either climbing a ladder, or you’re building the mountain that the ladder would have allowed you to climb up. My usual career advice is that it’s easier to climb a ladder than it is to make one, but it doesn’t really apply in this case. Once you get to approximately where I’m at in my career, you need to radically shift your approach to life to keep climbing the rungs. The reason is there’s just no $150k+ Ruby web development jobs in Atlanta. I need to move to either NYC or Silicon Valley.

Because the reality is, if you want to do “pure” software development and make “real” money, the only people paying serious money for it are in huge tech firms and you’re basically a rock star, the 1% of the 1%. You have to organize your whole life around the job, they’re paying you too much to be willing to organize around you. You’re not actually a rock star with a brown M&M clause in your contract. You’re just a very highly paid specialist.

So that leaves the other route, building the mountain. Because $250k+ jobs are so scarce in software, but software is so deceptively easy to make, you can go the business route and take control of your own income. Sound easy? It’s not. You’re essentially retraining your mind to think around business. Everything that worked for you that made you a lot of money as a developer has to get subjugated to meet the needs of a brand new business. You think you know what a MVP is? Not until you actually tried to sell one, that’s when you learn the actual meaning of the words “Minimum” and “Viable.”

But while this isn’t by any means easy, there’s still plenty of territory out there to grab, so I’d say it’s roughly easier than trying to nab one of the top AmaGooFaceSoft jobs. But you’re not really a software engineer anymore, more like a businessman who writes code. Since decent non-technical cofounders are rarer than hen’s teeth, you’re going to have to do it all yourself.