I imagine someone who has this skill has a shot at being L4 or L5 at Google. levels.fyi estimates a year salary of an L5 engineer at Google to be 362,248. If we naively divide that by 50 (weeks in a year) * 40 (hours of work a week), we'd get $181.12 an hour. Googlers also get health insurance, free food, other perks that may push the effective hourly compensation even closer to $200. Googlers also get equipment to do the coding, whereas this competition does not provide a workstation, so another possible line item to consider.
It's not a perfect comparison/analogy, so I'd rather not get nitpicked, as the overall thrust of my argument is that $200/hr is not outlandish imho.
It's not a perfect comparison/analogy, so I'd rather not get nitpicked, as the overall thrust of my argument is that $200/hr is not outlandish imho.