I'm a senior software engineer in the Bay Area and spend most of my days writing Javascript/Ruby. I don't manage anyone directly, but have technical/product leadership responsibility on my team.
My gross comp is ~$350k, 60% cash.
The 3 main learnings that I've leveraged to get that high are:
0) be the top performer on your team, no excuses
1) ask very explicitly for the things you want [0]
2) negotiate from a position of power (have a BATNA [1])
---
[0] "I'd like a raise" != "I'd like my salary to be $X"
Would also be interested in some examples, just for curiosity sake. COBOL maybe? Wild guess at something specialized/scarce.
Personally, the only people I know in the 200+ club are in some form of management and rarely, if ever, code anymore. But then we are back into the anecdotal realm..
Example specialties of people I know in the $250k+ range:
* Machine learning + finance
* iOS (I know several examples here)
* Android
* Enterprise Java
* Embedded development
* Specific scientific expertise (a friend is into optics and diffraction and makes $250/hour freelance, with some coding and some design)
I don't know any COBOL programmers. Or at least if I do, they're in the closet. :)
This is universally from big companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Ball Aerospace, etc.
