I think the main thing his experience showed is that if you want to make a lot of money, you need to position yourself to move into industries that can pay a lot. For software engineers that means 3 major options:
1. The US tech giants (the "FAANGs"). These companies are so insanely profitable and they can afford to pay a lot, though they all have become more cost conscious in the past couple years.
2. Finance. Again, they've got a lot of money, and especially for trading firms it's usually more straightforward to assign value to individual developers than in other areas.
3. Currently there is a big desire for AI talent, so if that's your industry one of the big startups (OpenAI, Anthropic) or one of the smaller well-funded ones should be able to pay you well.
So I would say this person didn't so much "climb the ladder" as opposed to position themselves well to get hired at other companies that would pay them a lot more. And I think this person did it in perfect order, i.e. it's been said a lot on HN how "the startup deal" (i.e lower salary but more equity) is hardly ever worth it for IC software developers these days if you can also get a FAANG job, but it can be a great stepping stone to getting experience that leads to a better paying job at companies that can afford to do so.
I was leading enterprise app dev + AWS projects at a small startup making $x. I got a remote job working at AWS (Professional Services) as a mid level (full time direct hire) consultant making $x + 65K working remotely.
I got Amazoned and a year later, now I’m a “staff” consultant (full time) at a smaller consulting company making the same as I made as a mid level consultant at AWS.
If I were to work at GCP as a “senior” (one level down) I would be making $150k - $200K more than I am making now. But even that department has a return to office mandate. Maybe I would try it after getting a few more years under my belt working at this level
I think what made the difference in both places is that I had good projects I could talk about and the tell a good story of this is the business problem, this is what we did, this is how I contributed, this is the result. I know this is not super helpful and sounds like standard STAR stuff. I was lucky because I was given a chance to deliver large and important projects and I think this is what they liked.
This comp is high but once you get into l7 and above or get senior roles in trading firms numbers become even more crazy.
What kind of work experience would you say was most valuable in climbing that ladder? Open source stuff? Anything you could show off?