Thanks for the suggestion. I appreciate the careful reading.

This text seems inappropriate “Don’t always expect reliability, scalability, and general code perfection from this group – they are the visionaries of outstanding and radical applications that turn the everyday and mundane on its head.”

I think it will be better if you write: Do not expect free lunch. There is not such thing. And do not forget that you get what you pay for. Reliability, scalability, and general code perfection is one way to add value. Outlining better way is other way to add value.

I agree, nobody makes that in salary, even CEO’s aren’t paid that much in pure salary–but many of the coder-founders of the companies I listed did; even Open-Sourced jboss went from 10m start in VC to $400M sale and Marc held a lot of the company at the time.

Working for somebody else you will always sacrifice a lot of your upside–at the same time I know when Google and MS fought over some top coders there were 7 figure offers floating out there.

Thanks for the thoughts.

James

There may be rock star programmers but there is no rock star programmer pay.