So first off there aren't any software developers at Microsoft making a salary of $2.5M dollars (maybe Yen?) a year, year after year. There may have been some combination of stock bonuses and stock appreciation that hit the perfect combination such that someone made that one year (although I doubt even that) but that's a far cry from salary. Note that your source is a single, anonymously reported compensation reports on levels.fyi, where the vast majority of the rest of the top salaries are in the $500k range which is the actual top take-home for the top developers as MSFT. You're anchoring on what is probably a made-up number (the combination of salary, stock, and bonus they put in doesn't even make sense) and even if it's not made up it's a far cry from the average of the top salaries, so very selective vision in play there. Second, it's almost vanishingly unlikely that anyone is initially hired at a salary of $300,000 as a software developer unless they're being poached based on their performance on a rival's high profile project or in a few cases where you're doing something super obscure in a high margin field with a severe talent shortage, like if you were an FPGA developer 5 years ago. It's very likely you could end up making $300,000 a year if you provided that much value to a company, but you need to prove that first. To the extent you care, and coming from someone who runs a software company, you're putting out a pretty unreasonable expectation set for a developer. I'd be happy to pay you $300,000 a year, heck I'd even be happy to pay you $2.5M a year if you were the key to bringing in the profits to support that. A developer would need to provide some support for that upfront or through their performance though. The whole "what I should have been making" because "I saw a single anonymous compensation report online for MSFT" and "I could have had a job at MSFT a decade ago" attitude not only doesn't work, it puts you out of the hiring pool entirely pretty damn fast.
I'd love to know specifically what I said that was "ignorant"? Was it the part where I pointed out that relying on a single anonymous salary survey online that was out of line with the dozens of other surveys there, hundreds of surveys elsewhere, and my own experience as a owner of a software firm was a bad idea? Was it the part where I said a random jackass with an attitude isn't going to get hired at $300k starting salary anywhere absent a couple edge cases? Seriously, I'd like to learn from you but it's damn hard to do so with a statement as vague as "Blissfully ignorant of whatever he is saying. So nice." Is that really all you can come up with?
Never have to work a day job again, not even trading, and worry about living expenses no matter where I live. It can be done for us worker bees. I have been free for more than a decade.
Yeah, get married to a rich chick. I'm very confused. So you are free by your definition, but you also trade? Why trade if you are free? Humans are not very good at being idle. Let me see if I can dig up the video... The slide in particular: