How to go from average senior to top senior making 500k and more?

I just want to say that while money is important, it should never be your primary motivator. It's much healthier to focus on your growth and adding value to others instead of compensation increases, level bumps, and company prestige. If you truly do that, your pay will be a lagging indicator as I talk about in-depth here: "If my main goal is compensation, would it be wise to learn blockchain tech since it will potentially be the tech of the next couple decades?"

It is truly a privilege that we're able to type some random stuff into a random program from the comfort of our own homes and make more money than 95% of the world in our 20s. Never forget that.

• Join a FAANG company. Or join a unicorn startup that hires mostly FAANG (so when the company IPOs, there's a non-trivial chance the IPO is multiple times your sign-on price).
• Pick a team that is mission critical to the business. This reduces the chance of you being impacted from your team/org being targetted for headcount reduction.
• Be more efficient than your peers at shipping code/features/projects etc. since management roughly correlates bigger numbers with more impact.
• Stay in the same company/team for a long period of time so that you're seen as an anchor of stability/consistency.
• Be helpful to everyone interacting with your domain so that more people are willing to go to you for help and more flexible when it comes to working to you.

In order to get 500k off the bat, you generally have to be Staff. 500k L5 (senior) offers are possible, but very rare. Check out this thread: "How to get hired at L6+ in Big Tech?"

In terms of a roadmap, here's the most straightforward, high-level one:

1. Get into FAANG or an equivalent company (unicorn or recent IPO like Uber): [Course] Ace Your Tech Interview And Get A Job As A Software Engineer
   1. If you were down-leveled to mid-level (likely if you're coming from outside FAANG-tier), follow the advice here to get promoted: [Course] Grow From Mid-Level To Senior Engineer: L4 To L5
2. Work hard to get good ratings and a promotion to Staff someday. My advice here is to more or less consume everything on Taro, but for starters, go through this: [Course] Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer
3. Be lucky and have the stock of the company go up (if this happens, you can definitely reach 500k TC even at L5)

The other path is to get lucky with a top but earlier-stage startup (at that point, you'll make way more than 500k): "How to find and connect with scrappy startups?"

I think its all about breaking in to the right company. I would get very comfortable with leetcode (solve mediums in under 30 mins and some hards in <45 mins). Go through the behavioral course and show signs for senior. Though it's possible you'll get downleved to mid level in this economy at FAANG+

Of course for senior level interviews you'll need to get very good at system design. DDIA is a great resource for that

Thanks in order to get to 500k range is to get to FAANG as l4/l5 and work hard to get to staff engineer in order to make up to 500k rangw. But I'm not sure how long it will take to make the staff, many engineers try for the entire career but only few of us are able to get there. So the staff is the expected level to expect that 500k range ..