Some ICs at top tech companies get paid much, much more than $600k.

If you think you have a reasonable chance to become a Google Fellow or equivalent, then by all means ignore everything I’m saying here.

600k is staff level TC, not even close to fellow.

Oh really, I guess I was misinformed. Figured that was closer to 500-600. I hadn’t heard of anything well above $700k or so for positions like “Senior Staff”

Well the other piece is that after senior staff there's distinguished and principal, and then fellow.

There are somewhere around 3.5-4 million software engineers in the US. What percent would you say will make $600k TC or more this year?

I was responding directly to a comment referring to Staff Google engineers. So in response to your goalpost moving question, I guess the percent would be (total number of staff engineers or higher at Google) / (your random estimate of the total engineering population)

I’m sure we are all very impressed by your insider knowledge of the details of a tiny portion of the industry irrelevant to most engineers. For the rest of us Google Fellow or equivalent is a reasonable way to sum up the entire niche.

It's not equivalent, unless you think that getting a job at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or any other reasonably large west-coast company is a "niche" that's completely out of reach for you. "Staff" is not some unattainable level that only a few people per company are lucky enough to break into.

There’s the patio11 way of doing things which he’s written plenty about.

But there’s also the more classic knows-where-to-put-the-screw consultant. Something is broken and bleeding money and after being jerked around by underlings for a few weeks some director is desperate to fix it.

There’s are many many companies out there that can be losing tens of thousands of dollars a day or more because something isn’t working.

I wonder how many of these shops exist. And if they're mostly solo operations?

McKinsey and such, I expect.