Comment by jrockway
16 years ago
But ones that don't pay almost $100,000 more:
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Bank-of-America-Vice-Preside...
The top end of "Senior Developer" at Lockheed is around $100k. The top end for the same job at BofA (with an impressive-sounding but meaningless title) is $200k. And you don't have to lie about being investigated by the FBI. And if you get bored, you can just jump ship to their competitors across the street.
Dunno, but I'm not convinced that anyone should worry about security clearance unless they are completely unable to write even the simplest computer program.
Some people choose their jobs based what they find interesting, not on how much the job pays. So, depending on your background, the cutting edge research at Lockheed may be far more interesting to you than the cutting edge research at BofA.
I'm doubtful that anyone with a VP-Level title at BofA is writing software. I have a feeling you're comparing entirely different jobs here.
Additionally, Lockheed built (among other things) the SR-71 and the F22. Its probably a safe bet to say that writing the control systems for those machines took more skill than "the simplest computer program."
Financial services firms are FULL of Vice Presidents. At Merrill Lynch, we had a 23-year old, 2 years out of school who was an Assistant VP and many mid/late-20s engineers as VPs. [Almost] All of us wrote code all day long.
(BofA has since purchase MER, long after I left.)
The promotion progression is Officer -> Assistant Vice President -> Vice President -> Director -> ...