Career and Interests

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

It's pointless to join a discussion if you don't even bother to read the arguments someone makes and don't provide even the slightest shred of facts to back up your statements.

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Emp ... nc./Salary

[Milos]

I believe that's for usual companies. Not a high profile ones.

You are mixing apples and oranges. High profile companies hardly pay higher salaries. The difference with high profile companies is in stock options. However, the value of stock options is a very variable category that is heavily dependent on stock markets and general world economy, which atm is definitively not in good shape.

On the other hand, if Vas worked for Google (unless he got a good managing position, which is hard to believe considering his PR skills ) even with his experience he would not earn more then 200k$/year that I can assure you.
Now a simple calculation, assume only 10k copies of Rybka 3 have been sold (which is far smaller then a real number), and that Vas has only 50% of it. That's half a mil, from august 2008. You can draw conclusions easily.

[jdart]

Vas is at the top, so yes, it's a profitable business for him I expect.

But there are never going to be a lot of programmers who can make a living with full time work on chess and IMO there are going to be very few even of those who do as well as upper level software professionals in industry.

Personally I've worked in commercial software development for 20+ years, including a stint at a successful startup company. I've been very well compensated for the work I do. Chess programming is a hobby for me. It's not something I need or expect income from, so my program has always been freeware.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

But there are never going to be a lot of programmers who can make a living with full time work on chess

There can be only one (number 1).

Everybody else has to diversify

[bob]

Someone said that he'd earn about as 3 times more from a day job as he would from computer chess. I don't know if that's true. I believe he would earn as 5 times as much than that.

This assumption doesn't seem to have any kind of reasoning behind it.

There are limits to what you can earn as an employee, no matter how good you are, and there are limits to how much potential you can achieve if you work for a boss, but there are no limits to what you can earn and achieve if you're your own boss and run your own company.

Rybka has made in a very short while an enormous brand strength and has maintained it's large advantage for a substantial amount of time, as well as having a good distribution network with the two largest chess companies very actively promoting it. As a consequence, I am sure it sells orders of magnitude more than engines like Deep Sjeng, Fruit or Zappa have sold.

If you're still doubting, make an estimate how much copies Rybka sells, how much Vas earns from each copy, multiply by 5, and tell we which technical positions at which companies pays that kind of wage.

Has he sold say 10,000 copies? And makes perhaps 50 bucks a copy? Over 4 years now? $125,000 per year, roughly? Not exactly "remarkable". And that is likely a gross over-estimate of copies sold. It is not exactly in the chessmaster category for price and market.

[Milos]

Has he sold say 10,000 copies? And makes perhaps 50 bucks a copy? Over 4 years now? $125,000 per year, roughly? Not exactly "remarkable". And that is likely a gross over-estimate of copies sold. It is not exactly in the chessmaster category for price and market.

Exucuse me Bob, but you are simply wrong.
Let's make a better assumption.
There are 5.5 thousand FIDE masters. Do you really think there is a single one of them who doesn't have Rybka 3?
Or you think some of them are using R3 from torrent? Or do you think that just FIDE masters own R3?

Just to demonstrate you how big underestimate is 10000 copies, take a stupid iphone application that costs for example 10$, and see in how many copies it is sold. Take the most dummy chess for iphone, and check number of copies sold. Numbers are in hundreds of thousands. And here we are talking about officially the strongest chess engine in the world...

[Spacious_Mind]

FWIW, http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job ... Experience

Vas is 38, so he should have about 15 years of experience.

I tend to agree with Gian-Carlo on this one. Top programmers earn a fraction to what was earned prior to Y2K in industry. That bubble burst.

But logically speaking lets assume only 10000 copies are sold per year and only $20 goes back to the pocket that still makes it close to double when compared to the scale shown in the link which btw is very realistic since I use it a lot to buy programmers for projects in our IT dept.

So in a nutshell Vas makes a lot more money in what he is doing and more importantly probably also enjoys it a heck of a lot more. (rightly so).

This may not be the case for all commercial programs but for Rybka there is no doubt about this at all.

regards

Nick

[michiguel]

Has he sold say 10,000 copies? And makes perhaps 50 bucks a copy? Over 4 years now? $125,000 per year, roughly? Not exactly "remarkable". And that is likely a gross over-estimate of copies sold. It is not exactly in the chessmaster category for price and market.

Exucuse me Bob, but you are simply wrong.
Let's make a better assumption.
There are 5.5 thousand FIDE masters. Do you really think there is a single one of them who doesn't have Rybka 3?

I don't.
But you may be right about the other 5499...

Miguel
PS: does not he have lots of expenses and people to pay?

Or you think some of them are using R3 from torrent? Or do you think that just FIDE masters own R3?

Just to demonstrate you how big underestimate is 10000 copies, take a stupid iphone application that costs for example 10$, and see in how many copies it is sold. Take the most dummy chess for iphone, and check number of copies sold. Numbers are in hundreds of thousands. And here we are talking about officially the strongest chess engine in the world...

[bob]

Has he sold say 10,000 copies? And makes perhaps 50 bucks a copy? Over 4 years now? $125,000 per year, roughly? Not exactly "remarkable". And that is likely a gross over-estimate of copies sold. It is not exactly in the chessmaster category for price and market.

Exucuse me Bob, but you are simply wrong.
Let's make a better assumption.
There are 5.5 thousand FIDE masters. Do you really think there is a single one of them who doesn't have Rybka 3?
Or you think some of them are using R3 from torrent? Or do you think that just FIDE masters own R3?

Just to demonstrate you how big underestimate is 10000 copies, take a stupid iphone application that costs for example 10$, and see in how many copies it is sold. Take the most dummy chess for iphone, and check number of copies sold. Numbers are in hundreds of thousands. And here we are talking about officially the strongest chess engine in the world...

5,500 < 10,000.

Do you _really_ believe non-tournament players are going to buy Rybka, excepting the small group of computer chess enthusiasts? I'd bet 10K copies is _high_, not low.

The reason those other engines sell is price. Chessmaster has sold more copies of chess programs that everyone else combined, and multiplied by 100x. Because they are dirt cheap and run on cheap hardware.

You think Tommy in the 3rd grade knows anything about Rybka? Or wants a program that completely throttles him with no way to dumb it down satisfactorily?

You are thinking with the background of someone interested in computer chess. We represent a miniscule segment of the chess market.

[BubbaTough]

Not that I am particularly interested in speculating about Vas's finances, but I thought Vas was a salaried employee. No one ever confused chess programming with a get-rich-quick scheme, but I am sure Vas is enjoying himself, and sales of Rybka are doing just fine.

-Sam