If you're going to work you might as well shoot for the top 1% of the top 1%, around $10.5 mil per year for 2015.
From The Economist:
A book on the persistence of elites is an unexpected guide to getting a good job
MANAGEMENT consultants, investment banks and big law firms are the Holy Trinity of white-collar careers. They recruit up to a third of the graduates of the world’s best universities. They offer starting salaries in excess of $100,000 and a chance of making many multiples of that. They also provide a ladder to even better things. McKinsey says more than 440 of its alumni run businesses with annual revenues of at least $1 billion. The top ranks of governments and central banks are sprinkled with Goldman Sachs veterans.
Technology firms, though they are catching up fast, have nothing like the same grip on the global elite.
Which raises a pressing question: how do you maximise your chances of joining such elite professional-services firms? Lauren Rivera of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has spent a decade studying how these firms recruit. The result, “Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs”, is an academic book with the requisite references to gender theory and Marxist concepts of inequality. But read it carefully and it becomes something far more useful—a guide on how to join the global elite.
The bad news is that by far the best way to get into the tiny group of elite firms is to be studying at the tiny group of elite universities—Ivy League colleges in America (where Ms Rivera did her fieldwork) or Oxford and Cambridge in England. The firms spend millions of dollars love-bombing these institutions with recruiting events: students can spend the recruitment season wining and dining at their expense. However, as Ms Rivera notes, firms reject the vast majority of elite students they interview: so even the most pedigreed need to learn how to game the system.
The most important tip is to look at who is doing the recruiting. Whether in consulting, investment banking or the law, firms use revenue-generating staff rather than human-resources people to decide who has the right stuff. The interviewers are trying to juggle their day jobs with their recruiting duties: they seldom spend more than a minute or so reviewing each application form. In the interview room they behave predictably: they follow a set script, starting with some ice-breaking chit-chat, then asking you about yourself, then setting a work-related problem. That makes them desperate for relief from the tedium. Be vivacious. Hang on their every word. And flatter their self-image as “the best of the best” and the most jet-lagged of the jet-lagged.
The most important quality recruiters are looking for is “fit”: for all their supposedly rigorous testing of candidates, they would sooner choose an easy-going person with a second-class mind than a Mark Zuckerberg-type genius who rubs people up the wrong way. ...MUCH MORE
