I know someone who makes half that and who is utterly unremarkable (nice guy, competent - but unremarkable, he's just played his card very well. Not playing politics, but being a consultant, not FTE, in a lucrative niche, and possibly having a nose for ending up on good projects). So I can believe that a tiny number (which is what we're talking about, they can make this much exactly because there is only a tiny number of them) can make this much.
"Without working too hard" is quite subjective. I suspect they are quite disciplined and works quite hard, but are very rarely in the office after 5, nor working much more than 35-40 hours a week.
As to (bad) communication, $200k/yr is high but unremarkable for SV/NYC careerist professionals. The notion that someone with decades of rare, in-demand experience should somehow be capped at what a (lucky) 35 year old engineering manager makes is just silly.
There is a steep power law in bill rates. It is not twice as hard to get $400/hr as $200/hr, but orders of magnitude harder. And my observation - as someone who bills more than these numbers sometimes - is that the higher the rate, the shorter the gig.
You have to look at this probabilistically. Contract programmers taking home $800k/yr are very rare, but folks misusing "upper six figures" to mean $180k are common. I'm not a gambler, but I would happily place bets on the meaning of the OP. This is classic Bayes' Theorem.
The fact that everyone here is jumping into this thread to justify how it could be possible probably says a lot about the psychology of HNers.
If the systems they build and maintain generate magnitudes larger revenue for their overload owners, then why not 800k salaries. Time for labor to actually be valued.
"Without working too hard" is quite subjective. I suspect they are quite disciplined and works quite hard, but are very rarely in the office after 5, nor working much more than 35-40 hours a week.
As to (bad) communication, $200k/yr is high but unremarkable for SV/NYC careerist professionals. The notion that someone with decades of rare, in-demand experience should somehow be capped at what a (lucky) 35 year old engineering manager makes is just silly.