This question is inspired by this thread in the meta section.

Basically, it costs $1.5 million to hire 4 full-time programmers and a few additional outside contractors to code a forum script. The company in question charges a $100,000 monthly fee. This means that each coder is paid roughly $300,000-400,000.

Now I don't know much about web development/programming so I was surprised to see that the figure is so high but it turns out it's actually pretty standard in the industry and some websites pay even more than this. I'm sure it's not an easy job and writing a forum script from scratch is a complex task that requires good coding skills but I always assumed that they would get paid $50,000-150,000.

It also seems that someone who works in this industry could retire very early. After 10 years, they would have about $3 million so someone who enters the industry at age 25 could retire by 35 or even earlier. So do most web developers/programmers retire in their thirties?