So I'll give my general experience. I'm a RoR developer making 450k a year. It took about 3 years of non stop pushing myself (80/hr a week or more) to get here. I'm fairly unknown as a developer, so I'm not one of the bigger names. I work for a consulting company like Accenture or IBM global services. How I got here:

Basically I was a Java dev and pretty much knew RoR would be big, and knew there were guys making 100k+ at it (this was 2008). At the time I was making 75k as a Java guy and I just wanted to see if I could become one of the best. So i worked at it night and weekends, virtually non-stop till I got a Ruby position for 85k. That let me spent all my time on Ruby which was helpful. I tried for find every little scrap of info that would help, and overtime I got better.

I got a job for 130k 6 months later and my mind was blown. It was so much money to me it was just unreal. I didn't take it for granted though, I went in and worked my butt off to try and tackle every big problem there was and tried to pre-emt and issues that I saw, so I had a solution as soon as the problem came up. That went on for about a year.

All this time the main thing is that I kept working on all my skills, everything big and complex I could get my hands on that is. So I knew how to troubleshoot any performance issue that came up, etc. I also relentless kept it touch with recruiters. I know a lot of people on HN and Reddit aren't too fond of them but I love them.

I did whatever I could to help them out when they were looking for people, and made good connections because of that. When they emailed me I would just quote a ridiculous rate like $200/hr and be polite about it.

Eventually I formed a contact with a large consulting company and they said they could offer me something good but not what I wanted. I did the interview and go the highest tech score in the country (a lot of that due to the fact that there were slim pickings). They made the offer but I turned them down. They said okay.

A few months later they got desperate and gave me the rate I wanted. I was more than blown away, it didn't seem real at all.

I went to the client location and yeah, it wasn't glorious work but the pay was insane, so I've kept at it. I live pretty frugally, more or less just stocking the money away so when the gravy train ends I won't have to work as much.

What do I attribute it to?

1) Work insanely hard. 40 hour work weeks are good and healthy, but I think it's harder to become super successful without working a lot. As an employee when I was getting paid that 130k I worked 65/hr a week even though I was only getting paid for about 45 of those hours, just because I wanted them to know I was insanely aggressive.

2) Find people's problems and solve them. I always tried to befriend high level people and solve their problems to the point that they see me as invaluable. When I got the 450k job I made friends with all the project directors, found out their problems (like performance) and would fix it and surprise them with it. This helped me to cement my place at the company to the point that I was able to have a lot of control and influence within it.

3) Be nice to people even when they are mean. I get insulted by the client company often. Their developers tell me I'm an idiot. That's sort of the nature of being a consultant. The big thing is that I'm always polite even if I don't think it's warranted. So I'll say "Hmm, interesting, why do you say that". And then politely explain why they are wrong and then make them not feel too bad about it by saying "Actually it's easy to be confused over those things because of..."

That is probably more of a book report than is needed but that's about it. The one thing I will say is that the money, while very good and nice to have, wasn't the end all be all that I thought it would be. I figured I'd easily meet the right woman with all the money I have, but I haven't, in fact the women I have mentioned it to on dates didn't even care (or believe me, or both). I don't really get treated any differently either, other than by the developers who know that I know what I'm doing. I also realized that I don't care about material things all that much. The most fun I get is out of achieving new things, rather than things the money can buy.

In the end I'd say the success was a result of hard work, a lot of luck and aggressively marketing myself.