Imho, the best way to be high paid is a social activity. Nowadays most parts of companies try to find someone who has good references somewhere. Taking part in conferences or having a good place in competitions(I am from data science domain), or writing interesting open-source project can give you more money than working hard hours
> good place in competitions(I am from data science domain)
Do people actually commonly care about that these days? Good papers / leaderboard positions on shared tasks I get in data science but competitions as in Kaggle et al? My brain defaults to interpreting that as "had time to waste working for free, for whoever put up that competition". Seeing that in an application package has about as much influence for me personally as some random certification.
