The person making 1.2 million isn't just a programmer, but he/she also understands the business well. More so, he/she is an integral part of the business.
That person was probably Sergey Aleynikov, who made $400k at Goldman Sachs then jumped ship to Teza for $1.2m - salary. He was doing high frequency trading code in C++. This is a matter of public record. Unfortunately he's now in jail having been accused of stealing said code from GS.
EDIT: I have now read to the last page of the article, and I guessed right!
Interestingly, for a while I used some of Aleynikov's code myself, he wrote Oracaml. It hasn't been touched since 2006, doesn't build with the current OCaml or GCC without some hacking, and he's probably not going to be uploading patches from jail! So I restarted the project as OCI*ML on Github.
programmers at high frequency trading firms can make well into the six figures and still spend most of the day coding. firms like these usually don't have much in the way of management tiers. though I wouldn't expect a programmer to make money like that unless they were closely involved in developing the trading strategies themselves.
Math/stats + ultra lean code + plus understanding market micostructure. From the CS side some of the more cutting edge stuff I've heard of being worked on involves hacking graphics cards to get a speed edge and building data centers in the middle of the ocean for the same reason.
