I wouldn't claim to know anything specific about your situation, but I'll say that I'm in the same boat (albeit by intention). In order to break six figures, y

I wouldn't claim to know anything specific about your situation, but I'll say that I'm in the same boat (albeit by intention). In order to break six figures, you'll probably need to work for a tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, etc) and live in the appropriate metropolitan area. If you're not a top productive developer, you'll probably be expected to put in 50+ hours a week. These things all incur a cost to you, the employee, that is partially compensated by the increased salary and benefits. For example, I currently make about $90k. I interviewed at Microsoft in Redmond and was offered $110k base. Let's call it $130k with bonus. I declined the offer. Why? I interviewed for a senior position and was told "we don't think you're qualified for a senior position, would you like a junior position"? This is not a problem, except that it communicates to me that expectations will be high for improvement. Additionally, during the interviews, I inquired, "Does the team generally work 40-hours a week?" And they said with a disdainful tone, "Well, we do have one person that works 40-hours a week." That tells me that I'll have to work my butt off for 50+ hours a week. Additionally, moving from the smaller town I live in to Redmond/Bellevue area will incur a noticeable increase in cost of living (specifically rent/mortgage). So, I go from a pro-rata rate of ~$43/hour to ~$50/hour (a 16% raise, nice but not amazing) but then I have to pay for it with substantially higher cost of living and substantially more stressful workload. As an aside, this was when stack ranking was still a thing, and my questioning of the team during the interview indicated that it was a internally competitive team, which as a personal thing is disqualifying for me. So if you want a six figure developer position, create a GitHub profile and build some ad-hoc demonstration apps using some interesting modern tools. But just be aware that, if you're not a "top developer" or "rock star", then six figures often comes with a considerable cost.