brianwawok, when I first started out, you could say my boss was some guy who hired me off the street and decided to take a chance on me. Was he wrong in his jud

brianwawok, when I first started out, you could say my boss was some guy who hired me off the street and decided to take a chance on me. Was he wrong in his judgement of paying me $12/hr? Probably not. While I came with some knowledge and experience, it was mostly personal and non-professional. It took him about 3 months to get me ready and trust me enough to work in his software. While he did give me a small raise once I started doing that, it would be the only raise I had seen. While I was upset that he continued to pay me what he was paying me, considering I did live on a coast at the time, and the fact that in over a year, his customer base rose by thousands of companies using his product across the nation, I did not see any benefits for that, at least not monetary. But I am very grateful that he did take that chance on me, because it was he who gave me that "real world experience" to put on my resume and have every single company thereafter take me seriously as a programmer. This was a benefit that I had not foreseen, for sure, being young and at a college with too much debt, I didn't know any better. I have also had this discussion with my girlfriend regarding salary, who also works as a web developer. We have discussed our salaries and pay worth and she pointed out this very thing: What makes us think we are getting underpaid for the amount of work we do? Surely, the company does not just randomly give out salaries and does their research on what a typical web designer would make. They likely figure their own costs of charging clients and the quota we need to meet, and pay us a base salary. I suppose searching Indeed.com or a salary website does reveal the national average. But seeing something like that is always off. Lets take this the salary of a web developer/designer, which is $64k national average as of 2015. This salary varies greatly depending on where you live: Middle of the country tends to pay less, while the coasts tend to pay more, so are we really underpaid? Or overpaid? Or are we where we should be based on 1) geographical location 2) cost of living in geographical location 3) experience. The other point is too: If someone is unhappy with their current situation, including the demands of a job vs. salary, than change it.