Happy to go into a bit more detail on this. As I said in my first post, I shouldn't have accepted 40 to start with. I had received an offer for 55 at another co

Happy to go into a bit more detail on this. As I said in my first post, I shouldn't have accepted 40 to start with. I had received an offer for 55 at another company that fell through when they had a hiring freeze, so I was getting a bit desperate when I accepted 40. The early raise to 55 after about 6 months made me feel a lot more comfortable. The way the raise process worked at that company, I was never present, never given an opportunity to negotiate or even suggest a number, but I was lucky enough to have a great boss who valued what I did, fought for what he thought he could get for me, and told me to let him know if I was unhappy. I tried to keep an eye on the market (just follow a few recruiters on LinkedIn and it's not too hard), and when I went from 70-77.5 at about 2.5yrs I felt I could get more elsewhere. I was also at a point where I felt like the growth potential there was running out (it was a very small engineering dept.), when I was offered another role internally reporting to the same boss (was a SWE, new role was Product Manager, again very small company though) so I took it and pushed for a raise to go with it. At the same time, I interviewed at a few other companies and ended up getting offers at 75, 80, 85 and 95. The raise came through at 90 so I decided I was comfortable where I was. This is at about the 3yr mark. Note: These were all quite small companies by global standards, but normal for a small city like Brisbane (50-500 employee range, not FAANG etc.). Stayed in that role for about a year until I decided to move interstate. I could have kept my position and worked from our office in the new city, but decided it was time to move on. Being a new market that I hadn't been paying much attention to, I wasn't really sure what was fair, but felt I should take my current salary, add about 10% for another year's experience, and then another 10% for increased CoL. I interviewed at a few companies and asked for 110, and got two offers at 95 and 110. I had already decided on the company that offered 110 so was happy to accept it. I'm not sure I would call this advice, as I don't know how widely applicable it is, but what worked for me was knowing what the market will pay, being confident that you're worth it, then find somebody willing to pay it. If any of this breaks down, fix it. At your current employer, the first step is to get your boss to value you, and my suggestion for this is to understand their job, their pain-points, the things that they're accountable for, and then fix those for them, even if it's not in your job description. Try to get to a point where you are seamlessly interchangeable for them in meetings/dealings with other parts of the business, and actually find opportunities to do this. If they're on your side and the business just can't afford you, as much as it sucks for your boss, it's probably faster to look elsewhere. Hope that helps.