I live in a metro area of the USA, but not one of the 20th largest ones. I started making any kind of real salary (meaning over $2000 a month) in programming i

I live in a metro area of the USA, but not one of the 20th largest ones. I started making any kind of real salary (meaning over $2000 a month) in programming in the spring of 2019. I now make base over $130k a year, and bonus/stock will be about $30k this year, so about $160k a year total compensation. In 2009 I was making $90,000 a year as a systems administrator (was a sysadmin from 1996 until 2009) and was going to school at night, but the recession killed my job and I went back to school more full time then. I don't have my degree in computer science yet, although I have a few more classes to go. I am not currently enrolled. There are about 20 programmers in my larger group. I would say there are about 4 programmers here that are clearly better than me. I am pretty easily better than 10 other programmers here. So I am in the 50%-75% range of ability where I work. A guy I am friendly with who started programming in 2000 and knows my main language and framework told me he is making about $30k less than me and his bonus will be smaller than mine. He knows my main language and framework much more than I do. I already has a broad array of skills - Ansible is too new for me in terms of devops/SRE which I never went into but I know all the old-line sysadmin things going back to SunOS IPX machines. As well as the command line, MySQL, other toys; can talk about Turing machines somewhat, I forget what the pumping lemma is other than it puts something in the middle of other things or something, or about the sudoers file Right now I am learning my main language better, learning my framework better, learning core programming things better (like how every language and framework seems to be becoming more functional), learning git better etc. I am kind of on a leetcode to FAANG (or something similar) train, although I am in no rush. I doubt I will interview anywhere this year if my company situation remains as it is, which is good. At some point I might find that I can't grow any more where I am - or things could go downhill for reasons outside my control - which is why I am improving my skills to be a more attractive candidate where even a FAANG might hire me. So a ~$250k total comp. at a level 3'ish FAANG role is my current goal in the next few years.