Developer salaries are very bimodal (or even trimodal). Working for a contractor pays like shit, and pre-COVID many non-coastal locations were also significant

Developer salaries are very bimodal (or even trimodal). Working for a contractor pays like shit, and pre-COVID many non-coastal locations were also significantly worse than average. That group is just trying to churn out contracts at minimum-cost and that means squeezing wages too, generally they're not willing to go up, they'll take what they can get at fixed costs and modulate the work they take on to match staffing. It was usually $50-60k 10 years ago and $75k ish territory nowadays I think. And sure after 5-10 years you might be making closer to $80k or $90k but that's still under-market for basically a senior dev. Then you've got "market-competitive" wages that actually needs to get stuff done on a fixed timeline and are willing to pay to get the staffing to do it, deliberately, rather than just letting people fall into it. And finally the FAANG club and lead/architect tier positions, paying the most for top talent, with the latter two cohorts being smaller. Think about the stuff that everyone was trying to offshore to india 10-20 years ago and that's the cheap tier. And there's a lot of it. When I was poking around after my bachelor's, IBM Global Services was hiring around $50-55k in my area for java developers.