Unlike a lot of posters in tech on HN, I have experience with both the enterprise dev side of the world where most developers work and FAANG compensation. I’ve

Unlike a lot of posters in tech on HN, I have experience with both the enterprise dev side of the world where most developers work and FAANG compensation. I’ve worked a lot longer as a developer. But because of bad career decisions until 2008, I ended up doing a career reset. My first experience with staff augmentation type contracting was in 2011-2012. The company I worked for went out of business and was sold for scraps and I got a contract working with one of our customers. Local tech salaries for my skillset were in the low $100s - standard mid level C# developer. I couldn’t push above $60/hour. At 1800 hours a year, it was a wash. But no health insurance - I was also married. The next time was in 2016. I purposefully took a contract to perm job to get my first tech lead experience. I couldn’t find contract jobs for more than $70/hour. That translates to about $126K which was a little below average for senior dev in my area ($135K - $150K). But a racked up on hours. When I was hired full time, we were paying the contracting agency $90/hour and the contractors were making $70. Looking at one of the sites I use to use (https://www.matrixres.com/job/java-developer-424 https://www.matrixres.com/job/java-developer-424), it still seems like your average enterprise dev is still getting $70/hour. I’ve seen the same numbers on other sites.