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So... that senior engineer plateau is real. And yes, it means you'll be making about the same amount of money, inflation-adjusted, after about 8-10 years, if yo

So... that senior engineer plateau is real. And yes, it means you'll be making about the same amount of money, inflation-adjusted, after about 8-10 years, if you don't ever want to do the work to break into staff engineering. (And even if you do, you should plan on starting back at senior in a down market.) So, is it the worst thing in the world to be making $150,000 in the United States? (That's an average Senior in the US, according to Indeed. 183k in San Francisco, 143k in Durham, NC.) That's really not a bad life. No, we all don't end up in FAANG. That's okay. Yes, we're in a current downturn. That will change again, even if AI speeds up development by 20%.

scarface_74 2y ago
I don’t see that changing in the next decade - comp going up inflation adjusted. Enterprise dev comp (where most developers work) has been suprisingly stagnate and even going down inflation adjusted. Especially with the current oversupply of developers abs remote work. Every job opening gets 600-1000 applications within the first few hours. I was looking for a job both in 2023 and 2024 and bog standard “full stack developer” jobs with AWS experience was my plan B. It’s a shit show out there and they were offering “senior developers” with those qualifications $150-$165K. The same as I was seeing in 2020 before Covid and before I pivoted to strategic cloud consulting focusing on app dev. Inflation is up 22% since then (https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=202001&year2=202412 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=202001...)