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Comment by nerflad | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the southeast. 24, self-taught, no degree (I was able to make it through Triplebyte, though I'm not persuaded that actually means anything). 2009-2015 IT/helpdesk/sysadmin, and 2015-2017 more dev/devops, all with a local medium (~350 employee) retail-ish business that grosses about $30m annually if I had to guess. I quit this year for a number of reasons (depression), but I mainly worked on automation. A collection of scripts I wrote (and documented!) saves about 30 days' worth of the team's time annually. I made $22.50/hour. The numbers in this post are unfathomable to me.

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A friend of mine dropped out of CC with a 1.9 at the age of 20. During/after he did 4 internships at top-tier companies making $8-9k a month in each one.

Now he’s choosing between FB, Google, Microsoft, a few other unicorns, and a tiny startup all with offers over $160k TC.

He’s incredibly smart, no question, but at the end of the day it’s all a game. For him, all it took was his first internship at a top-tier company to land future interviews and months of practice to get offers.

Switch companies more frequently. Each time you do, you'll make more.

The trick is, you're worth whatever the market is willing to pay. But the only way to find out is to go out on the market. Most people stick with the same job for years, meaning they only check their worth a few times. Hence low salaries.

IMO, the key to this is to also increase your responsibilities and skill level - which sounds like the OP has, but some people ignore. It's the difference between a 10% bump and 2x-3x moves early in your career. I also think it's worthwhile to find a good company - growth and culture - and then negotiate well as tech and domain knowledge will make you less replaceable.

One thing that gets ignored on the west coast is how to specialize without hurting your career. In the southeast, we don't have endless tech companies, if you specialize poorly, you could get stuck with relocation being the only answer.

I think location matters the most

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