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Comment by dilyevsky | Hacker News Reader

> because you will absolutely make way more money by leaving

That is a pre-2023 advice my friend, unless you’ve been there like 10yrs or an ai researcher or something

It's pre-2023 thinking and early-career thinking. Without job title growth, eventually everyone plateaus. There's only so much any company is willing to pay a non-manager individual contributor worker bee. Early in your career you can go from say $45K to $60K to $100K like it's nothing, but the more you job hop, it'll start looking more like $110K -> $120K -> $125K -> $128K and so on, asymptotically approaching your locale's top pay for your role.

Note: the national median for software developers is $127k, don't let anyone sell you that as some kind of career ceiling. Especially if you live in New York, Seattle, or the Bay Area.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm#st

You're both right - you point out the absolute values achievable are a bit higher, but parent is pointing out that early career jumps are typically faster than later career ones (for good reason). So maybe it's 160k (or whatever) not 128k but the argument stands. Asymptoting to some sort of local-to-you maximum is how most peoples career arc will go. At some point there are no more big jumps to be made unless you wildly change what you are doing, and many folks will be ok with that, you continue making good money (globally speaking) for the longer run, but your days of doubling salary are done.

Yes it's always a risk on HN to post example numbers because people fixate on the values of them and miss the gist of the comment. I'm not saying that $128K is the magic number but that for every job title, in every area, in every industry, there absolutely is a number, and your late-career compensation is likely to flatline approaching it.

Yeah, at this point $127k for a SDE in Seattle MSA is... high-junior through low/mid-mid level salary. A senior title in Seattle MSA should easily be clearing $160k base cash. Maybe drop those numbers slightly in the startup scene, particularly very-early-stage, but honestly, post-2021 salaries need to match post-2021 COL, which skyrocketed already-bad numbers (I remember laughing at Zillow listings here in 2017, even) well into the stratosphere.

I do think the asymptotic curve analogy still holds despite the numbers being higher in these areas (in vast majority part, IMO, because of housing purchase costs out here (or landlord greed, whichever you want to attribute to)). The jump from senior to staff bands, especially in take-home/post-tax dollars, is way, way less than the jump from mid-senior bands.

A lot of tech companies have figured out pushing ICs into management is counter-productive and have IC tracks with very high ceilings. Until you're a principal/fellow pulling down $500k+ you haven't hit the IC asymptote yet. And yes this exists outside of just FAANG.

The corollary is that you often will have to stick around more than a year or two to get promoted into the senior+ ranks due to the scope of work and actually seeing large initiatives through.

Or you can bounce around every 18 months from senior dev role to senior dev role and hit a ceiling with small marginal gains a lot sooner.

2 of the 3 places I've worked (non FAANG) did not have IC tracks that went past senior or if they did it was 1 position that was not promoted internally and it never opened up again.

Well you’re right in that I haven’t been looking for jobs recently, but I find it extremely hard to believe that large grants and salaries are no longer a thing in the software industry at large. A few friends-of-friends I know very recently got nice grants and salaries, with large Mega Corps, but that’s always where the money was?

Everyone on HN knows someone's brother's nephew's wife's cousin's former roommate who makes $600K at MegaCorp FAANG but those kinds of opportunities aren't (and have never been) common. Especially now during our first tech bear market in what, 13 years?

Yeah good point, and 13 years is more or less the length of my career so it’s all I’ve known (feel like I will regret saying that I haven’t been programming for 192 years on HN but oh well)

At the same time, it’s 13 years of data backing up the claim, though they probably said the same thing before the dotcom bubble exploded, didn’t they, weee

What’s the unemployment rate for software developers? Still basically zero. It’s never moved, but for some reason people seem to think it has. That’s weird.

WSJ reported a few days ago that IT job growth is down year-over-year from 279,000 to 700. It's not contraction yet, but it is effectively the end of a long run of rapid growth.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-employment-grew-by-just-700-...

Yes, the number of unfilled tech positions has stopped growing but the absolute number is still in the hundreds of thousands in the US alone. There is no shortage of jobs. Maybe there will be, but there isn’t and hasn’t been.

Edited: typo “IS” to “US”.

You will find work but a lot of those jobs got pushed downmarket, to early stage firms, as late stage and public companies are short of cash now. And those early stage companies dont pay you as much or at least not in cash

Absolutely. Total comp, not to mention hiring in general at publicly traded tech firms has dropped significantly since the “software recession” and mass layoffs.

The current good times for employees are mainly in the economy outside of tech

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