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"But programmers want their companies to indulge their lofty career ambitions while still being exactly as useful to the company."

What lofty career ambitions? My productivity at work goes up at least 40-50% every year. I'm not expecting to capture even half of that.

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To expand on this a bit: I was on ~$80k/year in 2002. If I had even had 10% raises each year I would be on ~$250k/year.

Instead I'm just under $200k. Not bad by any means but I wouldn't call sub-10% annual raises as lofty career ambitions.

Out of interest, what do you do? And where?

It is interesting the thought about moving to management - I often see that developers have to become project managers or managers of some sort as they get older.

You really think that your productivity has risen more than 10% every year? Do you have any numbers to back that up? I know you use a ticket tracking system. You can add up all your completed story points, by year, pretty easily. If you're really getting 10% better every year, consistently, it should be easy to ask for a bigger raise.

My experience is that developers don't increase their value as fast as they increase their pay.

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