$100,000. I'm a 26 year old, self-taught Rails developer in Chicago with less than 3 years of professional experience. Really shocked to see all of the low salaries on here.

1. Started as a freelancer / Excel consultant charging between $25 and $50 an hour. Did some small jobs like Wordpress sites, web scraping, and writing VBA scripts.

2. One of my clients hired me full time as a contractor for $40 an hour. He hired me to write trading algorithms for him but I continued to learn Ruby on Rails in my free time.

3. After about year of that, got my first full-time job as a Rails developer for $75,000.

4. Changed jobs after a year and was brought on at $85,000. Shortly after I got a raise to $100,000.