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Comment by mdjasper | Hacker News Reader

It's my intuition that salary increases with experience for that time until you have basically "capped out" what the market will pay for your skills. After 9 or 10 years, talent and skill are probably a more a factor than experience.

Another way of saying that would be the difference in pay between a 1 and 3 year developer would be pretty easy to explain on experience alone. But, the difference in pay between a 12 and 18 year developer would be more explained by their skills and specific experiences (not time).

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Is there a hard ceiling for salaries for developers? Does one need to move into management/consulting/something in order for ones salary to keep increasing?

Lately I've been feeling like I've hit my ceiling and I need to start investigating where to go from here but that may just be my perception/pessimism.

Sort of.. For a given area, experience level, and skillset, there is going to be a general range that will give you an idea of where you are. Recruiters are sometimes helpful for figuring that out, and so are reports like this.

I don't know that switching paths is always a good bet - on more than one occasion, I've made more than my boss - and often not by a little bit. Principal-level developers are often compensated at director or even low-level VP amounts. Of course, at this level, you're not heads-down coding all of the time, even if you aren't managing people.

Going into management and getting stuck as a mid-level dev manager is probably not going to net you as much compensation as improving your skillset as a developer will.

There's no ceiling for developer pay (or at least, you're likely nowhere close to it). Large companies with technical tracks pay 1MM+/year for high-level engineers. Mid-level ("Senior" in title) engineers can easily clear half that.

A few things to note:

* Salaries like that are basically only possible at large public, engineering-driven companies, or finance firms (possibly also high-end consultancies, but I have little knowledge there)

* As you get more senior, a larger and larger percent of your take-home pay will be in the form of stock and bonuses; base salary rises much more slowly

* At the highest levels, you're unlikely to be writing much code. Mostly you'll be leading projects, reviewing technical designs, working with execs, etc.

I think it's important to note that this is very location-dependent.

In Utah, where this survey was taken, I'd be willing to bet the number of people with developer-like titles consistently bringing home > $250k take-home probably is less than 0.1% of the dev population, whereas in a place like SF/Seattle/NYC, it is a lot more common.

It's definitely location-dependent. My experience is primarily Bay Area/NYC/Seattle, and salaries will likely be lower outside those hubs. However for very skilled or in-demand specialists, it's definitely possible to get SF salaries while working remote in a cheap CoL area.

>Is there a hard ceiling for salaries for developers?

Yeah I think there is a limit to what the market will pay for any particular skill, including developers. That limit will be constantly in flux year-to-year (see the 2017 results for comparison), and will vary from person-to-person though as skills, experience, etc. vary. Hard to quantify what that cap might be for any specific person, but looking at all the data in aggregate you can see that salary growth isn't linear with experience.

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