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.
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.
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.
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.
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.