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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

If you remain 'senior software engineer' your salary will be constrained by the market range for that position.

When you get to the top of the range your salary will only increase in line with inflation/market forces whatever you do. It's not possible to get 20-30% more every time you change job unless you've stayed a long time in your current job and they were taking advantage of you (in which case those 20-30% represent what you were actually losing).

As for titles, obviously what I meant relates to what the actual role entails. 'Senior software engineer' is usually not very senior, in my experience this often means a dev who can be left alone to deliver the specific feature they were tasked to code. As for "highest IC role there is" again, if the job description is very senior you can also negotiate commensurate title and pay.

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So what? Chasing money in life is utterly stupid long term strategy, if somebody told you this they were lying to you (or deeply unhappy people who went that way and instead of admitting the mistake they just drag others in same pit). Literally everybody who achieved anything serious in life says so. Yes it sucks when you don't have them at all, but once over that they should never be the top priority.

Do what you like, and for most normal humans (TM) moving to managerial position is moving to worse job while paid marginally better. More stress, far less interesting creative work and more baby-sitting/micro-managing incompetent folks, chasing other teams, processes, politics etc (if you don't do that you are not really a manager in any bigger company).

I am software dev for 20 years, my current full time employment net salary is over 20x compared to my first full time employment while doing largely the same job. You don't get good increases by moving up the ladder, you get it by switching companies and negotiating hard. That's it for the money part.

My point is that if you want to remain IC then why limit yourself to stay close to the bottom of the pile when you could aim for better pay and more impactful and interesting work?

It's not about chasing money for the sake of it but in the real world more money always helps if you can get it. In this case this also goes with better job satisfaction.

A 20x salary increase in 20 years means either fantastic career growth up the ladder or so-called "developing country". No-one gets that kind of increase in a developed country just by moving company, or at all, really.

Yeah. There’s no way I’m going to hit 1.6M annually when my first job was $80k/year.

I’d have to live somewhere with hyper inflation to do it on paper, but that’s just being dishonest with the numbers.

20x increase happened to me as well. My first full-time coding job paid around 2.5k PLN after taxes, while my highest paying job so far paid around 50k PLN after taxes. That was over the span of a bit over 15 years, with low inflation over entire timespan.

Poland falls into the "developing country" category over the time period.

It started out with salaries much lower than in Western Europe and has been catching up since.

For 20 years ago the job market for software was a lot different.

It was right after the dotcom bust and before the FANG world.

30-40k was a fairly common starting salary for a software engineer (mine first job was 44k in 2003).

20x would still mean you're on the high end of engineer pay now, but it's not totally crazy.

but yeah unlikely we see that again.

20x over the last 20 years is pretty exceptional but 10x would be fairly easy.

You started out at non-tech company at $35k in 2004 (right after the dot com bust) then ended up at a big (non FAANG) tech company in 2024 for $350k.

I’m in that ballpark. Granted I’m staff, but I know seniors making just a little less.

> If you remain 'senior software engineer' your salary will be constrained by the market range for that position.

The salary range is somewhere from $100k to $600k in the US depending on the company. So if you hit the cap at your current company just move to one that pays more. If you've hit that limit at a top tier company then you can start moving to higher IC roles such as Staff.

"you start moving to higher IC roles such as Staff"

QED.

I don't understand the nitpicking. It is factually impossible to get 20-30% salary increase forever if you move every 2-3 years while remaining at the same level. You'll get to the top end fairly quickly.

The person I replied to who said this has happened to them has only been in the industry 12 years. So, yes, they started as junior, then eng, now senior engineer, they moved maybe 3-4 times. But now if they stay at "senior software engineer" level then things will taper off.

The only senior (L5) engineer making 600k TC is one that has been at senior for several years and stock appreciation brought their RSU value way up.

The high end for L5 is like half that.

Netflix would disagree.

Netflix is indeed an outlier and has always paid higher than the rest of the market since it's such a shitty toxic place to work and in a terrible location to boot.

Even they aren't hiring someone looking at L5 at one of the other big companies at 600k. They'll be much higher than the other companies though.

/All/ the current and former Netflix engineers I've talked to talked glowingly about working Netflix. I'm supposing there's a lot of self-selection. And they've recently started hiring remote.

Netflix is in a great location. Obviously it might not fit your preferences but don’t act like it’s in a war zone or something.

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