I grew up in a small town in Russia during 80s and early 90s. I found my first job as a developer building accounting software in Pascal when I was 15. I remember spending my first paycheck (about $100) buying winter boots. It wasn't enough, my mom ended up pitching in. :)

As soon as I graduated, I moved to a larger city to work for a company doing offshore development in C++. I was paid $4 / hr, managing to put in about 250 hours a month. I only ended up working there for 6 months before I moved on to the next stage.

I moved to the US in 2000 to work for Microsoft in Redmond. Microsoft was good, but it quickly became obvious that there was no way to make real money, even though I doubled my paycheck in 4 years I spent there. I started at $66K / yr, ended up around $130K when I left at the end of 2004 to go and work for Google.

Except that I didn't go to Google. :) I interviewed, got an offer and used it to get an offer from a smaller company where I felt I could do more. I wanted to be a big fish in a small pond and Google already felt to me like a big pond. Their offer was for $150K and ~10,000 shares with strike price of ~$170. Smaller company offered $200K base, $50K bonus and 2% of the company. In 2004 that was a lot of money.

The smaller company didn't do as well as I expected. I only made about $3M from stock versus $5-10M I could have made from Google. But I met some good people there. But 2009 I was a VP and making close to $450K / yr. I left in 2009 to work on a startup with a couple friends. We sold it at the end of 2010 for $15M and almost immediately started another one.

Right now I work as a CTO for that other startup. We had $40M in revenue last year and on track to be at $90-$100M this year.