[monk_e_boy]

I've been doing it for 20 years, there is no progression for coders in my local area. I started on about 22K and progressed to 30K over many jobs. There is no way into management or team leader as most companies are too small.

For the last few years the coding has been eroded by automation.

Yep. Automation. Most of our clients want websites to sell some stuff. This no longer needs a team of 10, now you need an Amazon account, Facebook and Twitter, eBay, Etsy... or Drupal and other shopping templates make it too easy for designers to cobble something together that is 'good enough' that a team of coders can't compete on price. In the good old days we were bashing out 30K websites and running them for our clients. These days no one spends that much on a website.

We have a few companies left, SEO (lots of interesting coding there) Cloud computing (Perl and Python) Games (cut scenes, testing etc) not enough to support many coders. And again, you can get a job, but no pension, no perks, minimum holiday, no job stability (each time we lost a contract half the team would be laid off) and for me, no progression. I'd like to think in 10 years time I would be running a team of coders. No chance in my local area.