| What do you WANT to do (besides make money)? Generally speaking there are 3 broad career paths for developers these days: 1. Senior developer/team lead 2. Management 3. Startup founder / worker ========== Senior dev: ========== PROS: Actually get to build stuff all day. Fun to program the latest and greatest. Be respected as an expert by your peers. Less meeting and paperwork hassle than other roles. CONS: Can be sat on by middle management. Often don't get to drive product or strategic decisions. Low salary ceiling. Frustrating to be forced to do things you think are bad ideas. ========== Management ========== PROS: Get to make decisions (well, more than people beneath you, anyway). Potential path to the 1%. No more keeping up with the ratrace of programming platforms and languages. Can have a positive impact on the lives of your reports. CONS: No satisfaction of hands-on product building, just lots of sitting in meetings, sending e-mails and crafting PowerPoints. Sometimes mentally exhausting to babysit your reports. Lots of Game of Thrones-style politics. ========== Startup founder / worker ========== PROS: Fun (well, more than corporate jobs). Be your own boss / have more independence. Work on interesting problems. Potential path to fame and fortune. CONS: 90% likely to fail and put you in debt or company go out of business. Potentially limitless time commitment. Doesn't feel life-fulfilling to work on a company dedicated to disseminating cat gifs (or whatever the startup does). ========== Ask yourself which of these 3 paths appeal to you the most, then write out a list of what you need to do to get there, potentially. If you're living with Mom at age 35 however it sounds like you need to move to a big city like San Francisco or New York where they pay developers a lot more, but I don't know what your situation is. |
I currently live in Chicago which is pretty good for COL/salary ratio, for the average programmer. Caveat: I am not average. I consistently get offers from very low paying jobs- as in "$25/hr on a contract" low. This comes from the tendency to being let go from jobs without having another one lined up, so I never could afford to wait much longer for a better offer to use as leverage. Also, I don't qualify for unemployment insurance.
That has put me in the bottom 15-20% of local jobs by total compensation. If I were to restart as a junior programmer at one of the better companies, I'd actually be getting paid somewhat more than at my last job (and with insurance benefits for once).