[sk1pper]

I’ve hit that in my market - or a soft cap, at least, meaning if I want to earn more, I’m going to have to make 2-3x as much effort than I did before.

Through working my ass off, and pretty great luck, (working on lots of side projects didn’t hurt either), I recently did some looking just to feel the market out and I’m making like $20k more than I “should” be.

Part of this is because my company is based out of Bethesda, MD and I live in Denver, CO - cost of living differences. My company pays really well which allows them to compete with Silicon Valley and everywhere else for the best engineers.

No complaints here. I’m making double what I thought I would be making at this point in my career.

Anyway, yes, anecdotally, it caps out, but I also like to think that if I really hustled, I could keep raising it. But I’m pretty happy where I’m at and would rather spend my free time doing stuff other than coding and hustling right now.

[molsongolden]

Were your feelers all in Denver? Denver seems to have surprisingly low salaries, especially when accounting for the housing boom of the past 5-6 years.

[resolaibohp]

Denver seems to pay very low, considering the cost of living these days. I think they refer to it as the "Denver Discount"

[iopuy]

What would be considered surprisingly low? A level 3 software engineer making $100K? Genuinely curious.

[azemetre]

That seems absurdly low. For reference, I work for a major ISP and we pay our new college grads between $85-110K across our regions of operations.

[Latteland]

110k nationwide is pretty good. In seattle we pay at least 120k for new college hires.