[sshine]

This is a bit of a tangent, and salary is often discussed on HN.

Companies whose software is important enough will gladly pay that.

There are two ways to get to a significantly higher salary; one is finding out what people who earn more do better than you, and do that, and the other is boldly asking for more. You can do either one or both. I've always felt better having some reason why I should have more. (Also, I always earned $93k-105k. I once had the option to earn $144k doing Drupal, and another time $122k at close to zero tax doing Blockchain, but my biggest career mistake so far was taking a job just for the pay raise.)