[scas]

My first job was employee #1 doing software development and sysadmin work for a non-funded startup in south Florida. Essentially, I was the IT staff for the company. At the highest, my wage was about $7/hour, with no insurance or equity. I was there for about 2.5 years.

My most recent salary was $55,000/year at a megacorp as a "customer engineer", effectively doing sysadmin, development and project management, complete with frequent meetings, on-call and weekly after-hours maintenances.

I have 7 years of experience where someone has paid me to keep things running, 11 if you count the side projects and open source project dabbling, and I've never even come close to a 6 figure salary. Now I'm feeling bummed that I read over this thread.