[mytailorisrich]

My point is that if you want to remain IC then why limit yourself to stay close to the bottom of the pile when you could aim for better pay and more impactful and interesting work?

It's not about chasing money for the sake of it but in the real world more money always helps if you can get it. In this case this also goes with better job satisfaction.

A 20x salary increase in 20 years means either fantastic career growth up the ladder or so-called "developing country". No-one gets that kind of increase in a developed country just by moving company, or at all, really.

[sarchertech]

20x over the last 20 years is pretty exceptional but 10x would be fairly easy.

You started out at non-tech company at $35k in 2004 (right after the dot com bust) then ended up at a big (non FAANG) tech company in 2024 for $350k.

I’m in that ballpark. Granted I’m staff, but I know seniors making just a little less.

[geraldwhen]

Yeah. There’s no way I’m going to hit 1.6M annually when my first job was $80k/year.

I’d have to live somewhere with hyper inflation to do it on paper, but that’s just being dishonest with the numbers.

[badpun]

20x increase happened to me as well. My first full-time coding job paid around 2.5k PLN after taxes, while my highest paying job so far paid around 50k PLN after taxes. That was over the span of a bit over 15 years, with low inflation over entire timespan.

[mytailorisrich]

Poland falls into the "developing country" category over the time period.

It started out with salaries much lower than in Western Europe and has been catching up since.

[lkjdsklf]

For 20 years ago the job market for software was a lot different.

It was right after the dotcom bust and before the FANG world.

30-40k was a fairly common starting salary for a software engineer (mine first job was 44k in 2003).

20x would still mean you're on the high end of engineer pay now, but it's not totally crazy.

but yeah unlikely we see that again.