[thejdude]

My experience is the absolute opposite, but maybe that's the difference between the US (or CA) market and the German one. Germany seems to pay people by seniority, not by their abilities (which, I think, sometimes causes unemployment for older developers). Maybe it's an "equality" thing - so all developers your age will make roughly the same.

Even with excellent reviews by my bosses (not to mention being a well-respected team member and the go-to guy of choice for technical questions), they wouldn't even give me a 10% pay increase. Switching jobs also didn't help (I got maybe 3% more), but at least a single company didn't get to reap all the profit from having me around.

Right now, I don't even bother anymore. All public job offers are for consulting companies, which seems to be very profitable (basically: you get paid less than the internal employees at companies that hire you, and the consulting company keeps 70% of the hourly rate they get paid; you get maybe 30%).

Sometimes there are article what nice salaries you're supposed to get, but if there aren't even jobs available?

[Pxtl]

Start a consulting company with one employee.

[thejdude]

Lots of people actually do that, but it involves lots of work that you might not want to do if you're interested in (and really good at) software development.