From my experience language and years of experience have very little to do with salary IF you stay at the same employer. To get frequent salary and title bumps you HAVE to move employers. It's the single fastest path to more money. Move every 3 years at a minimum and never accept a lateral move or for equal pay with new title. Your future salaries will depend on your previous comp, not by title.
Also, independent contracting is often a better option than employment in most parts of the country, but you have to be independent (1099-MISC, never W2). Being a W2 at a consulting company is just as bad as anywhere else. Independent consulting will get you a 2x bump instantly assuming you can find a full time gig but that's usually not that difficult. Furthermore, as a 1099, you'll be able to put away far more in retirement savings. I recommend an LLC with a 401K (not SAP), max out your personal contributions and then kick in another 6% from your 'company'. You'll be socking away ~50K in retirement alone this way while lowering your taxable income. Compare that to your 16K/year max as W2.
Another trick: if a company ever offers you a larger than usual bonus for some reason (i.e. retention, goal met etc) leave the next year when it shows up on your W2 and ask the next employer to merely 'match' your current W2 without breaking out base salary and bonus. I've scored 50% pay increases this way.
Following the above methods, I was making $180K+ at my 8 year mark and $230K+ at my 12 year mark. Most of this happened in the midwest although I currently live in the bay area.
I am really trying to understand how someone is worth $230k+
I am a server-side guy with a CS degree, proficient with C, C++, Java, bash scripting, and some .NET, PHP, Node.js, and I have never gotten close to even $180k in salary, and I have been working for almost 20 years, and I am in the Bay Area.
First time I made 230K+ was as a contractor at $120/hour. For several years my fees ranged $105-120/hour. My niche were rule engines (Drools, JRules, FICO Blaze) but I came out of the plain vanilla backend Java world and fortune 500s. In fact, that's where I discovered this need. These days I have moved into management and lead 3 dev teams in the Big Data space.
I'm looking for a contractor who knows rules based linear integer programming systems like Gurobi or CPLEX (or open source variants). Can you shoot me an email with recommendations? It's in my profile.
We're working with the head of the University of Illinois operations research lab. Would they be interested in the contracting with academic research in mind?
Is there any particular reason you picked 3 years as your lower bound? I haven't been as fortunate as most in that I graduated and got a job as a Java dev but the pay isn't at all appealing. I'm planning on jumping ship after a year in order to get a modest salary boost (we already discussed raises with my boss and I will be getting a pittance at the end of this year).
I'd say early in your career 1 year is fine but no more than 3. In fact, I think moving is essential to learning as I have met many people who had 10 years of experience but since they stayed with the same company, they really just had 10 x 1 year of experience.
As you grow in seniority, frequent jumps start hurting you.
Unfortunately, I have failed to see such jumps in compensation for offers that I received, but I'll admit, I haven't worked with most buzzword technologies (eg: big data).
Hot tech may help you but only for a short time until it becomes commodity. I think niche is far more stable in the long term. I.e. I specialized in rule engines for 7 years (Drools, JRules, FICO Blaze etc). Not many experts in this field. Not hot, not growing but a constantly in demand niche from companies who can't exist without it.
Also, independent contracting is often a better option than employment in most parts of the country, but you have to be independent (1099-MISC, never W2). Being a W2 at a consulting company is just as bad as anywhere else. Independent consulting will get you a 2x bump instantly assuming you can find a full time gig but that's usually not that difficult. Furthermore, as a 1099, you'll be able to put away far more in retirement savings. I recommend an LLC with a 401K (not SAP), max out your personal contributions and then kick in another 6% from your 'company'. You'll be socking away ~50K in retirement alone this way while lowering your taxable income. Compare that to your 16K/year max as W2.
Another trick: if a company ever offers you a larger than usual bonus for some reason (i.e. retention, goal met etc) leave the next year when it shows up on your W2 and ask the next employer to merely 'match' your current W2 without breaking out base salary and bonus. I've scored 50% pay increases this way.
Following the above methods, I was making $180K+ at my 8 year mark and $230K+ at my 12 year mark. Most of this happened in the midwest although I currently live in the bay area.