Junior programmer (22): makes $80-100k, 120k in the Bay Area. Easily gets jobs.
Senior programmer (28): 5-10 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $120-140k, possibly 150k. Serious stock options possible with the right company. Three-month job searches.
Expert programmer (37): 3-5 times as valuable as the senior, so 15-50 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $150-200k. Leaves the Bay Area/NYC because he can't afford to raise kids there. Has a defined specialty. Job searches take 6-8 months because he's overqualified for everything but high-level positions, and those in his specialty number in the single-digits nationally.
Master programmer (45): TO;DH.
This industry pays well at the entry-level (if you went to a reputable college, live in the right city, know where to look and how to play the game) but doesn't have a clue when it comes to rewarding excellence. Getting better tends to backfire when this industry (being run by dumbass MBA types) continues to insist on structuring itself like a pyramid.
I would qualify myself as an "expert programmer" given your scale, and it actually took me 2-3 weeks to find a job last year.
It did take me six months to find a "senior level" job two years back though.
My point is that it mostly depends on the economic circumstances and it's not quite correct to assume that people will specialize as they grow older - differently from the past, where IBM was giving away 10-year and 20-year presents, nowadays the average tenure at a company is about 3 years, and much shorter in younger companies and startups. The economic incentive is to be versatile, so that's what people get good at.
The salary depends a lot on where you are. Junior programmers in my area can't expect to make more than ~$40k (just below Alabama's median income). I would love to have the $80k salary that you claim "junior" programmers make (and like to consider myself closer to senior, given the options you presented). Maybe it's because I live in the wrong city, or didn't go to a reputable college, or am looking in the wrong places. My point is, it's difficult to feel privileged with a below-average income. There's something to be said for the environment: the (average quality) office chairs, the incredibly smart people I get to be around on a daily basis, having a job that allows me to prop my feet up and work off my laptop all day.
It's not something I take for granted, don't get me wrong; I just have a hard time feeling like I have it so much better than the guy who cleans the floors. Considering that I probably only make ~10-15k more per year and had to work considerably harder to get where I am, and that I have to work much harder day to day, we're probably about even.
I work as a full-stack developer and UI/UX designer, specializing in Node.js on the backend. I've been working a bit with Go lately in my free time. I also work at an agency, so that may affect my salary as compared to working on, say, a SaaS product.
Out of my own curiosity, where would I seek a 75-90k salary where the cost of living doesn't negate the increase?
Thank you for the detail! You definitely sounds like you should be 100k+ to me.
I would say you don't even have to move (although Seattle might be a good choice), but you'd have to find remote work.
Do you have a Github and LinkedIn profile? Put Go, Node and front-end expertise on there but don't say you're looking for a new position. When the recruiters start contacting you, let them know you're open to remote work ONLY if they can get you 90k+. They can get you this. State that it HAS to be remote in your initial contact and don't waiver.
Alternatively you could spend a couple years in the Bay Area or NY and build up a great network then move back as a consultant or remote employee.
Another negotiation tip: The recruiters will ask you how much you're currently making. DON'T tell them (you can after you get 100k+ :). Tell them "I'm not currently looking for work, but if you can find me something 90k+ I would be willing to take a look". Be nice but be firm.
I hope I don't come across as a dick but it sounds like your skills don't really match your location. I'm sure there are 10x as many .net/java roles in your area than node.js ones. Outside of a few major tech hubs the well paying jobs that will pay $70-$80k for a junior are more "boring" corporate roles.
You don't sound dickish at all, and you're absolutely right that there are more "enterprise-y" roles here than Node. In fact, the shop I'm at now is one of probably less than 10 companies in the entire state that would hire anyone to do Node. During my time here I've racked up over 2000 hours working in Node.js alongside some very bright people, and it's a technology I feel quite bullish on. I'm always trying to learn and grow as a developer, but I feel a lot more comfortable working in technologies like Node or Go than something like Java. That said, I'm not opposed to JVM offshoots like Clojure, which I find fascinating.
From Austin, I've seen junior salaries around 75k. Cost of living is pretty low. I'm in Seattle now, where most of the companies are in the 90k-120k for junior pay. It doesn't have the same cost of living as SF and is much more reasonable.
A $40K salary in Alabama might very well give you a higher standard of living than $80K in NYC or Silicon Valley, where housing and other necessities are very expensive (and income taxes are probably higher).
That's true, but he mentioned "$120k in Silicon Valley", which leads to believe the $80k applies to "places with a lower cost of living than Silicon Valley". I've looked at the numbers before and the standard of living evens out, depending on your priorities. If I live in San Francisco, I have a much shorter commute than my current 30-minute one-way drive from the suburbs - however, we'd have to double or triple our rent to maintain the same size apartment.
FWIW: I'm a junior programmer (22) and get right at the 80k mark. I'm not sure how common it is but I know my similarly-aged friends and coworkers make nearly as much as I do.
Usually people want to own a home when they start a family. Home prices in the bay area are insane, second only to Manhattan. If you are able to pull in 200k a year as a remote worker, you can get a much nicer home by just moving a few hundred miles away.
Also, you're paying 3-6 airfares when you travel, and you have to worry about education expenses. Even though there are great public schools, those are expensive when one considers that they're priced into the housing market. Then there's college (especially admissions and the attendant dark tuition, which are more terrifying than tuition because dark tuition-- elite high schools, counselors with connections, bullshit "internships" on bought strings-- can run into the half-million range). I'm terrified of how competitive college admissions are going to be in 25 years, especially because going to an elite school matters far more than it used to. (There are plenty of 50-year-old CEOs who went to state schools; these days, kids from Yale can't get VC.)
Personally, I think our society is unintentionally de-eugenicizing itself. If you're smart and thoughtful, having kids is a terrifying idea. The meltdown of the middle and upper-middle class is causing the most thoughtful people to choose not to have children (can anyone, excluding billionaires, make a confident bet 20+ years into the future?) and it'll be interesting to see what this does to the aggregate IQ level of our society. Free higher education (for the qualified) has all sorts of benefits, but one among them that is enormous (if not politically correct) is that it removes one of the major factors that impels smart people to reproduce less.
It also comes with pronounced income uncertainty. Software gigs run 2-5 years very typically. Spending 6-12 months in a job search (there are bust times as well as boom) when you've got mouths to feed is particularly stressful.
I'm probably exaggerating the badness of it. It depends how sensitive you are to context.
Job searching is easier when you're employed because, even though you have 1/4 the time to dedicate to the search, your confidence is intact, and it doesn't piss you off every time you check your inbox and it's empty. When you're jobless, every time you check your inbox and don't see anything new, it's an acute insult.
Most people wait too long to search for other jobs and, consequently, end up searching while they're in bad shape: laid off, fired, or employed but recently demoted or topped-out. When you're 22 and unsure of yourself, it's not so bad because people expect it. When you're 40, it's devastating.
More savvy people never stop looking for jobs. I don't. You never know when you're going to need to go elsewhere.
When highly qualified older people face 1+ year job searches, it's usually a mix of issues. Part of it is that high-level jobs are rarer, but part of it is what happens to their confidence (to anyone's confidence) when under financial stress.
Acute financial stress can actually really fuck you up (adrenal fatigue) and, when you're older, you don't recover from blown-out nerves as easily. In the past, most 40+ people had savings, but with housing and education costs being what they are, it's increasingly common for people to reach that age and still have nothing.
I don't interview if there isn't a high chance that I'd take the offer, but I pay attention to salary trends and opportunities pretty much constantly, because top-notch opportunities are uncommon and usually come through networking. Chance favors a prepared mind.
I wouldn't waste someone's time to "just humor" them. I feel like that would backfire.
Senior programmer (28): 5-10 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $120-140k, possibly 150k. Serious stock options possible with the right company. Three-month job searches.
Expert programmer (37): 3-5 times as valuable as the senior, so 15-50 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $150-200k. Leaves the Bay Area/NYC because he can't afford to raise kids there. Has a defined specialty. Job searches take 6-8 months because he's overqualified for everything but high-level positions, and those in his specialty number in the single-digits nationally.
Master programmer (45): TO;DH.
This industry pays well at the entry-level (if you went to a reputable college, live in the right city, know where to look and how to play the game) but doesn't have a clue when it comes to rewarding excellence. Getting better tends to backfire when this industry (being run by dumbass MBA types) continues to insist on structuring itself like a pyramid.