Just my 2 cents...If you want to make significantly more, focus on the business problems you can solve, not the technology you know/use. I’m not an “X” developer. I’m a business person that happens to use code to add value.

If this is outside your comfort zone, look for some basic books on business and internalize the fact that until you can tie your knowledge to dollars coming through the door, you likely won’t make significant jumps in pay.

There are numerous posts that have been shared on HN on how to make more money as a consultant/contractor/freelance developer. They are almost 100% relevant to company employees.

Could you elaborate a bit more?

It's hard to realize what problems a business faces without being involved intimately in the industry.

How can one seek out these problems and begin to work on solutions?

Would you mind sharing those posts?

I’m not saying this is something you can change tomorrow. It could be months, could be years. Really depends on how quickly you can learn the business you are involved in and where you are starting from. I don’t know you or your situation so this advice is extremely general. Focus on what the problems are your business/clients have which cost them money or find a way to answer a question like “if we do this it costs X and we make Y.” Make sure you drive those types of initiatives and get your name attached to them but that doesn’t always mean doing it alone.

The posts are pretty easily searchable and even if you don’t find the ones I’m thinking of, the process of searching and filtering on its own is important. One thing I had to learn the hard way is that, with a few rare exceptions, no one is going to be your teacher/mentor. Everyone is too busy with their own shit.

Ultimately, if you want to know more or make more, it comes down to finding ways to justify that to the people that can make that decision. Given you make around $85k/year you need to look at the people several years ahead of you in the career track, if one exists, at your company.

If your goal is to make more, you need to be aggressive. Invest in yourself in as many ways as you can. Learn more about software. Start by expanding beyond “web developer”. learn back-end programming, databases, etc. Talk to the people in your company that do sales, marketing, operations, HR. Learn as much as you can about your business or one you want to move into. Experience trumps everything. If you aren’t getting experience that makes you more valuable, you need to move on.

My last piece of advice is more of a warning. A lot of how much you make comes down to luck. Did the interviewer like you for the highly paid job? Did the team you are a part of get the credit for a major win for the company? Or other things that aren’t always within your control. The important thing is that you keep moving forward. Looking for opportunities and driving things to completion. Hard for me to not phrase this in terms of finance...you want to constantly be buying call options on yourself. So that new thing you learn/project you complete that gets your name out there? It is a call option on yourself. Most of those options expire worthless, but hopefully a few pay off big time.

Wow this is great advice, thank you I appreciate the time and effort you took in writing that.

I have a few follow up questions if you dont mind.

>If your goal is to make more, you need to be aggressive. Invest in yourself in as many ways as you can. Learn more about software. Start by expanding beyond “web developer”. learn back-end programming, databases, etc. Talk to the people in your company that do sales, marketing, operations, HR. Learn as much as you can about your business or one you want to move into. Experience trumps everything. If you aren’t getting experience that makes you more valuable, you need to move on.

Its so easy to learn in isolation, but how can you actually turn it into profit? How can you quantify your skills? How does one get good at tha?

Also, why the call option analogy, do you work in finance (just curious)?

In case you happen to see this: The commenter replying to you here is right, but that approach also seems really overwhelming. Something actionable but I think a bit easier along the same lines: take projects or seek opportunities to work closely with your product managers, or whatever your company calls the people whose job is to figure out what the customer / market wants from your product. Basically the people they make the most fun of in Office Space - "I talk to the customer so the developers don't have to" - are really important and great people to learn from.

Web development and other easy domains like iOS / Android are quickly going the way of other craft jobs of the past: Blue collar.

If you want to make above average salaries you're going to have to specialize. Find something that is both challenging (to reduce barrier to entry) and niche (to demand a higher salary). In other words - specialize. Staying as a generic web/ios/android dev is only going to guarantee that your salary becomes more and more diluted by the avalanche of developers entering the field. The barrier to entry is just too low.

>other easy domains like iOS / Android

In my department, mobile is the bottleneck for every PM's ambitions and the only speciality where recruiting never even approaches headcount/budget. It's possible that the low end contract labor market is flooded or something, but iOS and Android devs who can pass a whiteboard are worth their weight in gold.

I really don't agree with this. I'm a 27 year old JS-focused web dev @150k base.

I understand that the bootcamps and proliferation of web-teaching schools have made web dev seem like the easy thing, and I agree that what I do is less complex than these $800k-earning data engineers, but web development in 2019 is no joke. The same goes for iOS/Android.

The types of things these companies are trying to build are not just "slap it together in a week and done" type projects and it takes experience to architect and engineer them effectively. Your average bootcamp grad is not able to do it yet.

iOS/Android/Web development forms the 3 primary portals to a company's clients, and as long as that's true, the value of such skillsets will remain high.

Who is a data engineer here making $800k?

I'm sorry, but anyone who says any domain is easy either hasn't written real code in it, or is making gross generalizations about entry level code monkey positions that doesn't reflect the entirety of the space.

I don't care if it's games, web front end, back end, databases, machine learning, mobile, embedded literally doesn't matter, if you think you can brush off any of them like that, you haven't built something substantial with them.

Are there varying levels of difficulty across niches? Sure, but one person can slap a few python libraries together in an afternoon and call it AI/machine learning, and a 3-5 person team can also spend 6 months building a monster, fined tuned native iOS application.

There's challenges everywhere, it's a matter of finding them.

I get your point, but it's objectively false. If your same argument cannot be made for any domain, than you can't simply make it for domains of your choosing.

Certain careers DO have levels of challenge, as well as other barriers to entry, that increase the value of workers. You could not argue to me that flipping burgers at McDonalds is hard. Within the domain of computer science, you simply cannot argue to me that generic CRUD web/ios/android is hard.

And you can't argue that the extent of web/ios/android development is generic CRUD. I'm not attempting to make it for domains of my choosing, I'm making it for the entirety of computer science related domains.

Of course not. I think it goes without saying that within any technical domain is the capacity for a top ~5% performer, who understand such a depth of that domain that it becomes a specialization in itself.

I'm merely stating that the domain itself, is not by default, a high enough barrier to entry to merit any kind of above average salary. Of course if you're a much higher performer, with a much deeper knowledge base within that domain, then your pay will likely reflect that.

I have never encountered this. Good mobile developers are in extremely high demand.

What are some examples of challenging and niche fields? How can one do research to find fields like this that they also enjoy? As well as realize whether they have any marketable potential?

I just walked away from an offer at a React shop in Manhattan for 200K TC. There's plenty of specialization available still.

The only thing this means is that development quality goes down as salaries get lower though.

this is simply wrong, don't listen to this.

I am in Australia as well, I started on a similar base as you. I told employers that I was willing to learn and do anything. Most the stuff I have worked on is back-end services.

2010 - 25yo - 41k - First job - .net dev (internal services / sql).

2011 - 26yo - 41.1k

2012 - 27yo - 65k - Second job - job advertised as .net became pseudo COBOL dev.

2013 - 28yo - 80k - moved more in to tech lead / manager role.

2014 - 29yo - 86k - Third job - .net web dev (webforms / mvc).

2015 - 30yo - 86k

2016 - 31yo - 163k - COBOL / .net + odds and ends

2017 - 32yo - 163k

2018 - 33yo - 170k

As others have said, technology really isn't the thing that will drive your increase in remuneration. It is understanding client requirements, creating business solutions, being able to communicate said solutions.

Was it hard to get into a COBOL role? I am interested in moving that way, was driven to Coldfusion under the excitement of working on challenging code. Naturally the next progression is COBOL.

Oh man you hear some silly numbers being thrown around when it comes to COBOL...

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-banks-cobol/banks-scra...

Are these US or Australian dollars?

Look into the E-3 visa if you want to earn an SF/NYC salary. It's only available to Australians and we never use the entire quota.

Atlassian (Sydney) is always hiring for Java and/or JavaScript. Great company, good compensation, plenty of room for growth. If you’re interested, or want to know more, hit me up - marcins at gmail

Just chiming in to second all of this. Best combination of comp, culture & growth opportunities in my career.

Disclaimer: am a hiring manager at Atlassian, so obviously I am biased (though currently hiring in the US market).

Sounds sort of inline with me (Melbourne):

2014/2015 - 23 - $50K - $70K | Fraud Analyst using C#/Python/SQL

2016/2017 - 25 - $90K | Teradata/SQL Developer

2018 - 26 - $70K | SQL Developer and Coldfusion/Java

I switched companies in 2018 to be a little closer to home which resulted in a substantial paycut.

I feel your struggle with savings, buying a house in Melbourne is definitely not easy.

I couldn't care less about salary if I could work remote.

> 2018 - 28yo - $85K

I assume these are AUD. You don't say where in Aus you're based, but it's not terrible at that age, you're still some way off peak, it's slightly above average.

Based on https://www.livingin-australia.com/salaries-australia/

  Average Full Time Ordinary Time Earnings Q2 2018
  State Average Annual Wage
  Tasmania $71,718
  South Australia $75,369
  Queensland $80,304
  Victoria $80,610
  New South Wales $83,517
  Northern Territory $86,762
  Western Australia $90,496
  Capital Territory $94,224

Do you work in Australia as well? If so, Ignoring US even, you've got 5 years exp and you're making $85k AUD. That's not high for Australia. Is that including Super?

The larger tech companies in Melbourne and Sydney are giving $120k+ AUD total comp to grads.

> The larger tech companies in Melbourne and Sydney are giving $120k+ AUD total comp to grads

Which larger tech companies?

I'm self employed and have worked 100% remote for around 5 years, so am a bit out of touch. However, I have close friends in senior positions at major tech companies in Melbourne (REA, Xero etc.) and $120k for grads sadly does not align with what I've heard from them, closer to $70k (AUD) for a grad seems to be the norm.

> closer to $70k (AUD) for a grad seems to be the norm

Which by all accounts is a fantastic wage for someone fresh out of Uni -- nothing to sneeze at. Don't get discouraged keep at it, you'll get there.

It's absolutely nothing to sneeze at when comparing yourself to the rest of Australian society. Certainly got to be thankful to be in the industry.

However, it's a surprisingly weak effort by Australian tech companies to attract high quality talent. My first full-time software development job, almost 10 years ago and without a degree, was $70k. That was at your run-of-the-mill medium sized enterprise consulting firm.

Not REA, they offer really low.

I'm talking about Atlassian, Canva, Google, AWS, IMC, Optiver.

> The larger tech companies in Melbourne and Sydney are giving $120k+ AUD total comp to grads.

That's some nonsense. Could you drop some names for 'Graduate X' which has that kind of pay scale?

With that being said, it's quite possible to earn 150k+ within 4-5 years in Melbourne. Just be smart about it, listen out for what technologies are trending because inevitably they will be the most numerous and with the highest chance to score a well paying role -- especially if you have your ahead of the influx of developers in X language.

By all accounts I'm not especially talented and I have done so.

PS. If you want $$ learn Salesforce, the money which comes along with knowing that system is freakin craziness.

Not nonsense at all. I answered with a list of companies.

I got offered $150k+ at Zendesk Melbourne out of uni, but that was a special situation. But also I literally did get that offer so no, 120k is not "nonsense".

You just stated that it was an exceptional circumstance and now we're saying that it's normal. You played your cards right and got out on top, that's great - congrats.

I can tell you however, that is not a normal run-of-the-mill pay-scale for a Uni graduate.

Yeah it's not run of the mill, but great graduate candidates can absolutely get $120K+, so it puts into perspective the salary of the thread's OP, who had like 5 years experience.

You get paid 3 times as much working in the US. You also get treated well rather than as a cost centre which was my experience back in Aus.

I'm an Australian developer earning triple that+stocks on top at one of the FAANG. Trump, guns and shitty healthcare don't affect you day to day in the states. The E3 visa for Australians to work in the US is trivial.

The funny thing is that Sydney real estate is comparable to silicon valley despite no one earning anynear as much.

+1 I'm not doing much more different than I was when I left Australia, but went from 130K-ish AUD (inc super+bonus) to 260K-ish USD (inc bonus+stocks) = 370AUD in the last few years. The taxes are significantly lower on these amounts in the US as well (at least in Seattle where there's no income tax).

Not that funny for those of us in Sydney haha.

Where do you live?

Perth, very similar to your stats.

Sydney

2016 60k First Job

2016 65k

2017 70k Second Job

2017 80k

2018 90k

2019 110k