Instead of anchoring myself to what Brazilian companies pay for developers, I focused on getting a remote job at a US company. One that would anchor themselves among their peers around SV, LA, NY. Now I earn about 12x more than when I started as a junior when I started 5 years ago. I earn about 3x more than if I was lucky to get the best paying job for my experience level here in my city.

This 3x salary increase is very related to knowing that this privileged world existed, which is mainly HN’s fault in my case.

Bear in mind that I am not earning close to USD200k (but six digits). I learned around here that FAANG salaries exists, but then I decided that those are not for me. But that’s a conscious decision. A much better position of not even knowing this exists.

The issue is that there's no way I'll get as much money as what I'm earning now... and I know building the business will require insurmountable efforts.

So I'm reduced to keep working in IT, wait until my good luck ends and hopefully be able to retire around 45

regardless of whether or not you believe it's just "making that choice," completely discrediting somebody's claim the effort is insurmountable _to them_ makes you a breaker of Rule 1

That said I do bet that if you try to do your thing and it really doesn’t work out you probably can go back to software afterwards if you’re open to the risk of burning through your savings in the process.

Just one example.

Morality may not be objective, but it surely isn’t just personal either. That’s what makes it a nuanced discussion, and not just a choice one makes.

By deciding you want to do that in the future but first you need to save, are you deprioritizing it, or prioritizing it indirectly?

What if it wasn't meant to be taken literally

The extremely trusted is the hard part.

Your paying a local charity usually does much more to the community than even running a gym.

If you run a store or a cafe by just paying locals to work in it, using a part of your high wages, it's pretty helpful. But see the charity above; maybe it's better to support e.g. educators.

In general, your community is never better off if you suddenly become poorer.

Or a charity yes (unless of course it's sth like a SPA for dogs)

Maybe it's just the "midlife crisis"

The first 25 years to improve yourself

The second 25 years to improve your family

The third 25 years to improve your community

The final 25 years to improve everyone

It sounds like you're just reaching the third stage of life :-)

Ridiculously smart move. Congratulations.

I don't think people realize how corrosive to mental health a $200k engineering job can be though. I was making very close to that as a base salary, and the amount of responsibilities I had, that all directly contributed to the success of the organization and the engineering team, was frankly staggering. I was always available, even when I wasn't "on call." I was always putting out very important fires. It never ended.

Even in Berlin, with all the talks about it becoming a top destination for tech people, I'm yet to hear any 6-figures offer. Even the blockchain companies that were flush with cash were paying 90-95k€ to their top people, maybe a 10-20% performance bonus. Mind you, we are talking about Germany where the tax is ~42% of your income at this bracket if you are single.

When I was freelancing, pay was higher, but my best year hit around 130k€ net income, and that only because I deferred a lot of it and got an accountant that advised me to put as much as possible into a private pension fund to have a bigger tax deduction. If I wanted to have that cash in hand, I would've ended up with maybe 80k€?

Yes, cost of living is lower (though rapidly rising, and it is not a post-pandemic thing) and there is plenty of social welfare benefits. Especially after having kids, I wouldn't go to the US for a $200k/year job. But to think that this kind of compensation is par for the course shows a huge disconnect from the reality in the rest of world.

You mentioned taxes. When people talk about comp in the US, we aren't taking out taxes. Effective tax rate (federal+state+fica) for a single individual making $200k of salary+bonus is ~30% here. That would turn $200k into $140k take home.

That is, someone making $200k would pay 10% on their first $9,950 of income, 12% on their next $30,575 of income, and so on. They'd only pay a rate above 30% for the last $35,075 of their income.

You can plug in numbers and locations at https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes to get a sense of how this plays out.

Now with 42% income tax of a 100k salary, there’s a net of 58k arriving at your bank account over a year.

Given that your employer pays 120k, you have actually “lost” 62k (not just 42k) to the government and insurances. With that maths, the _net_ tax (incl. insurances) is actually close to 52%. That is a whopping net +10% taxes from the math in the parent post.

Oh boy, that's one of those misconceptions I'm really sick of. "The tax is so high, I pay almost half of my salary to the greedy state". No, you certainly don't! And if everyone please spent 5 minutes to understand the difference between the effective tax rate and the marginal tax rate, we'd finally get rid of that pointless discussion. With a 100k salary, there is ~75k net arriving at you bank account, if you're married. If you take care of children, it's even more.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einkommensteuer_(Deutschland)#...

I live in Norway and pay an 34% effective tax. The highest in the world at my salary level. I don't complain, because tax money is used for an excellent education system, including the best libraries I've ever been to, and not least for my own ~50k€ PhD salary that every single PhD student in town receives. Meanwhile my high school in Germany didn't even have soap dispensers in the bathrooms because highly skilled hacker news readers don't bother to learn the basics of their tax system before they go and vote for corrupt privatization parties that promise lower taxes and cut back public investments.

> "Money that your employer could otherwise add to your payout..." Also, please don't mix up taxes, insurance and pension. If you'd prefer to pay for medical expenses yourself, do the math. You don't want that, especially when you have a family.

This is not to say that rich people are actually poor because of taxes, obviously, but it seems more likely that people would talk about these things in a somewhat inaccurate way than that they would be totally wrong about what they actually pay.

You're correct that taxes, insurance, and pensions are different things, but in the context of "what amount of money arrives in your bank account at the end of the month", I find it a distinction without a difference.

Plugging in a 100k brutto salary into https://www.bbx.de/brutto-netto-rechner/, yields 57k of take home pay for the year, which is within spitting distance of the 58k figure quoted by OP.

The _income taxes_ of it add to up to "only" ~29k, sure.

And your example of getting 75k on 100k of income if you're married only applies if your spouse doesn't work; which; while I'm sure is a commonly occurring situation, it feels disingenuous to not specify that when mentioning it.

Don't get me wrong — having immigrated from Poland, I am having exactly the same feelings you do towards paying high taxes in Norway — I'm more than happy to pay those, and I see a _world_ of difference in how that that money is used; but we can make _those_ arguments without downplaying the actual amount of money that goes to the State.

If you're happy paying high taxes, you shouldn't feel the need to hide the real numbers (even if you're hiding by omission).

$8,000 -- city, state, and federal taxes take 40%

$3,500 -- rent

$1,500 -- health insurance

$4,000 -- care for my elderly mom

total: $17,000

In other words, it is easy to make $20,000 a month in New York City and feel like you are barely surviving. I'm grateful I don't have children, as it allows me to take care of my mom. If I did have kids, then some very painful choices would have to be made about care for my mom.

Europe is simply a different system.

With that said: my net salary may be less than half of my American counterpart, but my quality of life is certainly better here. At the moment, I would be more interested in getting "German" salaries but to be able to live in Southern Europe than to get US-salaries in Germany.

The other thing the safety net doesn't seem to provide is happiness, much to the chagrin of American democratic socialists. Overtime, unchecked depression results in the crumbling of society as well.

What you are describing is one of my many objections to the EU.

Those are your beliefs, not facts.

The Welfare State exists because some politicians genuinely care about people and want to help those who fall ill or have a divorce and no where to live or lose their job etc.

Not all politicians are calculating sociopaths.

> You can not think of it as something that has a ROI,

Say that to the people in the US dying from cancer because they cannot afford the expensive treatments. Or a researcher 70+ years old, but who cannot retire (although he's 70+), because then he couldn't afford his medications.

Or youths without money to study at University.

Quite odd beliefs and ideas you've ended up with, from my perspective.

In other words: insurance.

> Suppose it was easy for all of those high performers

A bit of a nitpick, but an important one. High performers and high earners are not the same thing.

When the Socialist government increased the marginal tax rate to 70% for millionaires, there was a huge capital flight and they lost revenue.

Moreover, this law was actually pretty fair : it was applied on marginal annual revenue over 1M so it meant that you had to be actually a multi-millionaire to be concerned.

Also, to call the French government socialist I'd completely laughable. Maybe in comparison to somewhere like Hungary, sure.

And I may be wrong about it, but I think that he increased taxes all across high-income brackets, not just the absolute top. And that certainly leads to a game-theoretical equilibrium.

To me (and I assume others) the following calculation comes into play:

- for what I pay in taxes, do I get a reasonably good public services back? I am not saying that I want to account for every euro, but I don't want to feel like I did in Brazil, paying 38% effective tax rate and receiving virtually nothing back in public services and still having to pay again for private healthcare, private education for the kids, etc...

- how much money do I have left in the bank after I paid all my expenses and taxes, i.e, what is my saving power?

If I had a 250k€/year brutto income, it wouldn't be too difficult to show that I would be better off in Switzerland (higher CoL, but way lower tax rate) or in Greece (similar tax rates, less return on public services, but way lower CoL). If Germany decided to increase the effective tax rate, this threshold would go down significantly.

I was more responding to that idea: everything is more expensive, and everyone is making a lot less (not just the top quintile). Seems like a bad trade, but that's just my $0.02

[0] https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/parmigiano-regg... [1] https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-parmi...

No shit, it’s literally an import from Europe. It’s like comparing California wine prices in Las Vegas vs in Sydney.

> veg. I helped a friend do his grocery shopping in a trader joes

Trader Joe’s is not a grocery store for middle class people. It’s a high end convenience store. Unless you’re really well-off, you only buy a few select items from there occasionally.

If you want to see prices the working/middle class pays, look at the prices at Walmart.

Also, you want to compare the quality of products and you can not base yourself on Walmart for that. The average American eats horribly compared to the European counterpart.

Not anything of quality. Most good wines in California that aren’t nasty blends are California wines at $10/bottle range.

> want to compare the quality of products and you can not base yourself on Walmart for that.

Yes you can. The milks, meats, vegetables, and fruits are fine quality-wise. “Walmart == bad quality” is a meme based on their cheap home goods. The food is fine.

> The average American eats horribly compared to the European counterpart.

Having lives in both places (uk, France, and Italy), the supermarkets in the US are vastly superior. The only reason an American would eat worse is if they chose frozen meals, snacks, or just straight up fast food over what’s in the grocery store.

European food costs more and is of more limited variety. The quality is consistently decent though.

The people who I'm comparing myself to in the US strive to buy imported European food, so that's the comparison I'm going to end up making.

Even basic things like fresh vegetables and fresh meat far more expensive than they are in supermarkets here.

That’s a dumb comparison though. Americans generally eat American cuisine. It’s just as dumb as comparing to imported Chinese food.

Maybe a few men here who would want to maximize their income, save for the future? Seems like a good idea,

Still, they're a bubble and not representative of people in general.

Have a look, happiest countries:

https://www.google.com/search?q=happiest+countries

The first question I ask is what would I do with the extra money. I don't _want_ to retire at 40 to pursue my dreams, I like what I'm doing and the pace that I'm doing it at. If I had the choice, I would choose to be where I am doing what I am doing. Why would I move somewhere else for 10 years to make money only to come back and do what I'm doing right now? [0]. I have friends, family, a life here. I don't want to uproot all of that (I have no kids and have already moved country, I don't want to do it again unless it would improve my quality of life). My partner would likely need to find something to do, as it's unlikely she would find a company willing to sponsor a visa for her line of work. Health care being tied to my place of employment is a total nightmare - I can only imagine what happens if I'm in a car accident and I end up at the wrong hospital, or treated by an anaesthetist that is out of network. It's also not just me, the injustice of it boils my blood, and I don't really want to contribute to that system.

I own a car, but it spends 5 days a week parked outside my door, and is only used for "adventuring". The idea of movin somewhere to live in a large house that I have to drive for groceries, drive to the doctors, drive to the bar after work etc, is not appealing to me.

The annual leave situation is commonly far superior in Europe - my current job has 40 days PTO per year, and I take them all. My previous job, the American employees had unlimited PTO, and I don't think my boss ever took anything longer than a long weekend in the 3 years I worked there. It also seemed many of them were banking on a "European trip of a lifetime" with their families, which I can do on the train from where I live (also I live in one of those bucket list countries to boot).

> It seems like non-Americans in this thread are unhappy that their ceilings are lower.

Grass is always greener. The Americans in this thread are complaining that it's so much more expensive to live in the US and are unhappy that it costs so much. Of course it seems the "ideal" situation is work for an American company, on an American salary and live in the UK, but having worked with Americans for the last decade, that has it's tradeoffs too - my workday starts at 10am and ends at 7pm (whereas my partner works 9-5). The "culture" of American work spills across, etc.

[0] https://www.becomingminimalist.com/recognizing-happiness/ - it's not a perfect comparison, but the point stands!

The gross salary a worker sees is after these, so not representative of what it actually costs to hire them.

And I know NYC rent is steep. I lived there as of 6 months ago, and spent a hell of a lot less on rent, and had an apartment no reasonable person would describe as "barely survivable"—it was a beautiful place in Downtown Brooklyn. Rents have increased a bit, as they have everywhere, this past year. But $3,500/month is.. more than ~1/3 of NYC residents take home a month total.

https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/new-york-health-insurance

Also, you might look into state funded elderly care support. Saved my family thousands a month for my dad in assisted living in FL.

I agree that these numbers always sound outlandish (I'm from Germany too), but they do seem to be true. Do keep in mind that while the wage gap is bad here, its several times worse in the USA.

But still, no one would claim that is easy to get a 90k€ salary in Germany, or that "if you are not asking that much then what are you doing". For 150, you have to be way above average or you have to running your own business.

The only true risk is becoming unemployable for some reason and losing your job. USA tech might fly higher but can crater way lower.

More importantly: do people actually take it?

Just compare Berlin with any big American US city, Berliner's PPP is still quite low. This is after the salary "boom" in Berlin.

I can give you some details via DM if you want.

Aside: The neat thing with the statutory health insurance is of course that they have to pay for your treatment, no matter how fucked up your situation is or how little money you have - but if you're healthy and well-paid it's poor value.

Doesn't matter. There's plenty of remote (as in worldwide) offers with these figures now.

Source: heavily interviewed last July while living in Moscow, Russia. Got several offers in that ballpark, accepted one from "Who's hiring" HN thread. Not a rockstar, just a regular developer.

But unless your story can come with many other examples, it should not be counted as representative of any "average" situation from the market at large.

My brother is also an engineer and instead of going after titles and management he decided to stay as an engineer for as long as he could. He’s extremely happy working on things without having direct reports. There’s a sweet spot for everyone here. Some like more freedom and time to recharge (this is me) and some can balance the demands of the work with the demands to explore work (my brother). Then there are others who dive so far head first into work they burn themselves out.

Please, take the time to find your balance. Not only will you be happier, people around you will be too.

No can do.

Ok I quit, but I can consult 3 days a week at 200% pay.

Sounds good.

It can be a bit hard to kick off, but being semi retired could help.

And that most people in the workforce don't get significant bonuses, and no shares.

Software engineering is an absurd bubble.

The only bubble that might pop is an America first hiring mindset which constricts the supply. If this were to change I would expect tech salaries in America to go lower. Then again, this is not that hard to do, most large tech companies already have major offshore dev teams. There are clearly reasons why companies don't move more of their spend offshore.

Maybe the problem is that those other guys as vital and stressful are not being paid enough?

One possible reason for this is that in software the "means of production" is much more accessible, so it's easier for a group of developerss to go it alone than it is in many other professions. When tech salaries are compared to "small business owners" in general, it doesn't seem so out of whack.

It's more that people don't really believe the high salaries and think that there must be some catch. In reality, there isn't, it's just that software is eating the world and thus companies must pay for talent.

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

Mo’ money, mo’ problems

I even negotiate my compensation in a manner that I’m not beholden like those with stock, options or anything where vesting periods are involved. It’s typically event based and more short term. But, I don’t work in a field where I’m turning down early Facebook equity or something like that.

I worked my ass off, grinding on interview studying, working internships and jumping companies whenever I could get a better offer. I'm about to turn 30 and I made 430k (200k of which is salary) in 2021 working at a big company in the US.

I would not consider my background to be particularly privileged and I don't consider myself to be all that smart, but I managed to get here just by working hard and never getting comfortable. Yes, if you get comfortable in the first tech job you land and just sit around enjoying your life, then you probably won't naturally end up in a place making lots of money.

Obviously being privileged and getting everything handed to you makes landing a nice cushy job much easier, but there are still plenty of paths to these high paying jobs if you're willing to work hard.

Also, as mentioned by another person in this thread, this totally does take a toll on your mental health and you absolutely have to sacrifice things. I gave up a lot of things that would have given me a better quality of life, but those were choices I was willing to make.

This has been resonating with me recently: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Just being born and raised in the US means that you don't have to worry about visa issues, for example. And when I was in the US, I only managed to get my H1B through a quota-exempt employer, meaning I couldn't move around for better offers. I also lost count of how many times I received the "you have very good qualifications but unfortunately we can not sponsor visas" email.

A lot of people are going to work as hard or harder than you, but because they chose a different career or because they don't have your set of skills, they'll never reach what you got and that is a huge privilege.

It seems like there are many cases like this where people have different perspectives because they have different understandings of certain word. E.g. "privilege": to some this doesn't have any implications around fairness, like "you pass the exam and you can get your driver's license; then you have the privilege to drive." To others "you're privileged" has an implicit "which isn't fair, and shouldn't be so* attached.

If we're just talking about people who already know they want to work in tech and have some access to a technical education, then I think a path to these jobs is absolutely open to pretty much everyone if they are willing to work hard and sacrifice things. Of course it is easier for some people than others, it's not fair.

If we're talking about people talented enough to actually build and ship their own apps independently, a $200K or more compensation package should be easy to come by remotely or in any medium size city.

For the truly average developer, $200K is definitely not the norm according to any compensation data I've seen.

One issue in this community is its members being unable to understand what "average developer" actually means.

Let's make a deal: I will give you my CV and we can work through it to see what I need to improve. If you get me an $200k/year offer that lets me work remotely, I will give you 15% of it for as long as I work there.

[0]: https://hub20.io

European compensation is lower. Sorry, I shouldn't be generalizing to United States like I did.

That said, in Berlin your options for high comp are largely limited to the big tech companies. You can get some hints here: https://techpays.eu/europe/germany# (sort by total compensation).

My suggestion, if you really want to get those high value offers, is to identify the best paying names on that list and start applying now. Stripe, Shopify, Twitter, other big tech US remote companies primarily. Work with their recruiters to optimize your CV and update your study skills. Use the interviews as practice and feedback, because it will be better than just about any advice we can give you online.

Whatever you do, don't pay some rando from HN huge amounts of money for help. All of the information about interviewing at big tech companies is out there for free. Plenty of prep material to study from.

And it was on purpose. I know that HN is US-centric, but I lived on both sides of the ocean and as time passes I am getting more sensitive to this limited (dare I say privileged?) view from otherwise very smart and educated people.

My proposal was more of a provocation to see if you could really back up the statement that "it should be easy for good people to make that much money remotely or medium-sized city".

> information about interviewing at big tech companies

That's the other thing that bugs me a lot: Big Tech. If these salaries are only attainable at FAANG companies, then the road of getting 200k+ offers is no longer just about being "above average", but also to be okay in selling your soul by working in places that long stopped worrying about the welfare of its consumers.

They are not. Looking at LinkedIn I see many such salaries for engineers. At your experience level you would be making many hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US, even remotely.

Caveat, 200k would have to include bonuses, and not just base salary.

- it can not be a FAANG company, or any other company who makes their money by unethically exploiting consumerism, and/or advertising that abuses user privacy. These are non-negotiables. I want to sleep at night without thinking about how many people get screwed over for my benefit.

- things like "flexible schedule" and "work-life balance" need to be more than just wishful thinking. I have two small kids that are always going to be my priority.

If you are up for it, let me know your email and I will send you my CV.

balasuar @ gmail dot com

> Also the cost of doing something so small can add up when you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy.

The point being relatively easy if you fit a specific criteria (don't need flexibility, want to work long hours, have a above average CV, can live near a major tech hub, have no problem working for FAANG etc).

And this is why I made the proposal, it was a challenge to this notion that it is easy. I stand by the idea that is not, and I am willing to pay to be proven wrong.

It may not have been clear, but we agree.

Worst case, they can't find a job and nothing changes. Best case, I'd be getting a job where I could work from anywhere in the world and that would pay me 30% more than what I was getting previously.

I've been able to build and ship my own apps for almost a decade now and have never received an offer close to that, even in SF. Maybe things have changed in the last 5 years, but whenever I see the 200k figure I always have to scoff.

Skillset has nothing to do with this problem.

I'm an above-average-skill but ADHD / below-average-work-ethic software dev in Canada who just finished interviews and my highest offer was $150K USD. I only prepped algorithms for 1-2 months but have a feeling if I spent 4 months prepping, I'd be able to break into the mid to high 200K USD range. And this is well below what a lot of people are making in the U.S. according to levels.fyi and teamblind.com

I don't say this to make you feel bad, and I even agree that the average is of course lower (glassdoor says the U.S. average for software engineers is ~$108K USD though I suspect older data-points bring it down from the real figure).

But I think >70% of U.S.-based software engineers with >5 years of experience are capable of breaking into 200K USD if they spent 3-6 months preparing (depending on their degree of natural talent and abilities to learn, problem-solve, and retain information).

Of course, chasing TC is also not a fun treadmill to be on, so if you're comfortable, you should do what makes you happy :)

The point of this is to say that these numbers are very, very real, and even attainable for the majority of devs who set their sights on them, and it's kind of silly to scoff at them as you put it. The only important skills required are ambition, dedication, perseverance, and good research skills (which are among the most critical skills for software engineers anyway) to be able to navigate negotiations and the market.

There are companies that hire at average salaries. Usually targeting Radford database @ 50% or whatever numbers they think they can get away with paying.

The next cluster of companies pay well but not at FAANG levels. They pay somewhere around 80-90th percentile of salary data. They collect all of the best employees who either can't, won't, or don't want to get FAANG jobs.

Then the long tail of FAANG salaries occupies something like the 95th-99th percentile of salaries. These are the numbers you see on the levels.fyi homepage.

HN tends to over-emphasize the FAANG level salaries, but there are a lot of companies in the middle bucket that pay much better than average. You might have to network and work to find them, though. Staying at average or below-average companies too long can actually make your resume less attractive over time, so you have to put in some work to break out of the rut and into the higher paying companies.

- Lowe's (Charlotte): https://www.levels.fyi/company/Lowe-s/salaries/Software-Engi...

- Equifax (Atlanta): https://www.levels.fyi/company/Equifax/salaries/Software-Eng...

- ExxonMobil (Houston): https://www.levels.fyi/company/ExxonMobil/salaries/Software-...

- T-Mobile (Dallas): https://www.levels.fyi/company/T-Mobile/salaries/Software-En...

TL;DR; look around and ask for more if you don't see $200k near you and you would like to earn more. I'm biased, but I think it's also worth noting that $200k in Dallas leaves a person with a lot more money left over after basic expenses than it does in SF.

Different continent, different problems? :)

EDIT: Shopify not Spotify

1 - levels.fyi will not have a record of all the folks working at a given company.

2 - Somebody is indeed the highest-paid engineer at every firm, so that data point is relevant. (It could be you!)

3 - Fine, swap out ExxonMobil for Chevron in Houston and then realize they hire from the same talent pool and likely are in the same total comp range: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Chevron/salaries/Software-Eng...

4 - Take JP Morgan in Houston as a bonus: https://www.levels.fyi/company/JPMorgan-Chase/salaries/Softw...

5 - Yes, some tech people make a lot less than others. It is also true that $200k is still rapidly becoming a mid-career salary in major US cities beyond the expensive coasts. (No, you are not mid-career at age 28.)

Mid-career means somewhere near the middle of your career. If you expect to work from age ~23 to ~65, the middle is around age 44. (Edit: if you start work at age 18, the middle is still over age 41.) Age 28 is much closer to the beginning of your career than the middle. Even if you retire at 50, the middle of your career is still in your mid-30s.

First, tech changes so fast that we end up having many "mini-careers" instead of a long one.

Second, ageism is still a thing: unless your work is so noteworthy that companies hire you for the PR (or to avoid that a competitor hires you for similar reasons), companies think there is not that much of a difference between someone with 5-7 years of experience vs 12-15.

This is where senior engineers have an opportunity to shine. Knowing not to pick up every shiny object, being able to draw parallels between many different projects, etc. all matter. For shipping software, just as it's possible to draw on lessons across tech stacks, it's also possible to apply lessons from entirely different paradigms (e.g. Windows desktop vs Web vs mobile).

The risk here is the apocryphal interview question of whether an engineer has 15 times of 1 year of experience or 15 years of experience. Mini-careers are better.

> Second, ageism is still a thing: unless your work is so noteworthy that companies hire you for the PR (or to avoid that a competitor hires you for similar reasons), companies think there is not that much of a difference between someone with 5-7 years of experience vs 12-15.

Ageism is definitely a thing. However, I can attest that companies can understand the difference if you are able to communicate it effectively. Again, remember that in the scheme of things that a person with 5-7 years of experience is new to the field. If you have 15 years of meaningful experience, you should be able to differentiate from someone who does not, in a way that matters to the hiring firm.

The bigger hurdle in mid-career is that where a firm may be frequently hiring juniors due to higher turnover and the general need by many teams to have fewer experienced engineers than juniors, they may not hire senior folks as frequently. So the job search to find an real senior role will take longer. This is not unique to tech; the dynamics are broadly similar to other professional fields.

The bottom line is that $200k at non-tech firms in major US cities is by no means a comp range for a mid-career engineer that requires one to be especially noteworthy in the field.

Early: 22-36

Mid: 37-52

Late: 53-68

You're definitely not mid career in your 20s. I'm in my 20s and I think that's dumb.

The way it needs to be interpreted is that one can get a $200K job in a high cost of living area such as the SF Bay Area, and other similar areas.

Additionally, one can get a correspondingly high salary, whatever that number might be, in an area with a different cost of living.

In other words, in most areas one can get a good paying tech job relatively easily for that area.

The point is that it's much easier and more lucrative to use your expertise as a well-paid employee than to run your own small business. Been on either side, can confirm.

The Bay Area might have the world's highest paying market for software engineers.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Netflix&trac...