> Am I being screwed or paid good money?

To the Average Joe, your getting great money. The U.S. median household income is $51,939... http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/upshot/you-cant-feed-a-fam...

> Should I stay or should I go?

Salary and title can be hollow benchmarks. Ultimately, you drive your career growth. It might be helpful to know where you want go. Are you looking for director level with larger management responsibilities? Or do you prefer to manage important projects as an individual contributor? Suggest developing a personal scorecard that indicates professional growth. Use that as a career road map.

Career advancements in large companies can be rather arbitrary. Some of the worst programmers I've ever worked with were "Senior" or "Staff" level. From my experiences, people get promoted in large companies for a few reasons:

1 - Politics. This is the most obvious one. People in power share power with people they like because it helps them maintain control.

2 - Tenure. Some companies just auto-promote people after a certain period of time. These periods of times can be very long if the company has an older "business" view of tenure and promotions. This doesn't seem to be the case at your company though, given your friends.

3 - Business knowledge over programming skills. I've seen quite a few terrible programmers get elevated to higher positions simply because they had good knowledge of the project. Any time they were in their text editor they were probably doing a disservice to the code, but the companies really valued their domain expertise.

money wise you are in pretty good position. 128k in Seattle is almost 140k in NYC and probably 150k in SF due to the tax difference. Career wise, it might be a good idea to pursue a conversation with your manager on how you can grow. What is it that you are not doing or you need to do that will make sure that you get a promotion in the next cycle.

128k a year... living in the US... and yet complaining...

I only wish I had my grass that green.

I think you are doing fine sir, just stop comparing yourself to others. If you are unhappy -- change jobs. But don't be a slave to other people opinions about how much money you should be making or your job. You'll always be unhappy that way.

One of the big banks has instituted this policy recently of firing a certain percentage of the seniors-and-above every year till they get become small enough. Now, do you want to be senior in this firm? :-)

There is a way to ensure career progress even when you are denied career progress : keep doing stuff and talk about it. For example, write a paper. Or write blog posts of this level of quality : http://aphyr.com/posts/294-call-me-maybe-cassandra/. Be good and be available. Then politics and denial of career progress at your current firm will become their problem, not yours.

Have you tried asking your manager for a promotion? Be sure to state your case (don't say my friends are already senior). If not start looking internally for a higher position or apply to another company. Many large corporations are no longer loyal to their employees, so why should you?

Well, either you are good and unrecognized, then you may indeed go and find (or make yourself) a better place, or it is that you are incompetent, but badly enough for the big company to bother firing you, and then your best interest is to stay.

Getting promos in large companies seems to include some amount of politics. I think I'm pretty competent at tech but not at politics. Not sure what OP (or myself) can do in these situations. My suspicion is that the politically astute do well everywhere - small and large companies.