Is 160k common in SV for 6 years experience?

I'm in the L.A. area and people want to crap their pants when I tell them to give me 150k.

I am definitely worth more now; I agree. Unfortunately:

1) Management in all but one job I've had invested nothing in training and helping new employees grow. My technical growth has come through personal projects and taking on extra work.

2) Promotion never offered anything like the salary increases a new job offered. The incentive to stay is not there.

> Your 6-years-ago self was probably not worth half of what your current self is. Your ability to land each new job was built upon the foundations of higher skills and professional maturity you achieved on the previous job.

I think employers massively overweight experience, particularly in a field that changes as fast as ours. Five years ago I was just as smart as I am now, maybe smarter - I didn't have 5 years' experience with tools X, Y and Z, but tools X and Y are already basically obsolete. But the market says I'm worth twice as much now as I was five years ago.

You are not worth more because you know more technologies, though it is an unfair fact on this industry that there will be one or two over-hyped stacks at any time. But back to the point, you are worth more because you have been exposed to the social dynamics patterns that repeat themselves over and over in each new development process. You don't learn that kind of stuff hacking on your bedroom and open source contribution, while valuable, can only take you so far. This is, IMHO, as far as and objective reason to hire someone experienced as you will get.

Also, there is the concept of social proof - which you may argue is a form of over-weighting experience, but that's an open ended question. If you have a track record of going to work for somebody else and achieving X, Y, Z goals there, you are perceived to be a safer choice than someone that in theory might be smarter than you, but that is lazy or otherwise unreliable, or with low communication skills, or a first class jerk. Not that you cannot hire this types if you go with someone more experienced, but from HR perspective, you are more of a "known quantity" once you have been around for a few years and built a track record for yourself.

But you also have five years more experience in designing software, organizing code, debugging, etc. All things that are largely tool agnostic.

I have five years more "professional" experience, seems to be the difference - I had verifiable coding experience on open-source projects before that that would have demonstrated those skills. I've got more confident in my judgement but I'm not at all convinced that judgement has actually improved.

Did your core languages change during each switch? What is your current stack/expertise?

I stuck to the JVM (since people seem willing to pay more if you have experience on the specific stack, and my first job happened to be Java); for the last 3-4 years I've been doing almost exclusively Scala.