Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Serious question, how many years? I ask because 1) I make really good money now, especially if you ignore the SV/FAANG outliers that everyone here pretends are the norm, but it still took me 7-8 years to break 100k USD, in the US. 2) Maybe because there are so many new devs now but I hear people say a lot "I've been doing this for years!" then when you dig into it "years" means 2 or 3. These are also the same people who don't consider themselves junior 6 months into their first job, or consider themselves senior after 3 years. A career is 30-40 years long.

The median income for a dev in the US is 100k. That's going to skew down due to lots of juniors but it also includes everyone making several hundred thousand dollars a year. I am taking a pay cut down to 160 for better WLB on a product I have used for years as a customer and really care about, and I think if you ignore the outliers I am very well compensated at 12 YOE and existing domain knowledge.



I'm mid way through my second decade of professional programming. I'm still well below $100k USD. But I earn way above average for NZ.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: