I feel that the only way I can advance my current position is by getting other job offers, but I don't want to be that guy.
I have found this strategy very effective over the years. I have only been working full time since 2004, and since then my salary has gone from 30k to 110k. I have never taken a job that paid less than the previous one, and on a few occasions I have used competing offers to get raises, or just taken the other job. People may look down on the fact that I have worked for 5 companies in 5 years, but at the same time I have learned a great deal, experienced lots of vastly different company cultures, and I've increased my salary by double in the past 3 years alone.
The secret to getting large salary increases when switching jobs and to avoid getting held back by salary history is to show how you are worth more to the new company than you were to the old one. For example, when I took a job that paid 50k as a junior PHP dev, I spent a year learning object oriented PHP5 and payment processing. I used this experience to land a job paying 58k working on high traffic sites where I learned caching, scaling, and performance tuning. I used this experience to get a job paying 70k working on an advanced ad serving platform running on a cluster of 50 servers, where I learned about load balancing. I used this experience to get a job paying 96k working for ClearChannel, working on syndicated radio shows, where I learned about streaming audio and video. This experience landed me at a stealth mode startup where I'm making 110k plus stock options. Each step of the way, the experience I gained at the last job made me more valuable than my last salary, so the new company offered more, and I didn't even have to ask the first few times (though the last two times, the same recruiter did the asking on my behalf).
I have found this strategy very effective over the years. I have only been working full time since 2004, and since then my salary has gone from 30k to 110k. I have never taken a job that paid less than the previous one, and on a few occasions I have used competing offers to get raises, or just taken the other job. People may look down on the fact that I have worked for 5 companies in 5 years, but at the same time I have learned a great deal, experienced lots of vastly different company cultures, and I've increased my salary by double in the past 3 years alone.
The secret to getting large salary increases when switching jobs and to avoid getting held back by salary history is to show how you are worth more to the new company than you were to the old one. For example, when I took a job that paid 50k as a junior PHP dev, I spent a year learning object oriented PHP5 and payment processing. I used this experience to land a job paying 58k working on high traffic sites where I learned caching, scaling, and performance tuning. I used this experience to get a job paying 70k working on an advanced ad serving platform running on a cluster of 50 servers, where I learned about load balancing. I used this experience to get a job paying 96k working for ClearChannel, working on syndicated radio shows, where I learned about streaming audio and video. This experience landed me at a stealth mode startup where I'm making 110k plus stock options. Each step of the way, the experience I gained at the last job made me more valuable than my last salary, so the new company offered more, and I didn't even have to ask the first few times (though the last two times, the same recruiter did the asking on my behalf).