> Making $80k a year is a GREAT salary. That’s going to invoke a hearty yawn from many when comparing to dev salaries.
I'd like to draw a distinction here:
$80k is very good, by the standards of what most people can get.
$80k is middling-to-poor compared to how fast the cost of living is going up. Housing prices are skyrocketing, people have no savings, can't afford emergencies.
The economy is leaving people behind. In my area, SWE pay moves closer to "normal difficulty" every year, while everyone else moves to "hard".
Once when working in devops I asked my team lead why we didn't just move everything to Heroku, rather than reinventing a bad in-house version of their features.
I was firmly told not to suggest it again unless I wanted to put all of us out of a job.
That seemed ridiculous to me — we had a laundry list of ways we could help the business if we got basic platform stuff off of our plates. But I sure learned something about how incentives affect otherwise-good engineers.
I'd like to draw a distinction here:
$80k is very good, by the standards of what most people can get.
$80k is middling-to-poor compared to how fast the cost of living is going up. Housing prices are skyrocketing, people have no savings, can't afford emergencies.
The economy is leaving people behind. In my area, SWE pay moves closer to "normal difficulty" every year, while everyone else moves to "hard".