When I go there.... I see a lot of data points with ~10 years of experience paying ~$140K.
Which is more like I expected honestly -- it's just that OP was blowing my mind suggesting $175K-$225k and up... saying they are using levels.fyi as data too... or discussions here on this post with someone making $175K being considered very underpaid... every time I see salaries discussed on HN I end up confused.
So there are all these people in these threads who are like "I only make $175K/200K/150K, I feel like I'm grossly underpaid when I read these things."
I got you all beat.
I have 15+ experience. I am a really good coder. I can be very not humble because this is a throwaway, but everyone who has ever worked with me or gone to school with me or worked on open source with me would agree, I am very good at designing and writing and maintaining software, including understanding what software should be written, let's just accept that for the sake of discussion.
I only make around $90K.
Now, I work in the non-profit/academic sector, and have my whole career. That's what I wanted to do, and I make more than most people in my social circles even at $90K, but the work is getting old, it's not actually that "meaningful" in the end, and especially when people keep saying that I could be making literally 4-5x what I'm making.
I also these days mostly only know ruby and Rails (but that's not un-marketable right? And I certainly can learn other things, I have before. And I know ruby really well).
People here are like "Sure, but don't you want good work/life balance, maybe $175K is just fine for that." Yes, and $175K would be a fortune to me!
I literally don't understand how I get into that market. Because I have worked in academic/non-profit industry my whole career. (which I don't know if that leaves me out now. And I'm in my mid-40s, does that doom me?). I know how to get more jobs in the industries I'm in at about what I'm already getting paid, and have several times...
But I don't understand even the first step to this world where $175K is considered low-paying. I believe I have the engineering skills of anyone at that level. I don't know how to get into it. Help me out?