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Comment by whattheheckheck

13 hours ago

Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k

Again HN bubble thinking. Most developers in the US are working at banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc in second tier cities - in the “enterprise” and are not making “$400K”. Most developers will never in their career see more than $175K inflation adjusted and I really haven’t seen comp on the top end increase in nominal terms in a decade [1] for enterprise devs.

That leads to my second point, in second tier cities, you see comp go from around $80K —> $115K -> $150K —> $175K, junior -> mid (pull well defined tickets off a board) -> Senior (leads larger initiatives) -> Senior+.

For instance look at what Delta airlines pays based on Atlanta.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries

Why hire a junior at $80K when you can poach a former junior now mid level ticket taker for $115K?

[1] after pivoting slightly to cloud + app dev customer facing/hands on keyboard consulting, I’m at a new plateau that’s higher.