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If Tech Is So Important, Why Are IT Wages Flat?
dcblogs writes "Despite the fact that technology plays an increasingly important role in the economy, IT wages remain persistently flat. This may be tech's inconvenient truth. In 2000, the average hourly wage was $37.27 in computer and math occupations for workers with at least a bachelor's degree. In 2011, it was $39.24, adjusted for inflation, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute. That translates to an average wage increase of less than a half percent a year. In real terms, IT wages overall have gone up by $1.97 an hour in just over 10 years, according to the EPI. Data from professional staffing firm Yoh shows wages in decline. In its latest measure for week 12 of 2012, the hourly wages were $31.45 and in 2010, for the same week, at $31.78. The worker who earned $31.78 in 2010 would need to make $33.71 today to stay even with inflation. Wages vary by skill and this data is broad. The unemployment rate for tech has been in the 3-4% range, but EPI says full employment has been historically around 2%."
If you're a competent programmer and live in the SF Bay Area, wages are definitely not flat, to the point of absurdity. There are kids just coming out of college making $80k or more as a starting salary, and quickly rising up to $120k+ within only a few years of experience.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
flat is rising.
..so I'll just quickly say, my job sucks!
Because IT stuff is easy. I mean, you just type some things and click a few buttons, right? That's not hard. Why do you need 100k a year to do that?
Long signatures suck.
... why do they earn so little? Nobody wants dirty toilets.
Income growth has been shifting since the late 1990s from middle class to upper-middle and wealthy class.
In fact in many sectors, incomes have been shrinking for those in lower management and below. Meanwhile, incomes of upper management (i.e. CEOs, University administrative staff) - basically people who really don't work or anything productive - have been sky rocketing.
IT is very important... but as a CEO I don't want to pay a lot for it.
Engineers are the dumbest smart people in the world.
How does this compare with other employment sectors? Adjusted for inflation, real median household income in the United States went down between 1990 and 2010.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Get rid of the guest workers and offshore pressure, then wages can rise.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The median household income in the US is $52,000 USA Quick Facts
Most middle or working class occupations are suffering from *declining* pay. Holding steady is good these days. And think of all the people who were making $50K or $75K a few years ago and are now working for $10/hour or less.
Here, I'll help:
1... 2.... 3... 4... 5... 6...
Count your blessings! :)
My company prides itself on being "competitive" - which I take to mean they don't pay any more than they have to. The economy is in the tank, so they pay less (or lower raises) - you know, to be "competitive". After all, where else are employees going to go in this job market?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Because of capitalism. Those who do the real important work never get what they are actually worth, as it would cut into the profits made by executives and investors. The labor market cannot ensure that people get paid what they're worth--by which I mean the value they produce--because there's almost always someone willing to do it for less. We under cut each other fighting for scraps, and those at the top keep the bulk of what we produce. This is how capitalism works.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I am surprised that it has take the world so long to realise that IT salaries are overpriced. Because the hardware used to be so rare and expensive the people who used it and looked after it were also rare and expensive.Now that the hardware is cheap as chips, and the labor market is approaching truly global is it a big surprise that salaries are flat?
If a bad patch breaks my two year old $500 company laptop or a $200 tablet I am not going to pay somebody to fix it. I replace it and move my data over. There was a time when PCs cost thousands, and servers cost tens of thousands. People won't pay people $100/hr to fix a $200 devices.
I also imagine that it is a heck of a lot cheaper to engage off-shore programmers than using local resources (you can't do that for a truck driver...) - supply and demand in a free market in action.
IT is not being picked on, in particular.
Only the rich are getting richer.
Click that link to see
1) Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high.
2) Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.
This is common across all sectors and all skill levels.
The corporations have set things up so that the owners and managers capture all of the profit and any productivity gains. They have also bought enough politicians to keep their tax rates low so they don't have to contribute to the "general welfare". Corporate profits and upper management incomes are at record levels.
The situation with tech wages is the same as that with WalMart employees. You are expendable and replaceable and if you make trouble you will be fired so just sit down and shut up and get to work. At least tech wages are above poverty level so they don't have to go on Medicaid and food stamps to survive... be thankful for small favors.
The last time things were this far out of kilter was the 1930s and that gave rise to the union movement (as well as socialists and communists). This time, people seem more complacent and are just happy to have small crumbs.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
NEBS-compliant enterprise- or telco-grade systems still cost tens of thousands of dollars and people definitely pay people good money to work on them.
The company I work for is on-shoring work after figuring out that off-shoring it dropped the quality substantially.
Important != Valuable
The cleaning crew is important. Long haul truckers are important. Neither are high paying jobs.
Every occupation thinks theirs is the most important, and deserving of higher pay. IT is no different.
Use to be a hot topic, but now it's just an accepted practice. Wages are down because no one in the US wants to actually employee anyone. Stems from much larger problems with our country as a whole IMO.
Not I, sir. I patiently wait for a raise, then leave when its apparent that I would have to ask to get it.
It is not the current economic problems. Real wages in Canada and the US have not increased since the early 1980s, and in some cases have dropped. We are still paying the price for the deeply flawed economic policies of Reagan and Mulroney.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
What was the supply and demand for IT labor like 10 years ago? What is it like now? Therein lies the answer.
..because the rich man has been engaging in price fixing for wages for the last thirty years across all areas of the economy except executive compensation.
Seriously guys, are we complaining that wages are back up to .com levels? Am I the only one who remembers that as a few years of obscenely wasteful spending? Hell, I was a 16 year old making $40K a year back then.
Could you imagine a banker complaining that they aren't back up to 2006 level salaries?
That's it - the economy doesn't figure out who 'deserves' the most pay, it's supply and demand ... only.
Spoken like a true Libertarian: A sweeping statement with little attention given to reality.
There's a hell of a lot more that factors into pay rates for industries - even at a macro level - than just supply and demand. Industry trends, transfer pricing, changes in goods costs within in an industry, the difference between internal and external facing roles. There's a myriad of factors that go into the equation.
Two (related) reasons that I have heard as to why IT isn't valued as much as it should be (I myself am not in the IT field, so this is more like hearsay):
Clueless PHB: This is partly the fault of those who work in IT not educating those higher up in the food chain. PHBs don't look on IT as producers, but as cost centers. So they try to skimp on hiring competent people. And the IT people don't have direct relations with the clients (in most firms), so when it comes time to decide bonuses or raises, IT is generally at the back of the line. While IT is what allows everyone else to raise money, the PHBs would rather look at a $60k fresher vs. a $120k experienced admin and ask why they shouldn't just outsource it for $45k. They don't see the downside in having a poor IT team even after it bites them (just fire one newbie and hire another in his place).
One admin I know used this solution (based on "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming) after most of his team were outsourced (not because the team was bad, but because the PHB saw cost savings): everytime the outsourcing created a problem and someone tried to scream at him (he was their internal liaison to the external contractor) he told them to go tell PHB "we lost/cost $X extra because the contractor screwed up." Only when the PHB saw how much the "real" cost of outsourcing IT was, did he reverse the policy.
Taking Credit: As an old saying goes - the competent IT admin fixes problems before they happen. And then the PHB wonders why he is paying $X for new servers and infrastructure when the current system works fine. IT people should be more proactive about boasting about what they do. Sure, this is distasteful to lots of technical people. But guess what? Everyone else brags and lets their manager know (in a not so subtle way) of why they deserve more money: "I sold $YYY to MY clients". So the IT team needs to take credit for sales they help with. If an employee used a lot of resources to construct a portfolio for a client, it isn't all to the trader's credit. YOUR software and hardware helped him run simulations and generate the portfolio. So add THAT to your pitch. If one of the IT workers stayed up half the night so a client could get some figures/data - he should get credit instead of letting the suit tell the story. A knight wouldn't have killed the dragon unless he had a magic sword - but the armorer doesn't get any songs written about him.
The flipside is to be realistic about what you are doing - this isn't the dot-com boom. Don't expect riches for trivial work. If you do good/tough work, expect to be compensated as well (and let your bosses know why YOU are better than everyone out there). But if you just make a CSS/HTML page, don't try to claim you are God's gift to the firm.
One very important point that you may have missed is this -- tech IS very important. Even organizations who don't care about IT beyond basic file and print have a stake in making sure things they use work well. But, IT is one of those fields where you can still cover over massive, huge, big balls of fail with money to the right vendor or cheap labor. Because of this, companies don't like to pay for competent help, or if they do, they squeeze every last nickel out of it that they can because they feel it's a waste.
Also, "tech" is too broad. The desktop support guy changing toner cartridges, the help desk person changing passwords and the systems architect trying to make sure everything doesn't come crashing to a halt when you put it in the same room have very different jobs, skills and responsibilities. On the simple break-fix support/part-swapper side, the work is getting easier and more automated. This means that you can hire fewer people, and those that you do hire don't need to have as much specialist knowledge. I'm a systems engineer, dealing with Intel server boxes every day -- the vendors have resorted to putting an extra "Don't pull this drive out!" light on hard disks so that part swappers don't pull a second drive out of a failed disk array and cause data loss. Even though the failed drive has a big blinky red light on it. That tells me that customers have complained about this happening enough...so you can draw your own conclusions about skill sets. On the higher end, you just run into wage pressure, companies trying to get away with as little as they can.
I think part of the reason for flat wages across the board is just the overall impression that "computers are simple" now, so why do we need to pay these geniuses to run them? Anyone in corporate IT is keenly aware of the "consumerization" trend, where everyone expects all systems to be as seamlessly integrated as their iPad, no matter how complex.
So at least in "big corporate IT," there are a few things putting wage pressure on:
Things like this make IT a very difficult field to work in. I'm not stupid enough to call myself a rock star IT god, but I certainly feel I'm competent and do a good job. Fortunately, I have an employer who appreciates that (for now) and I do OK. The other class of people who are making serious coin in the IT "racket" are the nomadic consultants. How many places have you worked where these guys seem to parachute in out of the sky when a very narrow specialist problem needs to be solved, charge hundreds an hour for months, and are off to the next place requiring that same specialty just as quick as they came in? I know a lot of these guys personally (can't do the lifestyle if you're married or have any sort of ties to any one place or thing) and they're definitely not hurting. For those of us tied down by one thing
If your plumber fucks up you can end up with thousands of dollars in water damage. If your electrician fucks up, your house can burn down. That's why we pay them fairly well and insist that they become certified.
I don't know why you think coding on a large project is easy either. The skillset required is not easy to find, and there are a whole lot of assholes who can make a total mess of your project and cost you thousands in delays and additional work because they don't know what they're doing. That's one of the big reasons you don't see as much coding outsourced these days. 5 or 10 years ago everybody was doing it, and also discovering that the product they got back was of poor quality compared to stuff from their in-house coders. It is very expensive to fix bad code.
I read the internet for the articles.
If you're a MS shop, your doing it wrong because the software is not free. You're paying an overhead that you don't have to and licencing constrains your growth.
And yet, we pay a lot less for Microsoft than we did for free open source. Figure that. Maybe Microsoft knows exactly what to charge to make the labor savings you get with their platform worthwhile.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
is that it's hard for a lot of managers to figure out who's valuable. Most smaller shops hire IT staff because they don't have the expertise in-house already. It's not like a cook that hires an assistant cook and can watch them and know if they are skilled or unskilled. I think most IT for smaller organizations are easy marks for unskilled IT, that can be incompetent and still appear valuable because the people doing the hiring and the managing can't properly assess a person's skills before OR after the hire.
And I think this hurts the average pay. I've seen this happen a lot around here, where idiots are working IT for someone and the idiot moves on, leaving behind the managers to think that they need to find a replacement "as good as Tim", and are completely astounded to find that their new hire Jason actually knows what he's doing and is a massive improvement. Leaves them wondering "were we paying Tim too much, or are we paying Jason too little?"
So now at least they know that good IT is worth paying more for, but the rest of the hiring pool out there that hasn't learned that lesson yet doesn't consider their IT all that valuable because they currently are employing an idiot and just have no idea how much more they could benefit from quality IT.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Want to cry in your soup?
For the middle class, real wages haven't risen since 1978. (chart). Of course the upper class has made out like gangbusters.
In other words, your buying power is the same as your Leisure Suit-wearing predecessors, whereas the rich have accumulated whole closets of never-been-used ivory-handled backscratchers.
Yeah, right.
People say this about programmers being able to work wherever, but when you're developing something on a wide variety of devices (like trying to write Android software that works on Vanilla Google Nexus, Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC, etc. devices), it's reasonable for a localized team of people to share those devices, but not so practical if people are distributed. This becomes even more of an issue with secret or not-yet-released devices, which come with HUGE liabilities if you lose or misplace them.
Furthermore, working as a team is _way_ more efficient if you can walk a few paces over and talk to people. I mean, this is the kind of thing that slows down business if people aren't even on the same floor, let alone in different buildings or different cities or land masses. And doing video chats or phone chats is never going to be as good as _being there_.
Lastly, it's hard to get a GOOD, salaried remote code-writing job if you've not worked for a given company in its local area first.
the "Quit complaining and count your blessings" demands are what we've been getting told for decades by those at the top, "Cry me a river", the sad part is now we repeat it to eachother, ignorant of the fact that they were merely telling us that crap to protect their own raising income. Look at the year-over-year income rise % since the 60s, it is amazingly ridiculous how much CEO income raises have gone up in % over the years, not in total. Also look at the % of population in the middle class vs. % of population in the lower class since the 60s. Come back when you think we should all just keep sucking it up and aren't convinced if we continue to "Quit complaining" the middle class won't be gone altogether.
Last quarter the economy's profits grew quite a bit over previous quarters, however hiring remained flat. Quit complaining and work more hours, at least you've got a job right?
Y'all are making excuses for a much larger phenomenon. The implosion of the middle class. Here's a comparison of wage growth for Americans from 1967 until 2011. Look at the various jumps in the curve. You can see the big jump in the late sixties of the lowest quartile, the clear results of the war on poverty. The economic doldrums at the end of the Carter Administration. The sudden increase during the Reagan first term, but take special notice of how the rise benefits the upper quintile and even more so the top 5% (and if you could see the top 1% and top 0.01% I think you'd see something shocking.) The subsequent fall during the senior Bush Administration followed by the boom of the Clinton years (and make no mistake, the booms during both Reagan and Clinton involved huge economic expansions in industry, heavy industry for Reagan and information industries for Clinton. Then junior Bush's Terms, and here's where it get's interesting. Notice the steady decline in advancement. The majority of Americans are seeing their wages crashing towards stagnation or worse. In fact looking at the lowest quintile, over the last 10 years they've had a 20% drop in real wealth. Even the first quintile has remained stagnant with extreme fluctuation. So this is not just an IT thing. The only folks to see dramatic increase in personal wealth over the last 10 years I in a group smaller than the top 1%.
While that was going on, the real wealth of Americans at large has been disappearing. Here's a brilliant lecture on the looming collapse of the Middle Class and the economic forces responsible for the situations we all face today. Contrary to pundits conversations Americans spend significantly fewer inflation adjusted dollars on food, clothes, appliances and cars. Where they are getting killed is Cost of Housing, revolving credit and loan debt, Medical Insurance and drugs, Child Day Care, Cost of Fuel/Energy, that and there are new expenses surrounding electronic gadgets that have been a steadily growing part of the cost of living since the late 80s.
The Banks (both in banking, loans and real estate), Big Medicine/Pharma, and Energy have put the American Family in such a precarious position, that any small disruption or disturbance results in almost immediate financial collapse. The critical events facing Americans are Death of a spouse, Injury or Serious Illness, Divorce and extended Unemployment. Any of these (singly or in combination) are enough to initiate a cycle of debt, penalties and ultimate bankruptcy. Add to this growing inflation and the erosion of our savings and investments, and you can see that the American Family is under extraordinary financial stress. The American dream for a growing population is just being able to get by.
In my state it takes years to get a plumbing license and in order to do that you have to work as plumbers assistant for years etc. I'd much rather write code for $40/hr or even $10-$15/hr. Not that that is an option for me. My aging degree is in EE not CS.
I've always loved coding. Mainly c/c++ and assembly. I've always imagined that if I were to go back to college for a CS degree and somehow manage to get a job as a programmer that I would start to hate it anyway and I didn't want to learn to hate programming. Actually this was based on some persuasive posts over the years from professional programmers right here on slashdot.
Also, when I graduated in the early 90s it simply wasn't possible, as far as I could determine, to get a job with only a CS degree where I lived. Even getting a masters wasn't enough. You needed a minimum of 2 years of real world professional programming experience to make it past HR. Period. I've never been much good with people and don't do well selling myself at job interviews. So it is and was beyond hopeless.
For the next decade after college I would search the job market from time to time, but if anything the situation just seemed worse, requiring experience and certifications of all kinds in languages that I didn't like or respect in addition to the other requirements that seemed impossible. It just seemed that there were already enough experienced programmers in the market. I guess there just wasn't any need for inexperienced ones, regardless of what degrees they had earned.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
well IT / tech needs apprenticeships / trades schools and not theory based degrees.
I'm not a script kiddie. I have an EE degree and absolutely loved writing assembly code as a teenager and writing C++ code with inline assembly, making small games etc. I got an A in every programming course I took in college and spent way too much time writing code to the detriment of my math and physics courses. Writing code is fun. It's like playing. I am of course jealous that you get payed to play.
What I want to know is how you got your first job out of college? Did you know someone? If I had graduated with my pathetic EE degree (worthless for actually getting a job IME) and found that there were programming jobs all over the place that only required a BS in CS I would have just gone back and got a CS degree and then landed myself a job writing code, and maybe I would be making 80k/year now instead of 10k. I tried everything I could think of but there was just nothing available for someone without professional experience. I looked both in Florida (where I went to school) and Boston (where I'm from), but such jobs simply did not exist as far as I could tell. Or if they did exist they certainly weren't being advertised anywhere. You had to know someone and I didn't know anyone. I was utterly defeated by the whole, "Can't get a job without experience and can't get experience without a job" situation. All of you seemed to have overcome that somehow. I'd love to know what your secret was.
I guess it's those sorts of experiences that have made me a bitter, cynical "life sucks; then you die" kind of guy. Or at least more than I would have been. Actually if someone had told me that getting a job right out of college without experience was pretty much impossible, well I would have still gone (I liked it), but I wouldn't have been so disenchanted with the pointlessness of job hunting afterward and I might have come up with some plan for actually making a living in a way that doesn't totally suck. Maybe ideas for starting a business. Although before the internet that was quite a bit harder. Now it's the only form of work that seems worth doing anyway. Wage slavery tends to suck.
The two most imporant lessons I've learned in life. These aren't universal. They just apply to me.
1. Getting a job doing something you don't totally hate is impossible. Getting a high paid job is impossible. At least if you have to rely on someone actually hiring you. Starting your own business is another matter. For that you just need money. Before the internet quite a lot of money. Not so much now for certain types of businesses.
2. Getting a girlfriend is impossible.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Then you and your friend either suck, or live in a shithole. It's really that simple.
Either that or you are just overpaid and very, very spoiled.
Where in the hell do you live? Arkansas?
A suburb of Boston.
Which doesn't mean you're any good at it.
Never said I was, but the fact that you make shitloads of money doing it doesn't mean you are good at it either. In fact it doesn't mean shit except that you are one rich motherfucker.
Blah blah blah. Spoken like somebody who hasn't done jack shit in the real world. My projects range from 4 to 12 million lines of high level code. I'll give you complex. Yeah, I was writing my own assemblers and tools (and making good use of them too) back in the day.. but anybody who works with current production level code in anything but the most trivial system knows what a pain in the ass so-called "high level" code can be. And yea, there are times when you can't just throw more hardware at it.
Depending on how you define "jack shit" it is true that I haven't done it. I took the only job I could find outside of college. It wasn't manual labor, but it sucked and only paid $7.50/hr. I was just happy that I didn't have to spend the rest of my life waiting tables or working at a gas station or some shit like that. That I didn't have to clean toilets or deal with the public in some kind of retail job. What have you accomplished in your life besides huge stacks of 20 dollar bills that would reach the ceiling of your fancy house? Sucking corporate dick and doing what you are told working on someone else's project doesn't impress me all that much. Still better than my situation but not all that impressive in the scheme of things.
Care to tell me why they shouldn't? I think it's just that you're such an inbred, lazy, arrogant little fuck that you couldn't do their jobs if your life depended on it.
Actually I have done both plumbing and electrical work. Residential stuff. It's easy. In the sense that it isn't intellectually challenging. So I do know what I'm talking about. $125/hr to glue PVC pipe and solder copper joints is beyond ridiculous. I am lazy, but I think you are the arrogant one. I wasn't lazy when I graduated from college though. I had no problem working 12-16 hours a day and often did, but I wasn't able to work in any field that interested me. All of those jobs had already been taken by people with experience. Apparently a minimum of 2 years, but more typically 3-5.
I'll bet you're fat
Well since I'm an American that can be pretty much assumed. I'm about 30 pounds overweight, but I'm also in my early 40s. I wasn't more than 5-10 pounds overweight until my late 30s. In my 20s I was in very good condition. I ran, cycled and weight trained at the gym.
... that you masturbate quite a bit..
Fuck you. Rich fuck like you whose had everything in life handed to you. You've just been lucky. Nothing more. At one time you also had no experience, but you probably knew someone and got hired that way. Not on the merits of your abiliites.
and that your IQ, though you believe yourself to be brilliant, is within 1 std deviation of the norm.
I never claimed to be some kind of genius. I just wanted to be able to get a job working for someone else after graduating from college doing something that didn't totally suck and ideally something that made use of all that studying I did in college. I took a bunch of IQ tests when I was around 18. IIRC I think I scored something like 137-139. So you're right. Not that great, but not below normal either. What did you score? 170 or something? That would just prove that being smart is unrelated to being a cunt.
You just don't want to admit that luck had anything to do with your success and that you are the only one in the world
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Adding to that, they are missing the top wage earners, who have retired, and are now including the n00bs who are earning entry level (for their position) wages.
If we went through a recession, and the several bubbles which have burst, and you only track individuals, there are some people who have lost jobs but average earnings are up. This is not a debate about how much people earn, which is where most people above gp were talking about.
The topic at hand is this - if IT is important to the world, why are they not paying IT people more?
The assumptions in the questions are beyond idiotic. As a whole, should everyone in IT be paid more just because we are important to the economy? Or are we just displacing people and earning their salaries?
How many people worked in tech, multiplied by their salaries? And compare that to now?
Adjusted for inflation, we are $2 ahead. How does Victor's quote mean anything when placed directly next to a quote disputing it? Adjusted, we are ahead.
Why Are IT Wages Flat? First paragraph - outsourcing, automation, and economy. WTF are the rest of you babbling on about?
Including all of the people who took retirement or quit for other industries, and all of the n00bs. The rest is explained in the article, leading to b4dc0d3r's law: NEVER read an article with a headline posed in the form of a question.
The real story is the EPI report, second link. Microsoft wants more H1-B visas, which is not new in the least. Microsoft wants to pay people from lower wage countries less money to work in the US. If you spot the conclusion, good for you. Microsoft wants to keep wages flat.
As a large tech employer, and someone who is lobbying for cheap labor, it's kinda obvious to me that dcblogs (submitter) is intentionally misusing statistics, and a poorly written CNET article, to prattle on about H1-B visas.
If companies had a hard time finding skilled employees you'd expect wages to be rising, and they aren't.
What CEOs mean when they say this is "We can't find skilled, educated employees who will work for pennies."
Winchester, Browning, Smith & Wesson, Colt and Beretta...
I live in San Francisco, and have for many years.
I'm a Sr Software Engineer in enterprise Java development these days (been programming professionally for 30 years). Never wanted to get into management or team leadership, tried a bunch of startups that failed, and am not much of an entrepreneur, though I still love programming.
So at 48 years old, I'm still a Sr Software Engineer, but my salary (or yearly based on hourly, since I'm contracting right now) ends up being about $145k w/bennies, MAYBE $155k without bennies (contracting used to pay up to double what salary could get, but no longer - it's barely more than salary now).
Unless I were to head to a management track, or team leadership, or software architect roles, I'm pretty much stuck at this point. It's not horrible, not at all, but feels strange how one gets to a certain point in this field and wages just STOP, pretty much. The only people I know who have stayed in pure engineering who's salaries have gone higher (but who didn't strike it rich at a startup and aren't entrepreneurs) got there by taking a reasonably high wage at a big company, and going up through small yearly cost-of-living increases.
For some reason, I thought - when starting this career - that my wages would just continue going up and up and up the more experience I got, but that ended up not being true after a certain point.
Just giving my perspective anyway.