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Salaries For Workers in Technology Roles, Including Software Engineers and Product Managers, Peak Around Age 45 (hired.com)
A report released on Thursday by the job marketplace Hired reveals that salaries for workers in technology roles, including software engineers, product managers, and data analysts, peak around age 45. After that, earnings level off or drop until retirement. According to the report, the average salary of US technology workers is about $135,000, with the highest pay in the San Francisco area.
This is a great point and Ill clarify.
Tech salaries in San Francisco and Seattle are high but the cost of living is so high that even making 400K (which I do between salary+stock+wife income) that you are house poor (average house in decent school area 1.5-2M due to farcically low interest rates/money printing) or pay $5000+ in rent just to exist - thats 60K just to exist. And taxes here with AMT are around 50%, so 400K -> 200K (California charges more than 9% income and sales tax). 200K - 60K means 11K / mo. Now childcare, private schools, cost of living, etc. You would be shocked how just food, fuel, child costs, etc, all rack up here. Its insanity how fast 11K/mo turns into dust and at the end of the day you either have millions of debt in mortgage or are facing crushing rents.
It would make sense to make 200K anywhere else and live like a relative king.
The biggest sadness about San Francisco / bay area is the children of tech people are lost. Latchkey, parent-less, druggies, no very smart and no hope. Cost of living is hopeless for them and competition with all the H1B etc for them will be them vs the rest of the world. So extreme cost of living and horrific competition from the entire world.
So Joe_Dragon is right. Salaries are high here. Cost of living is crushing along with abusive confiscatory taxation and the tech companies are ALWAYS trying to flood the market with H1B and scabs to lower your "rate"
Unless you were lucky and smart enough to end up at Google, FB, Amazon, etc right out of high school, you definitely need to leave at least every 3 years in order to achieve maximum income by the time you are 45. I only have two years left, so I should really hurry up :)