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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.
While it quite possible to have your salary bump 10% per year on average in your late 20's / early 30's, it's not like that could continue forever. Once you reach a Senior Architect / Manager / Director / VP role by your 40's there isn't much room to grow for most people. Sure a select few will become executives or successful entrepreneurs, but that is not possible for everyone.
Having your salary peak at around $150k and then only keep up with inflation isn't that bad of a thing. Plenty of professions are worse off (actually nearly all professions).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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"
Rising health care costs and a desire on corporations to avoid training workers (it costs money and corporations fear they'll leave) drive many IT workers from the field at about age 50.
It spiked up after the supreme court gutted age discrimination protection in 2009.
Likewise, younger workers have open said on slashdot that older workers "don't fit their culture".
Which would be amazingly blunt if they said, "black workers don't fit our culture" or "female workers don't fit our culture".
Google actually approached the same 41 year old female engineer 4 times because their automated software was selecting her was a highly qualified candidate and younger human managers repeatedly rejected her. I'm not sure how her lawsuit turned out. So 41 is too old for some managers at Google.
Thing is .. everyone gets older every day. And I've known 64 year old java programmers who programmed the pants off younger workers with a few years experience.
The best thing you can do is to save hard and take any training opportunities you can get. Then also self train in what little spare time you have after the historically longer than average IT work weeks. Eventually, unless you are lucky, all the training in the world won't help because some young managers won't care about your skill set and simply say you are "too old". That's when you retire early on your savings.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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 :)
vs statistical inflation. I find the cost of things I actually buy (food, shelter, transportation, my kid's college) goes up about 3.25-3.5% a year. The cost of things I don't really buy (vacations, electronics, cars in the $30k+ range, etc) go up 1.5-2.5%. There's a 'net' of about 2%. But I don't see that 2%, I see the 3.25-3.5%. Meanwhile my wages go up 2.5% a year if I'm very, very lucky. Most years it's 1.5-2%. And I'm doing better than most. Lots of folks I know haven't had a raise in years. For them the only way to get a raise is to get a new job.
I saw a story about a woman who started at K-Mart in 1974 making $3/hour. When the store closed this year and she was laid off she made $10.50/hr. Thing is, $3 in 1974 was just shy of $16/hr today. She'd lost 1/3 of her pay in 44 years. Us tech workers don't have it as bad, but we're still feeling it. Everybody's losing ground. You just kind of hope you make it until your kid's are on their own and that you die before the layoffs in your 60s come.
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"Cutting the military budget would be like cutting the cable bill when you can't afford the mortgage."
Sort of. If social security and medicare are your $2300 mortage, the military is your $600 car payment. Education is your $100 cable bill.
https://www.nationalpriorities...
Take a look at the 3rd chart.
The military budget is not as large as you might think, relatively.
I guess it depends "what you think", but no matter how you slice it it is still a massive amount of money; especially when put into perspective:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Even if we cut it in half the US still has vastly more invested than anywhere else in the world. (And if you look at that chart, of the next 14 after the US, most of them are pretty close allies too; so in terms of spending the US + allies still would drastically outclass all plausible opponents combined.)
Returning the mortgage analogy; my first home cost me $1200/mo in mortgage payments for a single bedroom+den apartment; and was probably among the least expensive places in the area; the loan payment of $600/month for a Porsche 911; on the other hand was an extravagance. Yeah the mortgage was the bigger expense, but it was still the car that was the extravagance.
If cash had been an issue at the time, I'd have traded down to a more sensible vehicle without a second thought... I'd have bought a $5000 used honda or VW, had no payment at all, and freed up 10s of thousands in cash in the process too depending exactly where along the loan it happened.
Likewise, the US military is a collection of exotic hyper-cars; it may not be the biggest piece of the total US budget but it is still a ludicrous extravagance. It's perfectly legitimate to argue that you improve the efficiency and reduce costs in social security and medicare, because you absolutely should do that. But refusing to even consider selling even one of your 918 Spyders or Rolls-Royces or Pagani's when cash is tight is a bit absurd.
When it comes to the difference between the trades and college paths I am reminded of the story of three friends, of which I am one. We met in a community college trade program. All three of us were recently out of the military and drew together.
We had a similar starting point; but ended in different places. One of us went directly into a trade, repairing office equipment. Another bounced around a bit between various county and state technical jobs until he started his own HVAC business.
The friend who started his business was able to do it because his mother poured, quite literally, everything she had into his business to get him started. I remember delivering some of her personal jewelry to be sold in order to raise money for his business. He is now doing ok. We are all now in our 50s and he is pretty much completely broken down from the physical demand of his job. However, financially he is now stable (and has a lot of great guns, I love going out to his place just to see what he has added to his collection).
The other friend tried to stay in Office equipment too long. As he got older his numbers declined and he was let go right about 50. For reasons not understood by me, he decided to take that “opportunity” to get his college degree in a field that doesn’t hire people over 35 unless they are entering with a tremendous amount of experience. He is now delivering pizzas and struggling to hold onto his house.
Me, I saw the writing on the wall. Right around the time the company I was working for canceled the defined benefits pension program I looked around and realized that I saw no old guys. I went back to college and got my BA and eventually my MBA. I am not tall or good looking, I lack family connections and there was no way I could afford an expensive internship. I came from one of Americas poverty areas and, without question, it is part of who I am.
I was able to get a job teaching and took the accreditation over a period of a couple of years of evening courses. I now work as a teacher in rural district that, due to the number of immigrants, has many very urban problems.
What does this short biography have to do with the trades? Of the three of us one made it in the trades, mostly because his family had the resources to prop him up as long as it took to become stable. One just plain left, bounced around and left the trades. The other tried to stay until he was pushed out.
Those promoting trades, look around. Do you see many old guys in that trade? How many 60 year olds? How many 70 year olds? As we push up the national retirement age who is going to hire that 70 year old?
I do not think trades are wrong, what I think is wrong is how our society treats tradesmen. As long as people are nothing but disposable cogs to be discarded once they are worn I am concerned about the pure trades’ path. It can, and I think should, be part of a person’s life