Stagnating salary? Every job change comes with around 20-30% raise usually, so I would not call it stagnant. Managers are also being told what to do, by those above them.
Since I do not work for FAANG companies, but rather small-to-medium (regular?) tech companies, they mostly never have principal/architect roles. My current role, in most cases, is actually the highest IC role there is.
If you remain 'senior software engineer' your salary will be constrained by the market range for that position.
When you get to the top of the range your salary will only increase in line with inflation/market forces whatever you do. It's not possible to get 20-30% more every time you change job unless you've stayed a long time in your current job and they were taking advantage of you (in which case those 20-30% represent what you were actually losing).
As for titles, obviously what I meant relates to what the actual role entails. 'Senior software engineer' is usually not very senior, in my experience this often means a dev who can be left alone to deliver the specific feature they were tasked to code. As for "highest IC role there is" again, if the job description is very senior you can also negotiate commensurate title and pay.
So what? Chasing money in life is utterly stupid long term strategy, if somebody told you this they were lying to you (or deeply unhappy people who went that way and instead of admitting the mistake they just drag others in same pit). Literally everybody who achieved anything serious in life says so. Yes it sucks when you don't have them at all, but once over that they should never be the top priority.
Do what you like, and for most normal humans (TM) moving to managerial position is moving to worse job while paid marginally better. More stress, far less interesting creative work and more baby-sitting/micro-managing incompetent folks, chasing other teams, processes, politics etc (if you don't do that you are not really a manager in any bigger company).
I am software dev for 20 years, my current full time employment net salary is over 20x compared to my first full time employment while doing largely the same job. You don't get good increases by moving up the ladder, you get it by switching companies and negotiating hard. That's it for the money part.
My point is that if you want to remain IC then why limit yourself to stay close to the bottom of the pile when you could aim for better pay and more impactful and interesting work?
It's not about chasing money for the sake of it but in the real world more money always helps if you can get it. In this case this also goes with better job satisfaction.
A 20x salary increase in 20 years means either fantastic career growth up the ladder or so-called "developing country". No-one gets that kind of increase in a developed country just by moving company, or at all, really.
20x increase happened to me as well. My first full-time coding job paid around 2.5k PLN after taxes, while my highest paying job so far paid around 50k PLN after taxes. That was over the span of a bit over 15 years, with low inflation over entire timespan.
> If you remain 'senior software engineer' your salary will be constrained by the market range for that position.
The salary range is somewhere from $100k to $600k in the US depending on the company. So if you hit the cap at your current company just move to one that pays more. If you've hit that limit at a top tier company then you can start moving to higher IC roles such as Staff.
"you start moving to higher IC roles such as Staff"
QED.
I don't understand the nitpicking. It is factually impossible to get 20-30% salary increase forever if you move every 2-3 years while remaining at the same level. You'll get to the top end fairly quickly.
The person I replied to who said this has happened to them has only been in the industry 12 years. So, yes, they started as junior, then eng, now senior engineer, they moved maybe 3-4 times. But now if they stay at "senior software engineer" level then things will taper off.
Netflix is indeed an outlier and has always paid higher than the rest of the market since it's such a shitty toxic place to work and in a terrible location to boot.
Even they aren't hiring someone looking at L5 at one of the other big companies at 600k. They'll be much higher than the other companies though.
/All/ the current and former Netflix engineers I've talked to talked glowingly about working Netflix. I'm supposing there's a lot of self-selection. And they've recently started hiring remote.
Since I do not work for FAANG companies, but rather small-to-medium (regular?) tech companies, they mostly never have principal/architect roles. My current role, in most cases, is actually the highest IC role there is.