Where do you have to live to earn that kind of money?

Probably a big city with a major tech presence. One of the coasts.

Any city in California, I imagine.

I'm getting the upper end of that in Dallas, Texas.
Housing prices are half or less than many parts of California.

I do manage my career intentionally, so my experience isn't necessarily average.

In Silicon Valley if you make that money, you're underpaid. Also you should be getting paid in equity on top of that base salary.

I dunno. I make $120K. My wife makes $150K. Neither of us are IT people. We live in Pittsburgh.

I would think developers would make more than either of us.

Gov. contractors w/ a clearance can easily make six figures as mid-tier devs. Entry level is just under $100k while senior devs can make ~$150k. This is what I've personally seen at a big military base that is heavy into cyber warfare. YMMV depending on clearance level and skills. Only about 3% of the US has a clearance, or is even eligible to get one, so it's kind of an incestuous world due to more work than workers available.

Of course, the skill set for a lot of gov. contracts is a lot more specialized th

To be fair, I think most techies in SF are making a lot more.

My buddy found it easy to make $165k as a JS developer in SF, with Flash development being his only relevant skill.

I'm pretty sure >120k isn't poverty level even in SF, and since these numbers are averages, they'd be higher in high COL areas like that anyway.

What's mostly surprising is that apparently making mobile shovelware is the most lucrative field.That is, if these numbers can be really trusted, which is a big question in these sorts of surveys.

Such bullshit. Yes, great in Alabama, no not "close to the poverty line" in California.

"Cloud architect" is probably worse, since "cloud" takes away essence needed for proper company functioning and hides it behind a "cloud" of ISP, network transit, hosting, "cloud", and who knows what other contracts... and boatloats of brittle infrastructure dependent on even more infrastructure increasingly prone to brownouts.

But the results sure look good on paper! No capex! Everything opex! Look at us being lean!

Come to think of it, I really do want a cloud architect job now. Helping stupid companies c

Worth mentioning that while a good DBA is valuable, a DBA with too much time on their hands can make an over-architected monstrosity.

The same is true of cloud architects.

The only thing more American than crap annual leave allotments is not knowing what to do with leave when you actually do get it.

Look for some cloud architect jobs online and read the job descriptions. They're not going to be entirely accurate as to what you would do every day, but it will get you much closer than "click around in a GUI".

Some might rely on the services of cloud providers, and some might be working for a cloud provider, so you can imagine the scope of their knowledge and skills could vary widely.

There are probably some cloud architects out there who don't even touch those GUIs -- they make diagrams in PowerPoint and a

No, that would be an IT position or maybe DevOps or something. Without looking at a job posting, and knowing that I live in a Microsoft world, and that I am not a cloud architect, I would say a cloud architect ought to know:

Cloud databases, like when to use: Hadoop -vs- Storage blobs -vs- SQL Data Lake -vs- CosmosDB -vs- a traditional SQL database running on a VM. They should known IAAS, PAAS, SAAS. They ought to know the implications of those selections on various data privacy regulations around the wor

Find another job. Why should they give you a raise when you are doing the work for the current amount? There is no incentive to give you more unless you are willing to leave. Just remember that saying you will leave unless you get a raise will only work if you mean it.

There is no need to wait for your next performance review. And understand that discussing your salary with your manager is never rude. You don't have to worry about being tactful, because you are entitled to this discussion.

It's not like you are a bum on the street asking for a hand-out. Asking for a raise is *nothing* like asking for a hand-out. They are not morally equivalent.

The objective fact is your employer is already making more money off of your efforts than you are. A lot more. That is true e

Bring it up before your next annual performance review.

Do you have a review discussion of compensation with your manager at least yearly? If yes, then you're in a pretty good position.

What you want to do is *BEFORE* he comes to you with the CoL increase is ask him what title(s) they are using to determine your salary when compared to your peers.

Getting this data will tell you if they are trying to line you up with your peers or lowball you. You then go research the title(s) they give you with your peers and see how you stack up. Also, go lookup how you'd stack

It's market size. There is a ton of front-end developers. Most of the shitty bootcamp out there are really only training front end developers. So there is a gazillion of front end people out there.

The changing frequently is part of the reason it is paid less, experience simply counts for less. Backend is more stable for a reason, people are paid more to make sure it stays that way. Also, by almost definition, you have to start with a backend (else, what does the UI connect to in the first place?) of some kind, even if it is someone else's, and you have to understand that first.

Also, fundamentally, the data the frontend is accessing is the true value. How you present something is useful and important,

It doesn't require much computer science, so most code camps focus hard on frontend. 8 months training to a front-end developer.