So, living in Queensland I've been looking at some of the stories here with digust. The conditions Americans live under should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. I was inspired though, and wondered what I could get for myself.
I'm currently paid AUD80k/yr as a system administrator. We're a small team and I'm a jack-of-all-trades, so I also do helpdesk, printer tech, developer, DBA and devops engineer stuff, and some QA when a developer insists that “there's nothing wrong with the code, it must be the infrastructure”.
For my job title, my pay is probably about average, but I can find positions up to $120k. A 50% pay bump would be nice, and I might be an outside chance to convince the big boss to pay me that much.
Then I went looking for DevOps Engineer. The further I scrolled, the more shocked I was. State Government for $112k, private sector for $120k, $140k, $180k and fully remote. I'm still struggling to process that a small part of my current role could better than double my pay.
I was going to wait to get my long service leave in 2 years time, but with a pay increase like that I'd be ahead in less than 6 months. In three years I could probably pay cash for a house near my family and take a month off to move.
Needless to say, I'm going to be updating my resume and applying for jobs. Even if you think you're doing reasonably well, there's a good chance you could be doing better, in some cases, a lot better.
I told the senior developer my thoughts and he said if I go, he's out too; too much stuff is dependant on me, and if I'm gone he doesn't want to deal with the mess that me not being there will cause.