Background: my old job I started as an intern, making $13 an hour, then engineer I at $26 an hour, then six years later I was a senior engineer in title, project manager/ team lead / IT admin in responsibility making about $30 an hour.
So COVID hit, job was iffy so I left this 60k-ish a year job for a 85k salary position somewhere else. Then a year later, left again to my current gig making 120k salary position.
Background #2: Before I became a senior engineer I was asked if I can go out of state and set up VectorCover for a customer because they lost the talent. Project was expected to last 6 months, I finished everything up in three months, wrote detailed documentation and wrote a few tools to automate 60% of the work (hence project finished in half the time, I'm not a miracle worker, I happen to know programming languages and fake vba till it works).
Story: My boss three levels above my last boss calls me, and asks the usual small chit chat, and then tells me how they have a VectorCover project, and they really need someone with experience, as they lost lots of people due to stagnant wages. Asks if I could come back, or at least work this project because it's time sensitive.
Old boss said, hey I can give you 130k, work remote (not normal, but you can earn it if your bosses trust you, and do not need to manage you), and interested in going back to work. However I can't let anyone know how much I would be making, because it wouldn't be fair to the people who were there 10 years compared to my seven.
Moral of the story, I would probably be making max 80k a year if I stayed at the job, movie around gets you way more.