When my daughter was small and still practicing using silverware at breakfast diners with me, I managed a small software store. I was a broke single parent.
30 years later, I have built a career in on of the preeminent modern technology skill trees, becoming a tenured senior software architect with plenty of deployment and server administration masteries and plenty of what are called “full-stack” high-level side skills. I am currently not under-salaried nor under-employed.
In “daughter was small” early 90's dollars– it took me 30 years and decades of hard-earned excellence in a software (architecture) career, to raise my effective salary by only $10,000 over being the store manager of a small retail shop with no previous experience. In the dollars of that time.
That explains a lot, whoosh! : ) I have realized I was still thinking of the employment and income world as approximately the same, in just a few but very significant ways (what with my nose down to the grindstone for decades…) and it's definitely not! It's not the same. Nothing going on today in my budget is anything close to those times, which were probably ingrained on me because I was a tightly budgeting and loving father with several jobs.
I'm like– why I am still living kinda like a broke single parent? I have corporate game now…. I have a career and a fat resume in software. Why did my value not increase with costs? None of my many software friends are making anything close to the “average starting salaries” you find on the web, by the way (except for one). I believe that salary data has been created by people trying to get you to job hunt on their sites, and has been consciously inflated. But that's just little ol' gainfully employed me.
Anyway, get off my lawn concrete apartment doorstep!