When does your earning potential stop growing?

4 comments

1. Earnings earlier in life do affect the trajectory of your earnings later. You’re not wrong that it can affect you down the line. But tech jobs have a *very* high ceiling and high average for income. You’re unlikely to need to worry about your compensation getting stuck until you’ve got a lifestyle far in excess of most people. I’m 37 and a Staff Engineer, make awesome money, and even “normal” raises would keep me ahead of the curve.

   Is your compensation already pretty good? Do you have enough to live a good life the way you enjoy? Then don’t sweat it *too* hard.

   If anything, the thing I’d worry about is the “easy” part. If you stagnate in tech, your prospects get worse. Make sure you’re still growing your skills in some way.

2. Depends on the country and the sort of tech job. Can you elaborate? I’ve worked with top earners in IT sales (selling managed services for networking, cloud, end user compute, security etc) who make over £3,000,000 a year. Most were making £100k to £300k. I’ve seen solutions sales (tech specialist sales) make well into the £300k a year at the top end too.

3. Earnings are basically a supply and demand thing. As long as you can keep getting better at what you do _and_ there is demand for experts in your field, your earnings can keep growing. As soon as you’re either the de-facto expert in your field or demand goes down, your earnings will stagnate.

   Especially in tech, at some point you’re better off starting a company than selling your time as a service (employment). It just doesn’t scale well. A well managed tech company is basically passive income once you’ve found good people (including one or more managers to do your job for you)

4. >I worry that if I don’t get my income higher than it is now, my potential will be stunted for life, even if my skills grow…At what point does your current salary forever limit your future salary growth?

   That’s not really a thing, at least, it’s not as simple as “your earning potential peaks at age X”.

   It sounds more like you just want to get your career started on the best trajectory possible. That’s a good goal but you don’t need to stress about it the way it sounds like you are doing.

   You’re probably in your first or second job out of college. You have plenty of time to pivot in new career directions. I have a friend who pivoted from web security, to site reliability, then data analytics before turning 30. I pivoted between financial analysis, data science for marketing and now sales in the same time.

   Just keep your eye on the ball and keep working towards your goals and you’ll be fine.