At “$82k/year” you are definitely underpaid, given the degree and cred’s you claim…but keep in mind that San Diego is a soft market for most types of engineers.
A reference point is I bumped my salary by over 20% instantly just by opening up to offers from the Bay Area, and accepting one, taking me away from San Diego.
The Bay Area is pretty hot right now. It has turned around 180 in the last six months. Local software tech companies are fighting over talent, particularly for software engineers. Big offers from Facebook are pulling talent out of Google. Then Google responds by giving every employee a 10% raise. There are countless more examples.
Now with turnaround it went from DEAD, to now I’m getting a call per week from different headhunters asking me to interview for nice big blue chip Bay Area companies. I interviewed with Google last month, for example.
There are certain types of software engineers, that are getting offers of 150K to 175K for base salary up here in Bay Area, for only 5+ years experience. It was in the newspaper recently.
