Was I Really Getting Ahead All Those Years?

Something that I've wanted to do for awhile now has been to look at my employment income over the years that I was working full-time, and see how I did against inflation. Specifically, I wanted to take my totals for 1986 through 2008, adjust each for inflation (to 2009 dollars) and chart the progress, year by year.

Today, I did just that. For the first and last years (1986 and 2008, respectively), I prorated the employment over a full year, as both were only partial years in terms of employment. Here are the results:



As you can see, there were a few "down" years, but those are a bit misleading. In every case, I think, there was an abundance of overtime or bonus money in a previous year, rather than an actual drop in my annual salary. What's most interesting to me is the fact that I finished my career making about 3 and a half times as much (after adjusting for inflation) as I started at. That's quite a considerable increase, especially considering that I always felt as though I was contributing more as a programmer than I ever did at the higher levels!

As you can also see, I've removed the actual dollar amounts from the chart. But I will impart the following bit of insight: my 1986 annual salary in 2009 dollars was actually a fair bit lower (by more than 10%) than what we were hiring new programmers at, straight out of school, just before I quit working last summer. So I think that means that there's hope for you all! :-)