It was very much bimodal. If you were working in BigTech or adjacent, that was definitely true. If you were working in enterprise dev like most of the 2.5 million+ developers working in a tier 2 city outside of the west coast in the US, comp was definitely stagnating.

In 2016, I knew I had to do something when my (step)son graduated in 2020 and my wife was willing to move anywhere the money took us.

It just so happened that a job fell into my lap at AWS working (full time) in the consulting department. I am no longer there. I now work at a third party consulting firm as a staff consultant specializing in app dev.