I wouldn&#x27;t claim to know anything specific about your situation, but I&#x27;ll say that I&#x27;m in the same boat (albeit by intention).  In order to break six figures, you&#x27;ll probably need to work for a tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, etc) and live in the appropriate metropolitan area.  If you&#x27;re not a top productive developer, you&#x27;ll probably be expected to put in 50+ hours a week.  These things all incur a cost to you, the employee, that is partially compensated by the increased salary and benefits.<p>For example, I currently make about $90k.  I interviewed at Microsoft in Redmond and was offered $110k base.  Let&#x27;s call it $130k with bonus.  I declined the offer.  Why?<p>I interviewed for a senior position and was told &quot;we don&#x27;t think you&#x27;re qualified for a senior position, would you like a junior position&quot;?  This is not a problem, except that it communicates to me that expectations will be high for improvement.  Additionally, during the interviews, I inquired, &quot;Does the team generally work 40-hours a week?&quot;  And they said with a disdainful tone, &quot;Well, we do have one person that works 40-hours a week.&quot;  That tells me that I&#x27;ll have to work my butt off for 50+ hours a week.  Additionally, moving from the smaller town I live in to Redmond&#x2F;Bellevue area will incur a noticeable increase in cost of living (specifically rent&#x2F;mortgage).<p>So, I go from a pro-rata rate of ~$43&#x2F;hour to ~$50&#x2F;hour (a 16% raise, nice but not amazing) but then I have to pay for it with substantially higher cost of living and substantially more stressful workload.  As an aside, this was when stack ranking was still a thing, and my questioning of the team during the interview indicated that it was a internally competitive team, which as a personal thing is disqualifying for me.<p>So if you want a six figure developer position, create a GitHub profile and build some ad-hoc demonstration apps using some interesting modern tools.  But just be aware that, if you&#x27;re not a &quot;top developer&quot; or &quot;rock star&quot;, then six figures often comes with a considerable cost.