Developers: why you should be wary of big salaries

As a developer, you sell your skills — at the best price, sure, but you must always work on projects that let you keep growing.

Ask yourself this:

Why is an employer ready to pay for my skills above the market rate?

When you work on a project, there's a balance between the intensity of the output expected from you and the growth in skills offered to you.

Generally, an employer that doesn't have the means to support your growth, or to expose you to a cutting-edge technical environment, will compensate by offering you a better salary.

The risk of selling yourself to the highest bidder is losing potential, or even falling out of the market that talent is so sought after in.

If you feel your career is stalling, ask yourself about the real skill growth your current position is bringing you and try to define the key skills you're missing to reach the professional goals you've set for yourself.

It's quite common to meet developers who struggle to reassure others about their actual technical level after spending too much time working in an outdated technical environment — for example in IT consultancies where code quality isn't a challenge for your direct employer.

You could say the market is gradually splitting between developers who code to live, and those who live to code.