Very good topic, Andy. I've often wondered how much I could make, given my education, training, skills and years of experience. I remember learning of Payscale and Saral.com years ago. I got onto Payscale to try and learn what I could make, in other locations. At the time I was looking at some senior developer jobs in NYC. I found that given my education, training, skills and experience that they pay range that Payscale gave me was, well let's say exuberant. We got to the point of talking about salary and I told them the range the Payscale gave me. I never heard back from them. Either they thought my requested pay range was way out of line, or they realized that they couldn't get this hobo from NM as cheap as they wanted to.

Since then I've considered the estimated pay ranges reported by Payscale, and Salary.com, to be off by a lot. I'd love to know if others experiences using Payscale.