Anita (name changed for privacy) is one of the sharpest engineers I’ve spoken to lately.
She’s also quietly underpaid — and she knows it.
We got talking about money. She earns around $200k. Solid, on paper. But for her level, the market pays closer to $300k.
She’s known this for months. She’s still in the same seat.
I didn’t sugarcoat it. “You’re underpaid,” I told her. “The fastest way to fix that is to switch.”
But her situation is really about something bigger. And it might be about you, too.
Being underpaid isn’t a reason to grind harder where you are. It’s a sign you’re holding leverage you haven’t cashed in.
And for an engineer right now, the biggest lever is AI.
The wage premium for AI skills more than doubled in a single year — from around 25% to 56% (PwC). AI engineer is the fastest-growing role on the market. And roughly 95% of that job is production work: shipping systems, not watching tutorials.
That’s the whole gap. Nearly everyone can talk about AI. Very few can deploy it. The few who can are the ones getting the offers.
So if you know you’re underpaid, stop waiting for a raise that isn’t coming. Go build where the money is — one real, deployed AI project you can put in front of people. Then move.
Anita’s instinct to leave was right. She was just missing the thing to walk in with.
If you know you’re worth more — what’s stopping you from building the one project that proves it?
Go get paid,
Kirill
P.S. Anita had taken courses before. Knowledge was never her problem — a finished, visible project was. Now that she’s built one in our program, she’s ready for her leap 🚀