If you want to become rich and have a good salary, Study hard But for your Question, it depends on what kind of programmer it is. For example, You are a certified programmer but if you prefer to be a teacher/professor, your salary would be same thing as what they have for being a teacher. If you decided to go on a large company and you have the skills, surely you will get what you really want. My Aunt is a CPA. She said that the programmers salary is bigger than their salary even though some programmers are just sitting around and waiting for a work. Hope it works