* This might sound trite, but you will make the most money when your company has lots of money.  If your company is struggling or its industry is going through a cyclical slowdown, you will typically make less than at a flush firm or in a booming industry, even if you are a top performer.  Tactically switching industries midway through my career led me to significantly higher comp longer term (several multiples).  
  * Become indispensable in the key areas that are most highly correlated with company success.  I mean improving the company's bottom line, not working more hours than anyone else.  Be focused and direct.  These priorities are often broadcast by ownership/the executive team, but sometimes the message gets lost in translation by middle management.  Do these things with visibility and measure the difference you've contributed.  If your job isn't in the critical path or your job doesn't have enough transparency, move on. 
  * If you don't have equity, it's not your company.  Don't make the mistake of sacrificing your mental or physical health for your company's sake.  It's never worth it.  Having 'moral' equity instead of real equity is an awful feeling.  Instead of holding out, moving on was always the right call for me.

If, in your example, you become the single point of failure because nobody else wants to engage in modern practices to increase the durability of the application then its a management problem. The way to think about that is: that by changing direction are you reducing time and cost of delivery? If so you have become that single point of failure by pushing for greater ethical considerations.

Beware though, everybody especially people who are ethically wrong, will claim their way is better. The differentiator is measurements: speed of delivery, speed of refactor, degree of risk, speed of labor, quantity of dependencies, compile time, load time, and so on.

Out of curiosity, which industry did you switch from (and to)?

It's not really skill dependent. I mean of course you need some skill, but the point is that the raise comes for the skill you already have, why the employers are willing to shell out more.

If project manager's in OP's area make $90K, no amount of job hopping is going to making him a $350K earner. Agree all else equal, better earn $95K than 90K but the better bet is to break out of that range.

Just lateral moves won't get you there. You need a different strategy.

You say you are a PM - have you done both greenfield (aka "primary software construction") and looking at how to deploy/tune a canned application (like Salesforce)? I think they are materially different skills. How deep are your personal tech skills? I tend to see the very best PM's become CEO's pretty rapidly, so that is one path.

For me the most impact came from "rushing to the unglamourous stuff." Documentation, testing, build and deployment pipelines, security and compliance (which are not the same thing), and then building bridges to other functions, which helped me be the 'voice of the customer,' over and over again.

As an IC, I've been a coder (initally perl, later c++, then python), network engineer (cisco bgp/load balancers - pre cloud era), data center manager, biz apps steward (jira, confluence, sfdc, hris), database admin. As a manager I've managed dev teams, SRE teams, data science teams, and product teams. Getting involved in sales engineering and direct customer support also helped a lot.

They talk about "T" shaped people, but if you can have depth in multiple areas and have a framework for understanding black box (ie $largeVendor [ie Oracle] is used for $UnchangeableMissionCritical application - how are you going to work with it?) stuff, then you can level up from a "mere" PM to an "Agent of Organization Wide Change"

So much this.

I'd hesitate to even call them adjacent.

Compliance is nothing more than a set of checkboxes. It won't stop your developers from writing `sql.query("select * from users where username = '" + username + "'`.

Do you have other examples of this or a more elaborate form of explanation to this?

I work in fintech, the data points of my domain are transactions, prices, properties of different instruments, etc.

This data is moved + manipulated in different ways using different formats by different systems, but each day I accumulate useful context and expertise on the data of my domain.

There are a ton out there, just spoof up your resume and start applying. High level PMs at FAANG make at least 200k base + a ton more with equity.

If the goal is to get more money, starting a whole new job path is a crazy choice, just find a senior PM role that pays more. If you hate PM that is a different discussion.

I hire project managers and I would say this is very location dependent and also very industry dependent. Find the right type of projects in the right industry and $100,000 should be very very achievable in a medium-cost-of-living city. It should be a no-brainer in NYC or SF.

That said, again depending on industry and type of projects, there’s a lot of risk in switching jobs for 20% more salary. How long until those projects dry up and you’re first out the door?

The skills they teach have been very helpful in getting better pay than co-workers and early promotions. You may have to apply the skills for a few weeks or months with actual customers. The deep end is car sales. 12hr days and the bottom sales person gets fired.

Second option would be trying to find somewhere that will apply for you to get a security clearance. High job security and a good bonus pay on top versus without it.

I was a “pretty good” programmer (I’ll estimate as top 10%), but am also a fairly good writer (I’ll estimate top 20% there). That combination has been quite valuable to companies I’ve worked at and for my family.

Find the intersection of valuable things where you excel or could excel.

One underlining here is it's easy to fake experience in an individual domain ("yeah, I know python. I read like 2 books.") but you can't fake experience in multiple, pointed domains ("yeah, I used python to manage a fleet of clown cars for the Hertz-Barnum merger").

Another angle might be to look into software companies in the EV sector, ones that build apps based on the charging infrastructure. Pivoting into running projects for them would probably be the most straight forward path to doing PM work on software and not physical install of hardware.

Since high school, I have had precisely one job where I did not know someone going in and/or who did not come to me: and that was cleaning cars at Hertz at the turn of the century

Every single other position I have had came from: a referral, personal inquiry, or a recruiter finding me

Maintain a good reputation, and get to know as many people as you can

Additionally, exploring professional development opportunities or certifications in relevant areas could enhance your skill set and open up new avenues.

But you also mention wanting to find meaning. The two aren't necessarily related, so you need to decide what you actually want.

I will paraphrase something an old boss said to me, which is that the fact that you're asking about ways to improve puts you heads and shoulders above most people. There's tremendous value in focusing on growth -- personal and professional -- and spending a lot of time introspecting and thinking a lot about how to be a better person, a better team mate, a better leader. You'll get it wrong, you'll mess up, but the act of thinking about it is going to give you some advantages over most people you interact with.

For me personally, I think one of the best skills you can develop is the ability to problem solve. I'm an engineer, so I think about problems through a certain lens, but for PMs, it's equally important. It's not just about how to arrive at a solution, but how to determine whether you're even looking at the right problem. It's something that I thought came naturally to me, but I spend a lot of time running scenarios in my head about how I might solve the real-world problems I see in front of me. For example, if a particular system is slow, I run through scenarios on how to speed it up or decouple certain features to enable concurrency. If customers are dropping off in a funnel, I brainstorm scenarios through which I can proactively alert us that something is going wrong, or perhaps how to add additional telemetry to give us more signal in the noise.

One axiom out there is "bring solutions, not problems," and so constantly practicing the the problem solving is something that has served me very very well. My solutions aren't always the best, but the muscle memory is very ingrained and I can iterate very quickly with people about what possible solutions are, more so than many of my peers.

In a similar vein of this, like, is the problem the right problem to solve? Just because something is a problem doesn't mean it's an _important_ problem. For example, my CEO is asking me to do something that will make us $100,000, and she says it's really important. But our company makes $400 million dollars a year in revenue. Is an additional 100K going to move the needle? Nope, not even a little bit.

So is that the best use of our time? No. That doesn't mean we shouldn't build the feature, but it does mean that we are probably not solving the correct problem. By reframing "doing the thing" as "building a tool to automate the thing," then I can 10x, 25x, 50x the leverage the company has to do these 100K revenue tasks.

I don't always win this argument, but it's a good exercise to go through at any rate.

Anyway, that's some stream of consciousness stuff for you. Hope it helps. Best of luck!