dude, don't get stuck by pay grade or demoralized by statistics given from recruiters or sites like payscale.com. While it might be true, it excludes other software engineers (who are basically programmers) who have contract jobs, side income from app store, etc. From my experience there are lots of them.

You obviously know programming, and one of the best advantages we have in this industry is freedom. Free to learn and produce in any language and freedom from the shackles of corporate bullshit. Friend of mine has a 9 to 5 job with salary of CAD50k, but his contract jobs give him another 20 and they keep coming. Even though he is 35, he doesn't want to have a managerial role in his company as his true passion is in coding and ladder climbing is the least of his interest.

The way I see it, there is no real caps to what our income can be. A lawyer needs a license to practice but we don't (generally). Our P.E equivalent could be all those good recommendations in your linkedin, your involvement in open source, your technical blog, etc. The things you can do, span from consulting, selling a software, a 100 hundred line code snipplet, anything. Our industry is far from being traditional and we just can't treat it like any other industries.

Anyways, if coding is still your passion for the not so distant future, here is a couple of sites for contract jobs/outsourcing:

http://www.elance.com/
http://www.guru.com/emp/index.aspx
http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/default.aspx
http://www.odesk.com/w/