I need some advice. I am a 29 year old Australian designer & developer. I am happily married, and have 2 sons, 4 and 1.5 years old. I have been doing web development for over 14 years and am quite good at all aspects of frontend and backend dev. At home in Ruby, PHP, and Javascript. I love web development. I suppose I would consider myself a 'senior' developer. I have worked internationally (USA and other places I dont want to name as it will make it easier to know who I am). The problem I have is I am technical enough that I have gotten myself in this situation: Currently in Australia there is a mining/resources boom and salaries are quite high. 4 or so years ago I was working for an mining/resources related company (I will call them X) as a Financial System/Database person on an OK wage, while running an ok freelance web development business. I left there to work in the USA and after my E3 visa expired (2 years) I have had to return to Australia. Upon returning I got a job with a local web company for $75,000 which was good and I was happy for 3 months. After 3 months I got a call from X, after they found out I have returned to Australia and offered me the job back. I said no, as I had only been at my new company for only 3 months. But then she dropped a doozy: Offering me $105,000 to come back. I realized I could not ever make that in the small web dev company I was at and decided to take it. It was a decision for my family. The boss totally understood and even said he could not match that (i didn't ask him to) and wished me luck. I even offered to buy the retina macbook pro from then that they had purchased just for me - which they accepted. I had been back here at X for 6 months when I had my first performance review. I am on very good terms with my boss and she knows I have a passion for web development and does not mind me doing some small things on the side. After I told her I had the possibility to land a freelance contract on the side that was quite large I let her know. She asked me into her office and said that she wants to raise my salary to be comparable to the market. She said, "name a figure". I said I would feel bad to get an increase after such a short time, but she insisted. I said, "what would you offer". She said, "I will put you on $145,000 to keep you with us, we cannot afford to loose you and have our systems go downhill". I accepted. I have now been on that salary for 4 weeks. You might think I would be the happiest person in the world (I am and was). But now I feel like I am trapped here forever. I am trying to support my family working here where its not what I love but it scares me to think I will be here for the rest of my life. I like to think that "I am not a financial systems analyst, I am a web developer", but should i just let that go and face reality?