The critical piece that you are missing is learn to negotiate.  Learn to do that effectively, and you will make a bigger difference in your income than any other single thing you can learn.  Even if you only negotiate once every three years when you are discussing salary, learning the basics of negotiation will pay you back more, dollar for dollar and hour for hour, than any other possible investment of your time.

So how do you do it?

Many years ago I asked a friend who was an excellent negotiator for his recommendation on how to learn how to negotiate.  He suggested a contrary book, Start with No.  It walks through a particular negotiation strategy that is highly effective and is a pretty good fit for a lot of people.  I happily can recommend it if you don't already have good negotiation skills.

Subsequently I ran across Bargaining for Advantage and it is by far the better book.  I would describe it as being geared towards giving people a theoretical framework from which they can better understand negotiations they are in, and can better figure out what works for them.    It can definitely take you farther than the previous book, however it doesn't give you as clear-cut "this is what you do".  It is a more advanced book.  I'm glad that I read it, but I am also glad that I didn't read it first.

How cost effective is learning something about negotiation?  Those two books combined cost well under $50.  I spent, combined, well under 20 hours reading them.  In the last three years they easily made me over $100,000 in extra income.

Most effective way to increase programmer salary besides just doing your job?
I am using MPB retina. I have more than two years of a constant osx experience but what I can't stand is an OSX font rendering. That's simply uncomfortable for my eyes. Big amount of my work I do using external monitor (Nec 24') and fonts look even more blurry (terrible) on it.
Is there any official or unofficial way to change font rendering in OSX?
Any kind of custom kexts or patching would be appreciated. I can't find myself anything wrt this.
