(FORTUNE Magazine) – Are you underpaid? Most likely the answer is a resounding yes, especially in this era of tightfisted bosses who make Scrooge seem like Mother Teresa. But what can you do about it? First, you might consult the list of salaries on the following pages and see how yours compares with those for similar jobs. Feel free to covet, complain, drool, or dream. Say you're a middle manager--a broad category, to be sure. Just starting out, you should be making at least $50,035 a year. The mid-career national average is $69,675, and superstars are pulling down $151,165.

If you don't measure up, you have two choices: Ask for a raise (good luck) or look for a new job. To aid in your search, Fortune's list contains a wide range of careers, from CD-ROM producer to corporate ethics officer, and shows how much you're likely to make in each one, vs. how much you'll make if you stick in your current position. To compile the list, we queried scores of industry associations, recruiters, and companies. Amounts for entry-level, average, and high-end salaries include base pay plus bonus (when available). They do not include the value of options, restricted stock, and other goodies that can turbocharge executive pay.

The best-paying jobs on the list are on Wall Street, and the best-paid person in that industry, period, was financier George Soros, who raked in $1.1 billion. To put that in perspective, consider that it would take 11,000 of his fellow investment portfolio managers (average pay: $100,000) to equal what Soros made.

Since not everyone can be an international investing genius, you might settle for a regular job on Wall Street, where the average investment banker earns $440,000 a year. Those who do mergers and acquisitions--the specialty du jour--stand to make more, $590,000 on average.

If your ambitions lie elsewhere, you might set your sights on a top corporate job. CEOs, CFOs, and chief legal officers are the best-paid corporate managers on our list, respectively averaging $1,524,057, $277,200, and $258,966 per annum. Don't, however, be fooled by those superstar salaries in the media. Barbara Walters, co-anchor of ABC's 20/20, reportedly earns $10 million a year--yet the average TV news anchor makes a modest $65,824. An anchor in a small market--say, Rapid City, South Dakota--earns a mere $25,453, on average. Same line of work, very different pay.

If you're just starting out or looking to switch careers, you might consider those the experts say will have the best salary growth. They fall into three broad categories: high-technology jobs, hot new jobs, and jobs where you help a company cut its costs--call them hatchet jobs.

With companies becoming increasingly stingy, hatchet jobs are much in vogue. Corporate accountants who can ease a company's tax burden are seeing their incomes rise handsomely. Senior tax accountants can average $55,300. Benefit managers, who structure health and pension plans, can also have a huge impact on the bottom line. The pay is commensurate, $85,200 on average, with top performers earning $101,600. And don't forget consultants who reengineer your company and end up walking away with a bag of loot: They average $120,660 a year.

Because specialized skills and training are required, high-tech jobs continue to promise stellar earnings. While pay remains virtually the same for software and hardware engineers--around $55,000 on average--there's an uptick in demand for the latter. This is because so many people have swarmed into software engineering, the glamour end of the business. Imagine hordes of quant-heads, pulling Coca-Cola-fueled all-nighters while searching for the killer program that will make them the next Bill Gates. The upshot: There's now a need for more hardware engineers to design circuitboards and disk drives.

Thanks to the growing popularity of computers as management tools, software programmers who know a language named C++, popular for building databases and other business applications, are ardently sought. So are LAN/WAN (local-area network/wide-area network) specialists who are good at linking a company's computers. Beyond these broad employment trends, a handful of offbeat jobs --ethics officers, biomedical engineers, and CD-ROM producers--might be the place to be. Ethics officers develop and communicate guidelines aimed at turning venal employees into well-meaning Forrest Gumps. Roughly 50% of large corporations now employ one, and the number promises to grow. Ethics vice presidents average a robust $140,000. (After all, what kind of signal would it send for a company to underpay an ethics officer?)

If you've got a head for science, consider joining the ranks of biomedical engineers. They design prosthetic devices and heart pumps and are hard at work on such blue-sky projects as mapping the human genome, which contains three billion base pairs of DNA. Pay averages $72,500, comparable with that of chemical engineers, traditionally among the profession's top earners.

Another hot job for the technically inclined: CD-ROM producer. CD-ROMs like Rebel Assault and Myst are multimedia productions requiring all sorts of specialists--graphic artists, sound technicians, scriptwriters. They also require producers, e la Hollywood, to line up the talent, keep the project under budget, sort out legal issues, and otherwise pull it all together. CD-ROM producers don't get paid like Hollywood producers yet, though they can make as much as $100,000. But the career holds promise. Says Randy Breen, 34, a snow-boarding CD-ROM producer for Electronic Arts, whose credits include Road Rash, a no-holds-barred urban motorcycle-racing game: "The job keeps changing, and there's no end in sight."