I hope you don't do this, it just drags you down to an unethical level because you "think" they shouldn't pay you half what you expect to earn. Are you actuall

I hope you don't do this, it just drags you down to an unethical level because you "think" they shouldn't pay you half what you expect to earn. Are you actually worth what you expect to earn? Does the company have a valid reason for offering you less than what you expect? I think these are the questions you should be asking. I ran an offshore outsourcing company for nearly a decade, and I can tell you something from that experience. The vast majority of applicants were not worth half what they expected. They seem to have come from an environment where they expected to graduate from college and immediately jump into the real world of programming at ridiculous salaries -- simply because they had graduated from college. The reality was that they had learned a smattering of different languages but they were not proficient in one, so they were little more than "on the job trainees" to me, and in this situation they were lucky that I paid them half of what they "expected". The bottom line here is that they had ridiculously unrealistic expectations, and they were disappointed to learn their true value in the real world. It was an eye opening experience for most of them when I wouldn't even consider hiring them because of their lack of capabilities and their failure to perform simple programming tests without books and online references in front of them the whole time. I'm not suggesting that you're worth less than what you expect, all I'm saying is that in my hiring experience many of my former programming applicants have failed to demonstrate that they are worth their perceived values.