I personally see being a 'Software Developer' as a far higher position than someone doing 1st line support in I.T. That "friend who fixes computers at..." may

I personally see being a 'Software Developer' as a far higher position than someone doing 1st line support in I.T. That "friend who fixes computers at..." may not actually be first line support IT like you're assuming. Even if he is a System Administrator rather than a Software Developer, that doesn't say anything about the level of the position. A 3rd-level software developer playing with eclipse making minor modifications to existing Java and writing features under close supervision from a senior developer is much less valuable than a 10th-level System Administrator with a proven track record of diagnosing production bugs, managing deployments, tuning applications like Apache, Oracle, MySQL, and building stable, scalable environments for the developers and QA.