Recently, my wife and I started a company and she's handling the international IT recruiting side (I do consulting/training) and for years I've written a blog a

Recently, my wife and I started a company and she's handling the international IT recruiting side (I do consulting/training) and for years I've written a blog about how to be an expat. I'm actually a freelance software engineer with a background in economics. This leads to me to having an extreme amount of knowledge about this topic and while the article had a few issues, it's mostly spot on. There is a significant shortage of developers and ardit23 explained, with rapid growth of young companies fighting to hire developers but not able to pay Google-sized salaries, the vast majority of the job salaries are constrained by limited budgets of entrepreneurs. Until this industry stabilizes, it's going to be hard to get accurate price signals. And despite your contention, I know of plenty of devs who make >100K. I speak at conferences all over Europe and the US and I meet these people face-to-face all the time. Just because you don't know them doesn't mean they don't exist. That being said, part of the reason I know roughly what they make is because they work for big names like Google, or they are in-demand freelancers (we can charge buckets of money in the right situation). Hell, I know one guy who made €30K for a week of training! (search for top-notch training, note the cost per student, multiply that by a decent class size and five days. You don't turn that trick very often, but when you do, it's a lot of money). And $75 to $80k in New York? No way in hell I'd take pay that low to work there.