Why does custom programming cost so much ?

[sarettah]

Originally posted by Mike AI@Mar 25 2005, 12:52 PM
Sarettah, the reality is PHP programers are a dime a dozen... especially now.

The realy money for programers is in becoming a program manager who manages his own team of programers. But even that will not bring 6 figures unless you have amazing skills and experience.

Programing is becoming a commodity - something to be outsourced to third world countries...

The future is in business model development. That was one of the hot topics at the Inc 500 convention.

Past 3 years I have put six figures (not including to the right of the decimal point..lol) on my tax forms. And really, none of that was from side projects because I wasn't doing any. All of it was salary (currnt company doesn't do spit as bonuses)

And yes, I function as a program manager at times and NO, I did not do php during the daylight hours for the most part (we are ASP with SQL server on our web stuff although several of us are pushing to go php on apache just cause we can't stand dealing with IIS).

My junior most programmers bring down at least 50K.

My senior programmers are in the high 70's to low 80's and any one of us could walk and pick up more in this market fairly easily. Not as easily as a few years ago (screw Sprint and all the folks they put on the streets, they used to suck up the programmer population real quick making it easier for all of us to push the number higher) But with DST in town and several other fairly high profile tech companies in the area, the salaries tend to stay high (and I like that... )