In the city I am in Brazil, I've seen companies that offer from R$2,500 to R$4,500 per month gross (plus the legally required one month's bonus per year), plus other random forms of compensation.
Factoring in taxes and union dues (mandatory one day's wage per month go to the union) at USD 1.00=BRL 1.75 it comes out to US$14,000 to US$29,000 net. Some fudging is involved because the exchange rates fluctuate, and I'm not sure exactly about taxes (max marginal tax rate is 27%, plus random other "social" taxes plus union dues)
Wages may be higher in bigger cities such as Sao Paulo, but the rent is also higher.
Rent in the city I am in may come out to, I dunno, US$500/month rent in a reasonably nearby nice area. I've seen ads for rooms for US$285 taped to streetlights.
Overall its not bad, especially since companies will often pay a lunch per diem that is enough to stuff your face at a pay by the pound buffet and are legally required to pay for your bus fare to get to work.
This is for nice jobs where everything is done by the book. There are some pretty lousy jobs where nobody follows the rules and the pay is awful but I suspect that they are rare for computer programmers as opposed to say construction workers or janitors.
As a lifestyle it compares favorably in some ways to paying 50% of gross in taxes on a US$100,000 1099 contract job in New York City that involves commuting over an hour from some s---hole in New Jersey. Been there, done both.
It depends on what you define as above average. The minimum wage here in the UK is £5.93 an hour, so just under £12,000 a year (roughly $18.5k).
The 'average' wage in the UK is somewhere around £24k-£26k (roughly $37k-$40k).
For developers I'd say graduates start out at around £25k-£30k (roughly $38.5k-$46k) and the wages start to middle out at around £35k-£50k(roughly $54k-$77k) depending on your experience and seniority.
So in terms of 'above average' I'd say yes when in comparison to the rest of the population, but only by a marginal amount. There are extreme cases in the development sphere though - many developers who work in Finance will probably earn a lot more than those working in a more 'average' development job.
Australia (salaries converted to US$), for a developer who can actually program
Graduate $45,000
2-5 years experience: $65-$80,000
Highest salary for pure programming: $110,000
A lot of development here is done contract basis. Rates range from $40/hour to $100+/hour. Most good programmers with 2-5 years experience in a language in demand (say Java or C#) get $60-80/hour.
Specialist skills & good negotiating will get you more, bad negotiation or career planning will get you in a dead end position and you'll get less.
Mexico. From 10K to 30K usd per year. Then substract ~30% in tax. 50K if it is a very very senior job.
Life is a lot cheaper though. Still, engineering isn't very well paid back there, and options to work on something awesome are way more limited. Most options are consulting, business apps, or move outside to work for a cool company.
Here in Costa Rica it varies a lot between working for government or private companies, but a good salary for software development .NET, Java etc with experience is around USD $2500 per month, entry level or recently graduated around 1500-2000$ per month.
In India you stand to make between USD10k to USD12k annually if you go to work for a sweatshop (HCL, Infosys, TCS) straight out of college. This, I believe, is the lower limit. No idea about the upper limit.
Factoring in taxes and union dues (mandatory one day's wage per month go to the union) at USD 1.00=BRL 1.75 it comes out to US$14,000 to US$29,000 net. Some fudging is involved because the exchange rates fluctuate, and I'm not sure exactly about taxes (max marginal tax rate is 27%, plus random other "social" taxes plus union dues)
Wages may be higher in bigger cities such as Sao Paulo, but the rent is also higher.
Rent in the city I am in may come out to, I dunno, US$500/month rent in a reasonably nearby nice area. I've seen ads for rooms for US$285 taped to streetlights.
Overall its not bad, especially since companies will often pay a lunch per diem that is enough to stuff your face at a pay by the pound buffet and are legally required to pay for your bus fare to get to work.
This is for nice jobs where everything is done by the book. There are some pretty lousy jobs where nobody follows the rules and the pay is awful but I suspect that they are rare for computer programmers as opposed to say construction workers or janitors.
As a lifestyle it compares favorably in some ways to paying 50% of gross in taxes on a US$100,000 1099 contract job in New York City that involves commuting over an hour from some s---hole in New Jersey. Been there, done both.