"I asked the CEO of a startup with about 70 programmers how many more he'd hire if he could get all the great programmers he wanted. He said "We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning."
According to media PHP is used server-side (the system was written using CakePHP). This is decompiled client app that is used by electoral commissions (the one that is hardly working at the moment).
Context: State Electoral Commission declared a computer glitch is delaying the vote count. The problem persists, and election results are not yet available.
30 USD per hour, so c. 200 USD per day. Poland, but mostly remote clients. Mobile apps (crossplatform, also native iOS), occasionally some accompanying Python or PHP stuff on server.
yep, that's quite sad we have so little anticapitalist software projects. Like helping workers to organize, run consumer cooperatives efficiently, construct parecon-style economic networks...
Costs of living haven't been that much different for a decade or so. The only reason most businesses pay poor salaries to Polish workers is - because they can (high level of unemployment + low percentage of workers organised in trade unions + low minimum wage). Living expenses don't differ much between Warsaw and Berlin.
Programmers' wages are an exception, because - unlike most of the population - they have way out from the local labour market.
"2nd world" (Eastern Europe) freelancer here - it really depends what things you work on, even on Elance, oDesk etc. It's not that hard to generate >20k, of course if you know what you're doing. oDesk clients brought me >40k this year, most jobs north of 5k (I do mobile apps). There's of course a lot of crap job postings there, but once you get a minimal reputation, you don't even look at those "make website for a peanut" contests. Of course rates are well below those that American developers usually get, but really not <20k year, at least when you work full-time.
that's not an answer for the majority of population, when the pace of good job destruction is faster than good job creation.
no doubt, there's now plenty of opportunity for tech-workers, who will profit from the process (at least as long as their jobs don't get automated away, too). but the wages are already stagnant also in this sector - when the entry of new workers will undercut current engineers' negotiating position (and it will, as engineering becomes the only safe-heaven on the labour market), they will gradually face similar fate as the rest of the workers. the real winners of automation are the owners of capital.
...and when you have learnt it - use a decent cross-platform framework (like Titanium or Xamarin, I don't mean uncanny-valley-html-pretending-native-ui...) for 80% cases, where it makes more sense than producing two separate code bases.
people aren't "meant to" live in cities, use wheel, spend life in front of computer screens... but we're not hunters-gatherers any more, which suggests that what we are is far more determined by current form of society than innate "human nature". living a TaskRabbit life in the techno-capitalist dystopia is no more "natural" than some hypothetical form of democratic socialism - not to mention far less desirable for the majority.
first of all, it depends what you define as socialism.
what seems more important, history shows that there are no Iron Laws Of History Written In Capital Letters. what we see is always an outcome of particular circumstances. like - "trying to establish a particular form of socialism (i would rather say this was communism, not socialism, but let's not open an argument here...) in an isolated, pre-capitalist country, that was recently destroyed by war, and has no democratic culture, produces shitty effects". that doesn't tell much about choices we have today.
"let's emphasize that automation/technology will ultimately improve everyone's lives so that the middle class lifestyle will be the new poverty"
except there's no reason to believe it will happen. possibly new poverty will be good, old poverty as we know it - just extended to what used to be middle classes. when mass labour is no longer needed, those who possess the wealth have no incentive to share it. last 30 years fly in the the face of the "trickle down" narrative. when those who sell their labour will face further weakening of their negotiating position, this trend will rather accelerate.
Evidence-based policy proposal at its finest :)