The world runs on electricity, education, petrol, food, construction, clothers... what is really happening and what Andreesen should be saying is that now software is totally mainstream, not a hobbie or a hackers thing. And as so, we are part of society. But, you know, most people work in important industries and yet doesn't have the respect they deserve. Think in food supply or water supply, when was the last time you found someone famous related to water suply, which who was awarded and so?
Bought a license of PyCharm and I'm having exactly the same experience as Guido: love the debugger, prefer emacs+screen+ssh for everything else.
I've heard others python guys saying that they have PyCharm for exploring complex repositories and debug things. The problem with emacs is that it's perfect for coding, but not for exploring.
The C++ developers I've meet in London that earn 600 GBP/1000 GBP by day (consulting) are people who has been working for investment banks (JP Morgan for example) developing trading systems that use FIX Protocol (http://www.fixprotocol.org/).
«45K if you have a couple of years of experience» LOL that's interesting because, you know, it's false :) replace «couple» with "more than 5 years" and I will begin to believe you.
It's true that in BCN and Madrid things are better, but not that much. And in London you can earn more than 60K per year.
Spain is near Poland in salaries, we have tons of people with CS degrees (which doesn't means that they are good at programming) that make the salary lower by offer/demand law.
To put in perspective: rent a flat (average in the south) 600 EUR/months, buy a car 10.000EUR/30.000EUR, buy a house 150.000 EUR. And that's the south, in BCN you can increase rent and house price nearly by 100%.
In Spain you can find net salaries from 800€/month to 3000€/month (if we forget about big banks, and top notch developers in Madrid and Barcelona).
Yeah, we have substandard salaries and we are not that crappy. This could be the reason why many London based companies are installing here their dev shops.