[gexla]

Right, as you might expect, programming salaries would be all over the map. Somebody rock solid could get up to $2K and probably more. For many others, there isn't a floor and not much in expectations. You could land someone to be an "ass in seat" for whatever you could get way with in negotiating. The difference might be that the guy making $2K might be creating more than that in value while the others might just be costing you.

I had a buddy who was trying to build a start-up here running on the .Net stack. He was willing to pay $2K for the right person, but couldn't find anyone. The devs he did find he was paying around $1K for and he ended up letting them go through turnover and not replacing them (something would always come up where they would shoot themselves in the foot or just had to quit for whatever reason).

Blue collar labor jobs which may pay decent in the U.S. don't pay anything here. People expect labor and services to be super cheap.

All anecdotal though.