[FBISurveillance]

I think those numbers are impacted by outsourcing market a lot. As discussed here multiple times, when you work remotely for a company without a middle man, other rates are applied.

With Basecamp, for instance, you'd get proper pay so you'd be able to afford flight tickets for a conference, which is not the case with rates in this article.

Disclaimer: born, lived and worked not too far from Armenia; worked in outsourcing for a good chunk of my early career. I'm a strong advocate of location-independent fair salary and hope other companies will follow Basecamp's lead.

EDIT: typo.

[FBISurveillance]

Pardon my sloppy example, but using https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ as GitLab salary calculator (on the bottom of that page), you can earn at least $76k/year working on GitLab as a senior engineer. While still not fair—in my humble opinion—that's more than 2x compared to numbers on the article.

Mind you, outsourcing firms take at least 30% of your paycheck (from what I remember from more than decade ago, $1.5k fees on top of $3k/month salary).