[yulaow]

Agencies like Reply, Accenture, Avanade and Engineering are quite overcharging other companies for their consultants in Italy, taking advantage of the fact that a lot of big companies are hostile to keep devs in house (almost all of the big banks for example). I had the chance to see for how much I was being sold as a consultant some years ago and it was almost 3x the salary I was going to get (3 x 32k before taxes).

[txcwpalpha]

Lot's of commenters in this thread are trying to draw conclusions about dev salaries from this data, but you really can't do that for exactly the reasons you described. It gets even more disproportional for some of the bigger, high price tag consulting firms. In the Big 4 it's common to have entry level devs making $80k/yr ($~40ish/hr) while being billed out to customers at $200-300/hr.

[lvice]

I work in one of the companies you mentioned in Italy and, although it's true what you said, the rate paid by the customer still is around 350-550 Euro/day, which is $46-$73/hr, and these are the rates at top tier consultancy companies. $80/hr average still seems very high to me.