[marvin]

In Scandinavia, contracting agencies are king. We've brewed up many local varieties of these, that are much smaller, probably a bit more skilled and generally don't deliberately take money from customers that clearly don't know what they're doing.

Directly employing most of one's required software engineers is largely a very new phenomenon, and not yet widespread.

In Norway, you'd have e.g. Evry, Itera, Bouvet, Miles, Computas as well as international companies like Steria, Accenture and CapGemini. They contract out developers at ~$125 an hour and pay a regular middle-class salary. A large portion of software engineers are employed at a company like this.