[Arnt]

I'm only going to comment on the salary bit.

GP lives in an company world. The cost of a developer to a company is the developer's salary as stated in the contract, plus some taxes, health insurance, pension, whatever, plus the office rent for the developer's desk/office, plus the hardware used, plus a fraction of the cost of HR staff and offices, cleaning staff, lunch staff... it adds up. $3500 isn't a lot for a week.

[galleywest200]

Most of these items are paid for by the company, and most people would not consider the separate salary of the janitorial or HR staff to be part of their own salary.

[Arnt]

I agree, most people wouldn't. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings, when some people think in terms of what they earn and others in terms of what the same people cost their employers.

So you get situations where someone names a number and someone else reacts by thinking it's horribly, unrealistically high: The former person thinks in employer terms, the latter in employee terms.