How are you folks from Denmark coming to this $50K figure for an entry level programmer? Are you converting to US dollars from whatever currency you use, using current exchange rates?
Hmm...
http://www.citymayors.com/features/cost_survey.html
Ah ha! You live in the sixth most costly city in the world!
That explains it.
You see New York there down at number TEN? The least expensive 1br apartments (according to rent.net) are $2K a month. The median price is $3200 a month.
Here in Manchester where I live, the least expensive 1br apartments listed here are $800 a month, and the median is about $1000.
I pay $625, so this site doesn't exactly have the cheapest accomodations listed, but it's close enough.
I'm gonna wager a guess that you pay about $3-4K a month for your least expensive 1br apartments in Denmark. That's at least 3x what I'm paying. Your other costs of living are going to be similarly inflated.
So that explains how an entry level programmer would earn that much. If you lived out here in NY or California, then you might get paid that much entry level, only because that's what they have to pay in order for people to be able to afford to live in those places.
The places I've worked, like Indianapolis and Boston, are fairly cheap places to live.
So you see, you're really not making a fair comparison here. What you see as totally unreasonable may be totally unreasonable for YOU, but is totally reasonable for the majority of people who don't live in the most expensive cities in the world. :-)
Oh and Flameduck, there's no way in hell you can code a game in a week. Even when I was in high school at my prime, I couldn't do that. Unless you're thinking about adding no polish whatsoever and not doing any tweaking of gameplay.
I suppose if you had a design document which told you exactly what needed to be done, down to the last detail like how every menu should slide onto the screen, you MIGHT be able to do it, if you didn't sleep. But you're not gonna find a game developer out there who can give you a document like that. If you saw how vague the System Shock 2 design document was (and it was still like 100 pages) compared to how the final game turned out, you'd probably have a conniption fit.
Hmm...
http://www.citymayors.com/features/cost_survey.html
Ah ha! You live in the sixth most costly city in the world!
That explains it.
You see New York there down at number TEN? The least expensive 1br apartments (according to rent.net) are $2K a month. The median price is $3200 a month.
Here in Manchester where I live, the least expensive 1br apartments listed here are $800 a month, and the median is about $1000.
I pay $625, so this site doesn't exactly have the cheapest accomodations listed, but it's close enough.
I'm gonna wager a guess that you pay about $3-4K a month for your least expensive 1br apartments in Denmark. That's at least 3x what I'm paying. Your other costs of living are going to be similarly inflated.
So that explains how an entry level programmer would earn that much. If you lived out here in NY or California, then you might get paid that much entry level, only because that's what they have to pay in order for people to be able to afford to live in those places.
The places I've worked, like Indianapolis and Boston, are fairly cheap places to live.
So you see, you're really not making a fair comparison here. What you see as totally unreasonable may be totally unreasonable for YOU, but is totally reasonable for the majority of people who don't live in the most expensive cities in the world. :-)
Oh and Flameduck, there's no way in hell you can code a game in a week. Even when I was in high school at my prime, I couldn't do that. Unless you're thinking about adding no polish whatsoever and not doing any tweaking of gameplay.
I suppose if you had a design document which told you exactly what needed to be done, down to the last detail like how every menu should slide onto the screen, you MIGHT be able to do it, if you didn't sleep. But you're not gonna find a game developer out there who can give you a document like that. If you saw how vague the System Shock 2 design document was (and it was still like 100 pages) compared to how the final game turned out, you'd probably have a conniption fit.