I feel that good/great programmers ask too little. Because there's order of magnitude of variance in skill sets and productivity, there should be much more variance in salaries.
In Finland, if you leave out top 0.5%, the variance is between 2000€-5000€. And most of it settles around 3000-4000€. Finland is very eqalitarian society when it comes to salaries and thus that has to be taken into account. But still. 2.5 is not much, think how much variance there is in salaries of managers, lawyers, doctors.
How's it in States, what are the typical salaries for good or great programmers vs. below-average progammers? Leave out top 0.5% - i.e. rare individuals with specialized skill sets in e.g. bank security.
Different parts of the US have such large variances in the cost of living that it's hard to give a meaningful answer (i.e. non-skilled labor here has greater variance than that).
The knowledge that there is huge variance in productivity level of programmers is kind of useless, because we mostly lack the ability to reliably measure true productivity. Similar to advertising: "I know I waste half of my advertising dollars...I just wish I knew which half." You can really only pay amazing devs more if you can figure out which devs are the amazing ones.
In Finland, if you leave out top 0.5%, the variance is between 2000€-5000€. And most of it settles around 3000-4000€. Finland is very eqalitarian society when it comes to salaries and thus that has to be taken into account. But still. 2.5 is not much, think how much variance there is in salaries of managers, lawyers, doctors.
How's it in States, what are the typical salaries for good or great programmers vs. below-average progammers? Leave out top 0.5% - i.e. rare individuals with specialized skill sets in e.g. bank security.