Title: Today, while browsing the job sites for my area I started to notice a, what seems to me, bad trend. Of the few postings that detailed the salary, all of them were offering around 1000 euros (1300 USD) before taxes for people with 2-3 years experience (searched mostly iOS and Rails). This comes around to 700 Euros after taxes or so.<p>While I know the economy and country (Portugal) is in the crapper, this saddens me. I actually am doing a bit better but even this weekend I met with a client to discuss their need for a custom backend which I estimated to be around 1500-2000 euros development (and I lowballed) I also just got back that maximum he was willing to pay was 500 euros.<p>I read here in HN that talent is hard to find now a days everywhere, but from everyone I talk to here, those are about average salary for developers. (A couple years ago a manager told me their programmers with 5+ years of experience were quite happy to earn 1000 euros after taxes)<p>Is there anything I can do/say to try and convince clients that good programming skills are actually worth paying for? Any book recommendations? Or (and for people that know the kind of mentality I'm talking about) the only way to actually start making some more money is to look only outwards, either for remote work to people in the UK/USA or create and market a product to those markets? (I already do a bit of freelancing like this but it's a lot harder to get clients)
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