They aren't making 22k/yr is his point though. A US based dev, who is working 60 hours per week, and not making 50,000$+ is doing something wrong (or chose low pay for a cool company etc)
Not necessarily. I think a lot of developers are subjected to employment myopia, because they tend to reside in areas with a high concentration of startups that pay well and have generous benefits and "perks." Outside of those areas, the space is dominated by corporate entities, consultancies and other bastions of bureaucracy. These companies can get away paying little because they are entrenched in their market and face very little competition for developers from startups.
People who live in or attend school in non-tech-centric cities are often screwed. There are few companies that offer attractive employment opportunities, and those that do are in a position whereby they can hire only the best. (To be honest, I think that this is true everywhere. All startups want to hire the absolute best, and only the best. It appears otherwise because the best are the vocal minority. For every Google engineer on HN that made 120k out of college and extols the ease of finding lucrative employment, there are probably several developers who went to community college or a state school that spend their days in a cubicle in a Palo Alto office park for 30k per year. We just never hear from those people.)
So, I think a more accurate statement is "A US based dev, who lives in New York or San Francisco who went to Stanford and who is working 60 hours per week, and not making 50,000$+ is doing something wrong."
I'm not so sure. I went to college in a non-tech city in the middle of the country and all of my peers, many of whom stayed local, were making at least $55,000 working for boring companies (USAA being a big one). This was not an elite school either.
No startups, nothing sexy but if any of those companies recruiting us offered <$55k they were laughed at.
So that does seem like the ballpark figure, with the following 2 caveats: I don't know how reliable Monster is for this kind of data, and I picked three cities off the top of my head roughly in the middle of the USA that I don't think of tech centres but I don't know how out-of-touch I might be in that regard.
