[netmonk]

From my French perspective, I would say developers aren’t paid enough.

For one reason: market price manipulation.

Half the IT market here is handled by service company. Their main business is to hire IT guys and sell them at daily rate to customer (final company).

This works very well for market price manipulation when the middle company owners are also the owner of the customer company.

Let me explain: let talk about bank. They are the biggest IT service customer on the market followed by military. So in the late 80, when they get bored to be milked by freelancer cobol développers they united and created a service company, which business is to hire IT guys and resell them to themself ( the banks).

They hired cobol dev from North Africa, for far cheaper than hire locals, they invented business rules in buyers département, defining that the bank cannot make business with small company (too risky). Most dev freelance run a little company for accounting and billing.

Then when the locals were looking for new job, they didn’t have choice, they have to go through the service company which was allowed to make contract with banks (because she is far bigger than one man company) and the poor local dev was pressured to cut by half his price cause he was in competition with the North African dev.

We can also talk that as far as the service company and the banks are owned by the sames guys, this eases a lot of accounting and tax optimisation, to say the least.

And here in France only a des service companies are managing now half of the IT market.

And guess what ? There isn’t any union for IT industry.

And also this situation helps to create the fear about not enough IT guys, pushing government to open wide the frontier to allow foreigner to work. How ?

Well when a bank open a position to be filled, she sent the proposal to several service companies, and then those service companies publish proposal on job board. So there can be 5 or 6 open position on a job board, for the only one real open position at the final customer.

And after médias are writing article about how it is difficult to find people, there is much demand and so few candidates, we must open the border and let all peoples around the globe onboard in France to fill the job market. All that while we almost have 10 000 000 of unemployed.

I don’t know how it works in other countries, but this is mostly how it works since late 80 in France.

Let’s not forget about the public money (state money from tax) thief scheme. When ministry is opening an it positon around 1500 euros/day rate, and when the final working (the guy doing the job for real) is only able to bill around 600euros/day. 900euros days are going to a multilayer of middle service companies which most merit is to have a guy able to use a phone, and whose boss has often an uncle or similar into ministry or gov.

[betaby]

Such schema in the banking is not unique to France unfortunately, I've seen that in other European countries and Canada as well.