A note on programmer salaries

Companies that hire consultants for tech are incompetent technically. That comment means little.

Someone above made a point about how there is a big difference between your local market value and the value you bring to the company which I agree with. The way to close that gap is through negotiation and by getting past people's biases.

Even people who are generally logical will be resistant to paying a good south american developer as much as a mediocre developer who is also remote but in Seattle.

Even though I'm from SF this is strangely something I've thought about a lot. What I would do in your shoes: (1) create a nice portfolio of all your work (omit the Cisco CCNA stuff, if you are looking for work as a web developer that is actually a red flag, just put your web work and claim to have done anything you can reasonably defend in an interview), talk in aspirational language about your passion for the craft of software development and always point out every way in which you were involved in collaboration with designs are in business concerns and how that informed your more technical work because your real passion is for creating useful products that people love, not just banging out code (2) write some blog posts occasionally about functional programming and how to write better tests, (3) instead of saying you are from Central America say you are "currently enjoying living in Costa Rica (a US friendly timezone)" or just completely omit where you are and simply say you are in EST, who cares beyond that??(4) explain that you are an expert in "remote collaboration" (5) humans are experts at sniffing out non-native language speakers. Find a US Native copywriter and have them polish all your copy and pay a designer buddy to make your site look cool and modern, (6) post your resume on Hired, etc (7) ask for $175/hr but expect to accept $150 or so.

This all depends on how good you really are of course. Another US bias (possibly valid) is that php developers are paid less. Bone up on Elixir/Phoenix or another hot language/framework + react native, do a cool side project even if it is quite small.

IMO if you did all that you'd have plenty of work at high US rates. (just for comparison, $32K/yr is about $16/hr, you can definitely get up to > $100 or $150/hr)

All that investment and the resultant relationships have real value so step 2 of course is to hire a couple of your buddies who are also good at slightly better than local market rates...

if you are bad at negotiation you should hire someone to do it for you.

I'm a junior developer in a megacorp, where I sometimes think about how I'm not getting the salary I could be getting if I moved to SF, negotiated a bit harder, pushed for quicker promotions...

But I'm not the lowest paid person in the office. Even the junior devs who started well after I did and haven't had as many raises aren't the lowest paid in the office.

I'm fairly sure the lowest paid people in the office are the cleaning contractors who come in after hours, almost certainly with far less flexibility, worse working conditions and worse job security than the programmers whose mess they vacuum.

Not that this stops me from pursuing career progression, but it'd be nice to see software developers show a bit of solidarity with people who aren't lucky enough to be able to work with tech and who live paycheque to paycheque, rather than discussing how they're going to negotiate their way up to being in the global 0.5%.

It's not uncommon to let capable junior devs run a small project with someone more experienced having oversight.