Want good programmers? Then pay them.

In my experience, from what I see in Brazil, entry-level programmers with no professional experience are paid much more than the equivalent in other professions. And, even after years of "training" in college, they will need a year of two of actual on-the-job training before they start adding enough value to justify their cost. In short, a company that hires fresh-out-of-college programmers is making an investment in them.

most companies don't know how to value the contributions of software developers. i'm not actually sure they know how to value the contributions of most employees, period, except for salespeople. However as a dev, I'm biased some. I do think the potential for high value contributions, and the ability to avoid even costlier mistakes, is higher in the IT/dev dept vs other corporate departments.

Several years ago I was offered $60k at a company as a developer. I was coming to them with, at that point, 12 years of web development (backend, php, etc). I pointed out that $60k was not something I thought was reasonable for what I was bringing. "This is what everyone starts at here," was the reply, and I learned that was their starting salary for 'just out of college' devs. They hadn't hired any senior-level devs before (but had dozens of devs), and didn't even know how to put a value on the skills one brought to the table.

I've learned they've since changed their policies some, but that policy actually did a lot of damage to their rep in the local scene, and it was hard for them to get good devs for a while. The few I knew who were really good generally didn't start there, or started, then left after a bit. But... because I knew people there, I learned about their internal stuff. I was (sort of) shocked at how many basic dev mistakes they made, which ended up costing them extreme time/money to fix months or years later. These were rather elementary mistakes in most cases - I'd made them 10 years earlier myself in some cases.

How does one put a value on the savings experienced devs bring to a company, in terms of simply not making bone-headed decisions which cost a lot to fix later on? This is not saying I'm perfect - of course I'd make some mistakes. But mine would be harder to detect ;)

Lastly, somewhat relatedly, devs just coming out of school are almost never taught a few basic skills which are nearly universally required - how to break down a project in to smaller parts, debugging techniques (how to think about debugging, not particular tools), testing (including how to think about making code testable the first time), and version control concepts (again, not a particular tool, but the importance of version control). I'm seeing devs come out of school with degrees who have never heard of git/svn/cvs, nor understand why they need version control ("it's just me on a project").

You are right. But about that advert: Most people don't see that that's the minimum payment as demanded by the state. They actually pay more (and funnily, in that case, I know that company and they pay quite well and know to honor the skills of their developers). Kind of sad that recruiters in Austria haven't yet noticed that everybody thinks the minimum payment is not what people are interested in reading on there and confuse it with the actual payment.

I'm in Vienna and work for a local startup in the mobile application development scene .. and yeah. Pay-rates are definitely not what they should be, here in Austria. I think it has a lot to do with the "Kollektiv-vertrag" prices being set too low by the government itself ..