I've noticed you make comments like this every time salaries are mentioned around here, with usually the same reception. You seem to honestly believe what you're saying, and you seem to be genuine when you say that you've observed lots of low salaries in your portion of the industry.
But you'd benefit from knowing that it's not like that, pretty much anywhere else in the developed world. Real developers really are making six figure salaries writing code for a living, working 40 hour weeks, no tricks. More important to you, specifically: You could be making six figures as a software developer. You just need to step out of your niche and go find a job for a public sector company.
Given your comment history, I doubt you'll believe me, or any of the others here replying to you, or the dozens of people who have replied to you over the years. But it's true. We look forward to seeing you out here some day.
What dsolomon is saying sounds completely incredulous to me: I've yet to hear of a single company that requires employees to purchase their own hardware or software. This is true not just of the top tier SV companies, but of _all_ companies who are aware that building software is their core competency. That's simply the difference between software being a cost center vs. a profit center.
Typing this on a work supplied Macbook Pro, 16gb of ram, 256 gb SSD. Cost to me: $0.
I am ssh'd into my development server which has 78gb of ram. Cost to me: $0
I have IntelliJ Idea Professional (price comparable to -- if not greater than Visual Studio) open in another window. Cost to me: $0. I didn't even need to submit an expense report, just asked IT to provide me with a license.
I have Windows 7 installed in a VMWare Fusion VM. In this case, I didn't even need to request it from it, there was a self-service application that I used to install it. Cost to me: $0.
I have an Android Nexus Galaxy 4G LTE phone on Verizon for work purposes. Could have an iPhone if I chose to. Cost to me: $0.
Google is my employer's primary talent competitor, so I can't imagine they (per game theory) can be any different when it comes to this. I have not worked at Google, but I do know anecdotally (many of my friends work at Google) they're very generous when it comes to equipment.
2) Re: hours/flexibility. I am currently at home typing this and it's ~11:30 am here. I can chose to work from home where are no meetings scheduled and can come in/leave whenever I'd like. Earliest recurring meetings I've ever had scheduled had been at 11 am.
3) Re: salary. Look up my employment history (titles and employers), then see Glassdoor figures (same title at same employer). They're actually lower (on average) than what my own base salary had been at those companies.
You can choose not to believe me, but in this case, you're simply being paranoid.
tl;dr Get out of defense contracting/working for the government or traditional (non-technical) corporations. You'll fare far better working for private sector technology companies.
You sucked me in! I didn't recognize the name, but I remember him as the "DC Guy With Clearance". I browsed his comments over the past year, and it's pretty clear to me that he either enjoys being underpaid and views it as a badge of honor or is so completely mistrusting of other people that he thinks that we are trying to screw him over when we (tens if not hundreds of people) suggest that he can easily get a higher paying job else where.
I don't think unemployment is caused by out of work programmers. It's more the folks who have no or low skill jobs and those effected most by the recession such as construction workers.
It's hard for me to imagine a construction worker being able to transition from the blue collar culture to the white collar culture that most of these jobs fall into.
Again, It's not so much that construction workers are stupid, but if the ones that reroof my apartment are any indication, insulting each others mothers and swinging hammers at each other when one pisses the other one off are standard fair.
Actually, since the recession, unemployment increased by the same proportion in all sectors of the economy. That is, software engineering unemployment is about twice what it was before; construction unemployment is about twice what it was before; etc. etc. etc. This indicates that the problem is not structural (i.e. not due to people having the wrong skills), but due to a shortfall in demand: everybody tightened their spending at the same time.
If companies paid that much then unemployment would be next to nil.