These days, Web developers are in such high demand that they are paid incredibly high sums and given outrageous benefits. So says James Somers, who recounts a story of amazing job offers for Aeon magazine.
Somers quit his job as a developer to become a freelance writer, and he had offers of $10,000 to $20,000 for his first article. But after just four days of calling himself a writer, Somers received a Web development job offer he couldn’t refuse: “$120,000 in salary, a $10,000 signing bonus, stock options, a free gym membership, excellent health and dental benefits, a new cellphone, and free lunch and dinner every weekday. My working day would start at about 11am. It would end whenever I liked, sometime in the early evening. The work would rarely strain me. I’d have a lot of autonomy and responsibility. My co-workers would be about my age, smart, and fun.”
He later adds, “In this particular gold rush the shovel is me. We web developers are the limiting reagent of every start-up experiment, we’re the sine qua non, because we’re the only ones who know how to reify app ideas as actual working software. In fact, we are so much the essence of these small companies that, in Silicon Valley, a start-up with no revenue is said to be worth exactly the number of developers it has on staff. The rule of thumb is that each one counts for $1 million.”
