I just got off the phone with a guy who was laid off at IBM here in Vermont a year or so ago. He says that IBM calculates the fully burdened cost of an in-house programmer at US$160,000 per year. That includes salary/benefits and overhead.

I should think that there would be some substantial opportunities for outside consultants/contractors in that case.

Other interesting tidbits according to my friend, who has been surveying the job market in northern New England:

Java is taking off. Many jobs/contracts in our area are people looking for Java programmers. (but not on the Unix platform....yet)

.NET has not taken hold, possibly since it isn't cross platform,
People like the idea of being able to run programs on non-Windows platforms.