>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.

Yes, we see a lot of J2EE requirements here as oppose to .NET.