Take a look at the rates that these programmers from outside the United States (mainly Russia and Ukraine) charge for c+ developement and a whole host of other programming languages. And each programmer has their own bio. Here's Maxim K. from Smolensk, Russia who's currently charging $10.25 per hour doing C#/.NET development work for an American firm. Note that he has three stars out of five for his English skills rating. Looks like the $50/hour I was hoping to get doing freelance Access work is not going to happen.

I program Lotus Notes databases as part of my job at a healthcare company. All I've ever heard from programming know-it-alls (and non-programming ones) is how much they hate Lotus and how they'll be going out of business one of these years. Well, from all of my reading on the Web and hearing of people's first-hand experiences from this year's LotusSphere there's a new attitude in Lotus World and it's in the positive/aggressive vein. Ed Brill shares his thoughts on the big Lotus turnaround of the past year or so. Double-digit growth goes a long way to getting the attention of your ownership.