No it's not. But you must know more than just programming if you want to make yourself valuable and unique. Just being able to type from defined tasks will not bring you far, you must be able to define the tasks and how to tackle them.

I'm a South African developer who has worked mostly in the creative digital media space. Even with a couple years of experience, the most pay I could hope for was that of a junior developer - between $11k - $18k p/a - and I think even that was a bit higher than what my coleagues were earning. Developers in the financial industry earn a lot more here.

Roughly 2 years ago I took an entry level remote position at a Brooklyn based agency that paid 5 times that. SA cost of living might not be as high as in the US, but before I took that remote position I was living paycheck to paycheck, i.e. once all my utilities were paid and groceries were bought, I barely made enough money to live a life outside of the office. I had to save up for 6 months to buy home equipment (like dumbells, pullup bars, etc) and walk to work just so I could stay fit. Heaven forbid I get a gym membership - couldn't afford it.

I've seen graphs for this in the past limited to US states and found that developers with my skills earn twice as much in the SF bay area than those in NYC.

I can't find any recent (last 1 year) info on worldwide salary trends, in fact my own country hardly even shows up in comparisons for developer salaries around the world - so from my perspective, I don't think it can accurately be represented, as the gaps don't only exist between countries and continents. I think that the gaps that exist between corporations - whether from the same country/state or not are the more worrying factor, for the simple fact that a developer's pay is very open to interpretation - perhaps the people paying understand how complex a task programming can be, and pay more - but this is not always the case. It's all about how satisfied the individual programmer is with his/her payment, or more accurately whether he/she is willing to negotiate better pay - which can sometimes take a lot of courage.

As an aside, I'm an entrepreneur starting his own business, and I'm hoping to change perspectives of the worth of development work in my country and raise the bar a little higher in terms of fair payment locally, because I've been that guy that has programmed world wide itinerary tracking systems (while being warned any mess-ups could hurt the world economy - not sure if this was true or not, but the stress was real) for a measly $1500.