They say $40k is the median salary for new developers in Canada, this is much lower than I've observed and it makes me question the quality of the entire dataset. Are these really professional software developers who answered the survey?
Canadian new grads tend towards $60-70k with larger American companies paying closer to $80-90k in the same location. My sampling is heavily biased towards Ontario. I expect Greater Vancouver to be similar but perhaps the rest of Western Canada, along with Quebec and the maritimes are dragging the average down.
Maybe it's the same for Canada?
It also explains the extremely short term thinking - free lunch vs retirement - of the entire data set.
For example, I looked and found a level 1 Software Engineer opening in Kansas City for 50K. That actually seems pretty good -- the median house price there is 120K. Here in Portland it's 345K, and entry level engineers aren't getting 3x the salary. More like 80K or so.
This actually sounds kinda like a good reason for moving to the midwest, assuming you like everything else about it there.
I wouldn't expect a town of 30k (or even 100k) to have that many jobs for developers as it's a fairly specialized industry.
50 years ago you wouldn't find actuarials or design engineers in small towns either.
For the profession of software engineer, most of the jobs are in the higher salary bands there should have an outside impact on the average calculations.