The sad truth is that Big Companies are always cutting prices. It's impossible to get contracts at decent prices to shovel it down to the devs. I see both sides of the equation and in France you can't get clients if daily rates are too highs ; then you struggle to pay people what they truly deserve.

Our devs are not paid enough to save projects poorly down by half-competent team from big SSII that undercut everyone else.

And then the client is saying : "how can it takes so long ? I am only asking for this feature from Dropbox, that one from Google, a Facebook like feed and some Whatsapp notifications, all synchronised with these existing applications ! NOTHING HARD to do here !"

/rant