You can get recruitment offers without knowing any programming (fake profile) and you can technically target $180k if you're making $5k.

I'm not saying that's what the GP is doing, but it's not impossible!

I'm just really good at it I guess. I went to software engineering school in my homeland country but both quality of university and my desire to learn were not there. After I moved to the US all of sudden I felt in love with programming.

The reason I'm not responding to big companies yet is that I don't have enough english and US work history. I failed at Yahoo! just because I was not able to speak good English(they said it).