Do you know what is average salary of computer programmer?

The range of salaries for computer programmers for Microsoft centric technologies is 4000-8000. Add some certifcates as bells and whistles and it may go to 11000 say max 12000.

As I have been deep into it (and profession on my iqama still says so ), m2cs: as you enter into your thirties, it's wise to move out from the profession and follow a careerpath that has more of management and business. For example say functional consultancy or system analysis. The main reason in my view is the *encapsulation* which has played a fundamental role in this face of IT. Gone are the times when application written from scratch were respected. Microsoft themselves strarted focuing on dealing in off-shelf applications limiting developers to just *customize*. Same went for Oracle, the forms and reports all went somewhere  and eBusiness suite eating developers' lunch is quite a norm now. The launch of sharepoint services and eveything built around further aggravated scope for programmers. Not to mention the rise of open source world ...

Talking about Saudi Arabia in specific, the market here has not only more trust in the off-shelf solutions, also it has the ecomony to afford. The computer programming profession can be taken on short term and must just be a stepping stone to move ahead in career.

Hope this helps.