Sadly your manager did not lie, most people I have met in Portugal (which is also my home country) do get 1k eur/m gross. And they are quite happy with it because that's what most people get from similar jobs. They also don't seem to think much about it. The best I ever got was 1.5k eur/m gross.
I am now living in London and sometimes I look at the job boards, it usually starts at 2k gbp/m for 3 years of experience with rails. For iOS development I have seen much higher offers.
It's around 2.3k eur/m for the worst case scenario, more than double what he gets currently and the cost of living is London is probably around 1.5x to 2x more expensive than in Lisbon. It's enough for London but I should also note the website I linked to shows much more than that (around 50k eur/y average), I just like to work with worst case scenarios all the time. :)
Even 2k gbp is under 40k USD, and thats for 2 years experience and in London? thats a bit hard to believe that dev's get paid that little over there. You'd be hard pressed to find an entry level development job anywhere in the U.S. that doesn't start out at that.
Yes, worst case scenario and post-tax because that's how you do it in Portugal. But I should have made it clearer since I talked about gross wage on the same comment.
I'll insist on the idea that if you look carefully you can find offers at 1k gbp/m for entry level in London. I never talked about average, only minimum, and they do exist. Telling someone from another country that it will most probably get x gbp/m can be deceptive.
It depends what you do in America with regard to 55k / year after 2 years, I gravitated towards a platform / language that pays higher than median for developers as a whole so I got past that fairly quickly, but for guys who work mainly on the front-end or higher level languages it may be about the same, depending on location of course
I am now living in London and sometimes I look at the job boards, it usually starts at 2k gbp/m for 3 years of experience with rails. For iOS development I have seen much higher offers.
Check adzuna: http://jobs.adzuna.co.uk/search?what_c=iOS%20Developer&w...