Hi, SA dev here (Cape Town). A starting salary is usually 18-22k, a mid-level position is usually starting at between 30k and 40k and for experienced devs (around 5+ years experience usually) around 50k and I'm sure lots of people get more.
I'm a programmer, my dad's a dairy farmer. We're both happy with our choices. Anyone thinking of the farm life, just be careful of romanticizing it as this article does. You have to be very efficient and manage risk extremely well - a lot is out of your control (the weather, crop/livestock diseases, the prices of livestock feed/fertilizer/seed, the price of the final commodity you sell which is determined by global markets). Farmers often have razor thin margins and it can be very stressful when it doesn't rain and your crops/livestock start dying, or when input prices in your local area are above global sales prices for your commodity. These things happen from time to time and must be planned for properly (insure/self-insure and don't freak out), or you risk emotional and financial bankruptcy. This takes some doing. My dad can handle this risk and he is a very happy and successful farmer. I can't. I'm a very happy programmer.
I love working from home, but having everyone on the team using tools like slack to communicate is essential - I don't think it would work otherwise. The team and managers need a certain level of trust too. It was pretty hard to get "onboarded" initially and start feeling like part of the team but it got better over time thanks to over-communicating on my part and much use of the slack /giphy feature!
As a young woman developer this is a very saddening article to read, and especially upsetting the comments of women engineers being let go while/because they became pregnant. My hope is that the industry will become more balanced as the many millennials working in tech start families...
So cool to have a way to support the majority of musicians that just aren't making any money with the current system. With streaming the top 1% of artists get most of the pie...
As for costs of living, 50k is a really good salary. See the "developer big mac index" here: SA ranks number 2 https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015)
Milage varies if you have dependents to support though - private school especially gets expensive if you choose go that route for kids.