Hi janoc,
Yes true. What I meant by "Facebook"-like was not that it was hosted or run on Facebook... The actual site itself uses a bunch of already-made "frameworks" that make it function like some of those large social sites. But it is built from the ground-up using all of these modules.
Sorry, my bad. I misread.
So while it may not be an embedded system developer, her site is much more complex than someone assembling a site on Facebook or Wix (which I've used by the way, pretty neat!). Her developers are more like the people actually making the code to run Facebook and Wix, and her users feed into the site as well by populating it with their own social updates, resumes, event postings and making their own work/personal pages.
Sure, but website "coders" (as they seem to be called now) you will find a dime a dozen these days. Every high school dropout seems to be doing it. There are certainly good and bad web programmers among them but this typically isn't something you need an engineering degree for, unless we are talking massive scale stuff like what Facebook or Google are running.
A book, online examples and perhaps a training course is all you need to build up stuff from such modules, if the person isn't a complete novice.
We aren't speaking about writing just a few "apps" here - that phone isn't running an Android or some other "sensible" OS where there is a large pool of developers (even then the developers are hard to find!). It is a low level system so any developer will need to get their hands fairly dirty to make anything advanced to work on it.
Embedded programming is a very different kettle of fish because it is typically fairly low level, there are various engineering constraints ("No, you can't run your app at full performance all the time because either the battery will die or the phone will melt down!"), the development is done in low level languages like C or C++ (or even assembly), the engineers need a good understanding of the hardware they are working with, etc. It certainly isn't something you can just hire a kid from next door to write for you.
I cannot speak about salaries in Asia, but here in Europe web developers take usually low 5 figures salaries annually (this isn't Silicon Valley ...). The embedded engineers command much more - easily 2-3x as much - and that is if you can find one to hire in the first place! It is a specialized field and not many people have the skill sets necessary.
(I do a lot of system level programming myself, even though I am not embedded dev apart from my personal stuff).