There's some premium for face-to-face, but it turns out that even with remote work, price is still a good indication of quality.
I'm a freelancer and fully booked, so maybe those low cost competitors aren't so competitive after all.
I'm a freelancer and fully booked, so maybe those low cost competitors aren't so competitive after all.
Programmers have largely driven themselves to zero, just take a look at the workers on freelance websites and how much difficulty a native English speaking freelancer has against an army of commoditized labor.
There are still six digit earning engineers and always will be but you can't look at that as a metric for the massive commoditization that has occurred with generic programming in the past 15 years.