The defense contractor can't offshore your job. Once we normalize WFH, give it a decade and SWE salaries will be 120% of India, not 120% of Nowhereville.

My employer would rather pay 120% of Nowhereville for a dev in the eastern standard time zone than pay an Indian salary for that exact same dev working in India. And they'd even rather pay 120% of east coast major metro salary for that same dev commuting to their major metro office at least a few days a week.

I get the impression that much of the non-core software dev has already been sent to India. Much of what's left is core to the business and highly speed/quality sensitive, less price sensitive. Some of it even got offshored then reshored when management realized that time/language/culture/etc issues impose a variety of real costs that may or may not be acceptable depending on the project.

There are still significant challenges wrt workplace culture, meeting times, organizational setup (how work is actually synchronized between timezones/handed off), and, most importantly, language.

That said, a decade is a long time from now.

Language can be learned; but working with an European/US West/Malaysian team was a nightmare, because there's no way to schedule anything in everyone's daytime, and the resulting latency has horrible knock-on effects. Everything else can be changed, but the rotation of the Earth is...sort of non-negotiable.

(Mind you, we avoided actual teleconferences like the plague, but even sending an email was problematic: "yeah, this needs to go to A in Malaysia. God forbid that it then needs to go to B in USA, and then to C in Europe, because that's two whole days until you get a reply, minimum". Persuading people to work night shifts didn't quite work, either.)

> Language can be learned

Sure, but that doesn't mean they're communicating in the same way. You've got to learn (or unlearn) cultural aspects, too.

Then throw in the timezone difference, and a clear level-of-effort difference aka "case of the fuck-its", and you get a workflow that is entirely different from the local office.

We got around the time difference by offshoring in Latin America, who are on the same timezones.