Be careful what you wish for: if we move towards a genuine globally-integrated tech market, where work can be done from anywhere, then companies might start asking the complementary question: "why would I, as a company, pay US-level (or even EU-level) salaries when I could hire someone from Russia or India or the Phillippines for much cheaper?"

That particular knife cuts both ways.

Arguably anyone that could outsource to very low cost centres has already tried to outsource there and many have learned (expensive) lessons from it.

What seems to work: Geographically distributed but autonomous product-dev centers, with remote workers aligned within a certain timezone.

What doesn't seem to work: Outsourcing pure dev work to timezones with no overlap.

I don't believe the above will change even if things become more remote-friendly. Perhaps we'll see more dev centers pop up to service the needs / wants / cultural or language asynchronicity of a given region, but that would lend more toward expansion than cost reduction. This also resonates with the approaches being discussed that I've read and heard first hand from company leaders during COVID.

That argument from consequences is common against remote working but isn't an actual arguement against the utility.

If there is no benefit for paying a premium why not go with the commodity? Why go with an outmoded restriction to only hire blacksmiths in bounds of the south side of the original city limits? (Because they didn't want to smell the smoke in the posh north side while requiring the smiths live within the innermost set of city walls so they were available during a siege).

Not according to most surveys I saw https://qubit-labs.com/average-software-developer-salaries-s... . Australia is just like Germany or west europe in general. The big payers are U.S and Switzerland

Not trying to discredit those numbers, but I wonder about the split per US state. Are they very close? Are there states that pay a lot more than others?

I'm not American, but everything I read suggests that yes, of course; California pays much more than Missouri. I think the difference could be 2x - 3x. Then again cost of living is also 2x-3x more in SV.