They've made it pretty clear that they won't be looking for local programers. They're looking domestically. Presumably, the same processes used to hire remote domestic programmers will be equally applicable for most remote non-domestic workers too.
Aren't those negligible compared to the salary gap?
Probably true, however by then they will already have made the decision and it will be priced in to the company’s stock. The System is replete with the consequences of bad short-term decisions that have become more or less locked in.
$200k vs $<20k. It’s an extremely large gap to be filled. Surely the people who spend their days looking at numbers on spreadsheets will see this gap and try to take as much advantage of it as they possibly can, and surely the market will reward the massive cuts in operating costs.
There will always be companies who need to learn on their own how $20K developers are different from $200K developers and what investing in either means 10 years down the road.
By the way, good developers with good English and good communication skills can easily earn MUCH more than $20K even today by working remotely. Already today in most countries there are almost no barriers to earning multiples of their national averages other than one's own skills and attitude. And yet dev salaries in America are as high as ever.
The industry seems to be growing faster than the labour force even despite globalization, and I don't think that trend will reverse anytime soon. We're still shoving software into more places, industries, and processes, and making it all more complicated.
Among the big consequences: you lose R&D tax credits. The language and skill barrier is also pretty big; most companies that outsource end up spending so much money on QC that they barely save anything at all.
It's theoretically possible to find good programmers in the Philippines as opposed to locally. But seeing as how finding local programmers is still not a solved issue, expanding the job pool to include the entire world isn't going to make that task any easier.