It's going to be quite a reality shock when people realize their salaries were kept high _because_ their jobs weren't open to remote workers.

Wait until programmers realize that telling everybody that they should learn how to code depresses their own wages years later.

Not quite. Consider pay for athletes and entertainers. Why pay Robert Downey Jr. big bucks? There are millions of actors out there!

No, there could be a long tail of meagerly paid folks, just like baristas who aspire to be professional singers. But some folks (allegedly the best of the best somehow) will be getting top dollar.

Robert Downey Jr. is paid more because of brand recognition in the target market (people will watch a movie just because he's in it), not because he's a much better actor than everyone else.

Software developers don't really have that. Maybe if you're John Romero people buy your games without looking too closely, but it's pretty rare in comparison.

I used to think this. Now I think that doing software well is actually very, very hard and even the best practitioners often get it wrong. The market for the best developers will always be high in my view.