For those of us outside of the US who can now compete for the same salaries — certainly for the better. For companies who can now hire from a wider pool of talent, with lower salary expectations — for the better, too. For US software engineers — probably not so much.

Basically, the same story that happened to US blue-collar workers when Kissinger opened China to international trade and put a billion of starving peasants on the path to modern economic prosperity: everybody but those who enjoyed geographic privilege before is bound to win.

I don't think most US software engineers are going to fair any worse than anyone else, honestly. If you have one of these $300-400k TC jobs the HN folks act like grow on trees, you're unlikely to be replaced by someone responding to a RemoteOK job add because they're mostly hiring people local, and people with huge online followings/internet-famous dev types. If you make $115k for a bank and got your last 3 jobs from recruiters and LinkedIn, you're equally unlikely for different reasons.

The middle area filled with $200k/yr consultants will probably hurt a bit, but I'm not sure they haven't been competing with that group already.

Thanks for your reply can you explain this statement please ?

>got your last 3 jobs from recruiters and LinkedIn, you're equally unlikely for different reasons.

I don't see this trend in the US at all. Most folks we're hiring now expect $20-30k more than they did pre-COVID. We've had multiple team members leave to make more money and ended up giving a blanket raise to the development staff to try to make sure we're paying market rates.

This is in the midwest US but we're now recruiting nationally since everyone is remote.

Oh, I'm talking about 10-20 years.