Yes, we have tons of people who can code at a proficient level in one language. However, don't underestimate the difficulty of software engineering. The people who we need to build our applications are getting really hard to find and especially keep around.

Sure I can get someone who will code a basic Spring Boot application in a pinch. But do they have the excellent communication skills, knowledge of build systems, cloud knowledge, understanding of TCP and SSL, HTTP protocol, forwarding and reverse proxies, containerization, unit testing, and version control just to start. This isn't mentioning secure design and the hundreds of other small things they will need to learn and understand.

Then they have to be willing to get up to speed on new libraries and be able to read and understand software. Will they be able to set up remote configuration for our swarm? Will they be able to do the research if they don't know something? Do they have a firm base of computer science knowledge to make that learning stick?

It seems like it would be more value efficient to train a person making 40k a year how to do that then pay someone hundreds of grand a year who already knows how to do it.

The problem occurs when, after training that 40k a year developer, they BECOME a 100k a year developer. Unless you can lock them in with an amoral non-compete or some other form of illegal method, they will find out that they are worth that much and leave for someone who will pay them.

In many countries a 40k a year developer IS a 100k a year developer in US.

I thought so too but unfortunately it would take someone making 100k a year somewhere between 6 and 12 months to teach someone making 40k to do the job properly. Then that someone would get a job offer making 100k and quit.

This information seems like it would be of interest to the board of directors at companies paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to employees.

I assumed that they would have hired management that takes labor costs into account.

in this post pandemic world, now that companies have set themselves up for remote work.... why would they hire someone in the US when they could hire someone cheaper in another country?

The point of my comment was to sarcastically point out there there are very qualified people sitting in decision making positions with an incentive to lower labor costs.

It is possible they are making a mistake and completely missing a great money saving opportunity, but I would not bet on it.

There very well could be new opportunities for labor arbitrage that can be taken advantage of by many businesses, and if so, it will be evidenced by the success of companies that take advantage of it. But it might take some time.

But it is not a new idea, and is certainly one that has already been tried, and so if certain companies are not taking advantage of lower labor costs elsewhere, then it is prudent to assume there is a good reason.

My point is that the same people are also averse to risk. So now that covid essentially forced these companies to outfit and train their teams for remote and build a culture around remote work.. and they found it successful... Pandora's box may have finally been opened on outsourcing.

We live in a different world than a few years ago.

I hope I'm wrong because I'm benefiting from geographical effects and I have no delusions that I'm smarter than almost 6 billion people.

I can see that could be true, and communications technology and bandwidth has improved, so perhaps the situation has changed. I would expect it to take years to manifest though, maybe even a decade or more.

Crossing my fingers!

People have been saying this for 40 years and we have seen time and time again, as engineering gets “easier” by 1 click it makes each individual engineer 5x more effective, but it only expands the total pool of people available to do the work by 20%. The effect that dominates is that by making work more efficient/productive, there are many many more places where engineers can be a net value add to business metrics. It’s a textbook case of jevons paradox applied to labor markets.

Jevons' paradox applies to efficiency, not massive increases in the amount of supply. There isn't really an argument that foreign workers are more efficient than local workers (unless they are being paid less!).