Am I the only one that feels like the development and software engineering will loose the high paying benefit soon? Remote work normalised hiring developers from farther away. I've been approached by quite a few recruiters that want to hire from much farther away then usual. It seems like only a question of time untill most of the things will be outsourced to third world countries where developers get paid basically nothing. Sure they were usually a worse choice in the past, but it always gets better with time. I'm sure that there are a lot of vry smart wngineers there. Why pay your developer 50-90k/year when you can pay 10k/yr for two developers in India?

We're also automating ourselves out of jobs with all these no code platforms. Thoughts?

People feared that 10y ago already. Dont underestimate the communication part which can cause shit loads of damage because of things like bad English, little communication because of timezones, mentality problems many of those countries have like saying yes to everything without actually understanding it and delivering something completely useless, and also on..

Managers will at least need a few seniors on site to make sure the external staff does what it’s supposed to do.
So maybe we’ll see a shift in responsibilities towards more tech leading and less development but we’ll still be required.

Also don’t underestimate the different levels of education. I’ve worked with „cheap“ people all had masters and shit in CS but they didn’t know half of what I know from my Highschool degree..

All my opinion based on my experience though..

But don’t worry about us automating our own jobs. As long as there’s unsolved solutions to solve, we keep our jobs.

It could have gone that way long ago.

It still could.

It hasn't yet.

Rando contractor over seas is very much a thing but cost to quality can be SURPRISINGLY similar to the US...

I was part of an outsourcing effort at a big company where they were outsourcing fairly elementary tasks.

When your actually accounted for all the costs involved ... it was MORE expensive to outsource to India. It only looked cheaper if you accounted for it ... wrong.

I can only possibly benefit from that since I'm in a relatively low paid place. As for the language barrier - even though I'm not a native English speaker, I believe I'm at least as good as some Indians, if not better.

Why accept 10k/year just because you're in India?

Only if we as engineers allow it. The effort by companies to commoditize our labor isn't new. Corporations run by shitty business majors will always try and drive costs to 0 because they can't contribute anything else. Current devaluation efforts include:

- labour arbitrage
- bootcamps
- predatory visa programs
- forcing employees to become contractors
- unpaid overtime
- reduction of benefits

The way we as a global community of engineers prevent that is to stop allowing them to dictate the terms of employment. They need our skills, so we have the power unless they're able to divide and conquer. Do the following:

- share your salary information with other employees. Pay secrecy is illegal in most places, and is always intended to cheat workers.
- don't work for less than the local market rate of a company, or your local market. Pick the higher of the two. Your skills are worth X, do not allow corporations to make you compete on cost
- never take a cut in pay from an employer that is profitable
- never accept a bonus scheme tied to anything other than your performance
- don't participate in efforts to hire contractors, encourage programmes to invest in employees
- Unionize if you're able. Professional unions prevent the bottom from falling out of pay scales, while not limiting the top. They protect benefits and ensure companies abide by labour and safety regulations (no death marches, uncontrolled overtime). You vote to keep unions in line, if a union turns shitty, you form a new one.

This isn't all you can do, but it's a start.

There's also different cost of living. In some parts of the US, you can make $100k and still not even afford an appartment.

But it's also that an awful lot of Indian junior devs are already overpaid with 10k anually because they're actually more like interns and don't know shit.

Honestly I wouldn't consider that a bad thing. Code quality in this day and age is mostly complete and utter garbage. Yes companies will and already do outsource development to third world countries (let's face it, we're talking about India here just like we talk about China when we say manufacturing) and the results will show how good an idea that is. I hope it diversifies the payrolls, to make it actually tied to the quality of the work (and hopefully make the overall quality go back up). Have different tiers in product output if you will. We already have that in electronics and such anyway. Why not in software?

I'm not worried. Just specialize and don't dive into oversaturated markets like webdev where pay is low on average.

Sure, even specialized jobs may fall to automation at some point, but there are always legacy codebases running off some batchfile that provides 20 parameters from an XML config, while not a single human on earth still knows what those are for, so there will be high paying work over the course of my lifetime.

You may be able to teach a computer to write software.

But you cannot teach a computer to figure out what the fuck it actually is the client wants. The fucking CLIENT doesn't even know, how can the computer?

Real talk, I've never seen demand for development and remote development higher in my 20 years, and I've been fortunate enough to increase my income by almost 50% this year.