Your argument is basically “we’re all going to be outsourced by Indians.”
Your EU-centric view of how contracting works (probably more due to labor laws than anything else) isn’t an accurate assessment of how Silicon Valley is going to work.
Outsourcing has its place and a lot of gruntwork/ongoing maintenance is fine for it. Post-ZIRP it turns out the true value of software is a lot lower than previously thought, and for a lot of solutions, Indians is all they can afford (because the alternative might be to pay someone to do it by hand).
Where outsourcing fails is primarily when business & domain knowledge is required - outsourcers will obviously not be aware of internal company processes or even the target market for the required solution (just like we would be bad fits for trying to spec out a product targeting the Indian banking market for example).
So I see the industry and market readjusting to the true value of software, and as a result people will pick a mix of high-value implementation work (where local domain knowledge is required) and boring/maintenance gruntwork, or get outcompeted by those who can (and this is a global market, so you are competing with Indians(.
I'm not advocating for one way or the other btw, I have no skin in this game (technically trying to push people into freelancing and consultancy works against me). But I'm just trying to be realistic - the tech comp during the ZIRP era was never going to last, and even if ZIRP continued, more and more people entering tech means comp is still bound to decrease. You can either remain in denial hope those jobs come back, or plan for the worst.
The true value of software, post-ZIRP, is still obvious for the largest and most powerful companies in the world. They print cash.
Yes, ZIRP increased tech comp. It did not magically inflate the value of software, which is always directly assessed against what people actually find useful.
The value of most software for most companies has a limit, pushed down both by supply of software engineering labor and that manual labor is actually quite cheap and your software must inherently cost less than what it would to just pay a human to do it.
There are always outliers obviously - whether it's the adtech giants being in the right place at the right time, or niche industries (avionics software costs a lot more to develop, and yet even then the actual SWE salaries there don't reflect it), but by and large the value of software is nowhere near what a decade of market distortion led us to believe.
Remember most of us (including me) are plumbers, not rocket scientists. It's just that a decade of market distortion allowed us to play rocket scientist (with only a tiny minority of those rockets actually ever needing to fly). Now we're back to being what we really are.
> The value of most software for most companies has a limit, pushed down both by supply of software engineering labor and that manual labor is actually quite cheap and your software must inherently cost less than what it would to just pay a human to do it.
Software, in the limit, is FREE. It gets written once for a finite cost and then can be copied ad infinitum. Even stratospheric labor costs are acceptable because of this.
> (avionics software costs a lot more to develop, and yet even then the actual SWE salaries there don't reflect it)
But the cost to develop a piece of software (or anything, really) has nothing whatsoever to do with its value!
Avionics software is expensive not because it's inherently more complicated (high-quality OSS hobbyist implementations like Ardupilot exist for free), but because it has to undergo system integration tests because of FAA regulations.
And, despite lower pay for avionics engineers, the value to the end users of quality avionics is literally the difference between life and death.
> but by and large the value of software is nowhere near what a decade of market distortion led us to believe.
Where do you get this idea? Tech, as a whole, is a wildly profitable sector of the economy. It is a primary driver of US GDP growth and productivity [1].
> Remember most of us (including me) are plumbers, not rocket scientists. It's just that a decade of market distortion allowed us to play rocket scientist (with only a tiny minority of those rockets actually ever needing to fly). Now we're back to being what we really are.
I get that ZIRP is ideologically unpopular, I really do. You can only see so many "Uber but for dogs" startups get multimillion dollar funding rounds before you get cynical.
That being said, interest rates have been falling for centuries [2]. Low interest rates are a fundamental reflection of a society that's gotten better at allocating investments efficiently.
It turns out that software, because of the whole "zero marginal cost" thing, is a spectacularly efficient investment.
Your argument is basically “we’re all going to be outsourced by Indians.”
Your EU-centric view of how contracting works (probably more due to labor laws than anything else) isn’t an accurate assessment of how Silicon Valley is going to work.