Your qualitative data refutes your own argument: Leaving aside that you are using the average wages as a comparison, so that the wages of the guy in Sao Paulo or Bogota cannot be directly compared to - holy hell - the salary of a guy in San Fran, the numbers outright say that there isnt so much difference in between sending a job to Toronto vs sending it to some underutilized American state. To boot, the Midwest is not the only American region and the midwest is not so poor in technology sector, especially Texas. And amazingly, populated and highly talent-rich India is missing from that list, a top outsourcing location, and instead a random Bogota is in. Why not pick Aleut Islands - the average pay of a dev there would be much, much lower there due to the scarce presence of devs.

So who do you think that you will employ in Bogota and how many of them are there? All the top-tier talent that those countries have historically been producing before was flowing into places like San Fran or other tech hubs as immigrants. You think that if the kind of remote work offshoring that you imagine happens, you will be able to grab ~200,000 people from top talent tier in those countries? A number way above the population of many cities of those countries?

No. In such a situation, either the top immigrant talent now in SF will flow back to their homeland, still not reducing the price of the talent in those countries because there is no way in hell the education systems of those countries can churn out hundreds of thousands of tech graduates a year. So basically its another case of relocation of talent - this time, the immigrant talent goes back to their own countries to work for the same companies from there just like the American talent goes back to another US state to work for the same companies from there.

Take India as an example instead - a country that can actually educate that much talent and already has a large tech sector that is not only advanced but segments of it were actually geared to do the very specific thing that you are prophesizing doom about - getting the outsourced jobs of richer countries.

Did that change anything? Has the average pay in SF constantly increased over the last 2 decades or not? Has India been able to get American companies to outsource all development jobs?

...

Long story short, you are prophesizing doom about something that was already prophesized to happen, and just did not. Its not that American companies were not able to outsource to Bogota or Trinidad or Tobago before. They were. And it did not change anything. It seems like the already present reality of remote work stayed outside your radar for whatsover reason. But it existed, and it did not cause doom.

> Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and large replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.

$300k/year salaries and positions in SF may suffer until remote work brings down cost of living in the hellish real estate landscape and general prices, there is no doubt about it.

However I doubt that the loss of such positions are related to remote work - all the layoffs that we saw in the past year has been due to the companies trying to shore up stock prices due to the loss of the zero interest economy. Its not like they laid off 200,000 people and then hired 200,000 remote offshore devs in their place...