If every third 22 year old isn't making 200K, how are you going to sustain a market of crapshacks "worth" 1M?
If every third 22 year old isn't making 200K, how are you going to sustain a market of crapshacks "worth" 1M?
My mostly uninformed worse case estimate is a large portion of these companies become something like the "body shops" (I believe MS has some association with Accenture, so that'd fit) where they maintain a minimal US presence for (mostly) customer facing "sales"/"high touch" positions so they have someone to broker deals and contracts with the (often clueless, IME) F500s, and then outsource all implementation work offshore. Same goes for some large portion of "important" managers.
For the "deep"/important/critical technical work, there will likely be staff retained on-shore, while the "boring" CRUD-type work that comprises some portion of the FANNAGS (whatever) is done overseas.
It's unlikely, say, for Google Search or AWS EC2 or something critical at MS (M365 maybe?) to be totally off-shored, but lesser services/functions are a likely target. (I know this is already happening to some extent at these companies; I've heard from reputable sources there's some large services that were nearly entirely built by staffing firms)
Basically, I think it's two things: we've reached the end of stratospheric growth in "tech" (sorry I just don't see the LLM wave getting there; a million SAAS thingys to "vibe code" a React calorie tracker ain't it), there's a massive surplus from the ZIRP era paired with some sort of obvious recession happening (or that's been going on for a while).
It's also a reset of sorts--look I'm as "pro software" as the next commentator here, but it's pretty absurd to think that there's loads of people making 200K+ to write CRUD stuff. There's just not a "shortage" in any way for any of these skills, as anyone doing a job search can attest.
This type of pay is really only "rational" in the markets where the cost of living has skyrocketed in the manner it has (largely/entirely a function of the "growth" era in SF/Seattle/Austin). It never seemed sustainable, and I suspected there would be some abrupt end when the "learn to code" era really took off.
On a positive note, perhaps those cities would be more affordable, but the in-elasticity of housing prices on the "way down" are always a problem for buyers.
In "non-growth" times (i.e the era we're in now (post ZIRP) and probably for the foreseeable future, LLMs being the exception), very little outside the major revenue generators is probably "core" roles.
Someone who was a highly skilled factory worker would have said the same thing in the 80's. That didn't work out too well for them in the long run. You have to assume that eventually those overseas workers will become experts in that "deep" work because they have the incentive to.