> And now pay is higher than ever.

I think this is, as usual, specific to the Bay Area and maybe NYC, and also limited to the top 10% of developers at tech companies.

I don't think tech salaries are all that great even in other big cities like DC or Denver, especially as home prices have also passed their 2007 highs, while salaries were stagnant and bonuses or equity are nothing like in FAANG companies. This is especially true when non-managers salary cap at about 40, which is when many professionals in other industries are just getting started making good money.

A lot of small cities might have no real tech companies and only a few large Fortune 500 companies that employ half the software engineers in the whole city. All it takes is one or two of them to decide to offshore half the IT department to Bangalore while signing a big deal with Cognizant or Infosys for the other half in house (i.e. H1Bs brought in from India). If you're stuck in that city, you're looking at wage stagnation for a long while.

It's still okay if you're a good developer - top 25% - at age 27 making $90K in a low COL city, while most of your peers are barely out of grad school. But it's not when you're 40 making $120K and all your peers - nurses, government workers, sales, lawyers, entrepreneurs - have caught up, often with far more stability and better working conditions. I think software engineering has gotten to be a dead-end career for a lot of us not working at tech companies in big cities, and globalization and H1Bs have continued eating away at the industry for the majority of us working as contractors and at big corps.

> I'm not saying it will never pass. But history has shown it's much harder than you're making it out to be. We already had a great outsourcing attempt 20 years ago which had questionable results. And now pay is higher than ever.

The technological barriers in the last 20 years prevented effective outsourcing of tech jobs. Since the technology did not work, the cultural acceptance of it did not matter.

I did one of the first live streaming events over the internet in 1995. It involved a convert venue, a dedicated T1 line to the data center hosting the web server, a Cisco 2501, a computer camera that i rigged to a frame grabber, and a "beefy" web server running on Sparc10. After we got the telco to install the line it took about 2 days to do the rest. The "broadcast" lasted between 11pm and 3am. I think it had about 9 concurrent viewers at its peak and 12 total. The promoter of the venue paid ~$4k to do it. That's the accessible "telepresence" at the time.

I was at a company that had offices on the West Coast, NYC, DC and UK in 2000 or so. We had a video conference system and IP phones. It was possible to do a "meeting" with the other offices and it worked pretty well -- sound was fine video a bit jerky. It helped that we had our own network. Someone tried to take a headend home and use the his at home cable connection. It sucked. The video barely did 5-10 frames a second.

Today I can walk into most of random coffee shops and do a professional quality video call. The technology is here. The only blocker for leveling playing field is cultural. The circumstances are forcing companies to remote the cultural barrier. Would they put it back when the lock downs are over? I seriously doubt, especially if they save $200k/year per high paid employee.