[maqr]

Yes, let's all keep believing that. If companies realized that all programmers can actually work decentralized, we might not be able to command a decent salary as it becomes a global race to the bottom...

[JoshTriplett]

As a developer, I've specifically pushed to maintain a co-located team, precisely because the type of work my team does works far better when co-located.

I do decentralized development regularly, and for some kinds of work it works fine. For other kinds of work, it makes simple tasks take an order of magnitude longer.

[jasonjei]

As far as I know, kernel.org does most of their work decentralized. Is XNU (Darwin) a significantly better kernel? I have doubts about that claim.

[DasIch]

You can work decentralized but it's not particularly great, especially because remote communication isn't a solved problem. You communicate a ton of stuff in an actual face to face conversation through a variety of different ways and even video calls don't really capture that.

[nsxwolf]

Supposedly this has already happened with offshore development, and yet, here we still are, paying top salaries for US developers in the midst of a tech shortage.

I worked at a 100% telecommute shop local to Chicago for 10 years. We also used offshore development firms on some projects, and I can tell you, if anyone ever seriously had the idea of replacing us with them, they were quickly dissuaded by the experience of working with these firms.

[sidlls]

Most programming is work that can be done in a decentralized fashion. Some can't be. In either case the salary commanded is influenced by a number of factors other than supply (quality of the supply, for example). So I'm not sure a "global race to the bottom" of the apocalyptic kind you imply would result in such a realization.