[pault]

"Just" sending it overseas to be coded is more likely to end in failure than success, unless you have a lot of experience and know what the pitfalls are (which is a very expensive education). I'm not picking on developing countries; the same goes for big enterprise contractor providers in the U.S. They have no incentive to write stable, maintainable code. Their incentive is to make it just stable enough to not get sued and get it out the door as quickly as possible. An employee that will have to live with that code for several years will focus on maintainability purely out of self interest if nothing else. As to whether overseas firms are able to undercut domestic firms, it's a possibility, but anyone that has dealt with time zone issues and cultural barriers most likely knows what they are sacrificing to get that discounted rate.

[cupofpython]

Why wouldnt an overseas employee have all the exact same incentives and challenges to maintain their code as a more local remote worker?

I think you are assuming I was implying overseas work to be all short-term contract work but I am not saying anything about the paperwork. The paperwork will write itself such that the relationship between a remote worker and the company is identical whether they are in texas or india. And itll happen that way because of financial incentive to do so

It's already happening. People from NY and CA are moving to Texas and Georgia, and then their salaries are being reduced to adjust for cost of living - but they still make really good money for Texas or Georgia. Maybe those SWE think they are irreplaceable, but what they have effectively demonstrated to the company is that the work itself can be done entirely remote, and so when it comes time to replace them - they will look for a cheap remote worker. Maybe today it is tough to find good replacements in India, Ukraine, etc, but over time (on the order of 1 generation would be my bet) those replacements will be much easier to find over there.