Indian software wages are about 1/3 US. The U.S. would need to tax them much more to dissuade outsourcing.

How will you tax people in India sitting here in US?

All of the big software companies are like the parent describes, in most of their divisions.

Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or don’t care. That’s the reason why they’re bloated.

Google/Facebooks earnings are so high they can afford to be wildly wasteful with headcount and still be market leaders

Those two are perfect examples of burning insane amounts of money and still showing profits beyond that... Whole metaverse investment. And all the products that Google has abandoned. Even returning all the payments like Stadia...

I joined in 2018.

Honestly it was 10 years too late. The big innovations of the 2010 era were maturing. I’ve spent my career maintaining and tweaking those, which does next to zero for your career development. It’s boring and bloated. On the bright side I’ve made a lot of money and have no issues getting jobs so far.

I think my career started in 2008? That was a great time to start for the purpose of learning, but a terrible one for compensation. Basically nobody knew what they were doing, and software wasn’t the ticket to free money that it became later yet.

data engineering was free money for nothing at all circa 2014, they got paid about 1.5x a fullstack application developer for .5x the work because frontend/ui work was considered soft, unworthy

there’s always interesting work out there. It just doesn’t always align with ethical values, good salary, or work life balance. There’s always a trade off.

For example think of space x, Waymo, parts of US national defense, and the sciences (cancer research, climate science - analyzing satellite images, etc). They are doing novel work that’s certainly not boring!

I think you’re probably referring to excitement and cutting edge in consumer products? I agree that has been stale for a while.

Play it forward a half century.

Physical productive capacity is gone. Your global competitor is the de facto production hegemon. Debt has ballooned, and you can’t fund welfare programs. A big chunk of your country’s assets are owned by foreign investors.

But yes, you got a lot of cheap things before the music stopped.

Play it forward half a century and the US has climbed on to the next generation of industry while all those holding our debt are still trying to catch up, our economy has grown so much that the "debt" seems small, and we are far far more productive than the rest of the world still.

The US has massive productive capacity in things where there's not enough supply and for which we gain a huge profit margin. We do not have massive productive capacity in cheap commodities with very low margins. This is a good thing. Switching our absolutely massive productive capacity into less productive jobs is a huge self-own.

If we have key industries, like food and computer chips, we subsidize them at a tiny tiny relative cost to the rest of the far more productive industries.

A small chunk of our countries t-bills are owned by foreign investors, something like 25%, and the biggest holder, Japan, is something like 3%. We are not in danger of being owned by foreign controllers, especially as long as we keep outgrowing all the other countries by keeping our workforce in highly productive areas instead of less productive areas like sewing T-shirts or assembling consumer electronics.

The biggest threat to our welfare programs, the biggest threat to the music stopping, is refocusing the workforce towards the industries of yesteryear. That's when we will stop outgrowing our debt and when we will face a world of hurt. And it's exactly where the masterminds in control are steering us right now.