Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

Embarrassment discount.

The theoretical benefits of offshoring are obvious: get the same thing for less. The same goes for juniorization, find a young guy who can do the same thing for less (this worked out great one time in an HFT I worked for).

Your problem is there's a chance -whether you offshored or not- that not only do you not get the same thing, you get a steaming pile that your boss will not appreciate. And it's not like a 80% working software solution is worth 80% of the money, it's worth maybe 20%.

So how do we compensate? Fall back on crutches like "we only hire Ivy League or Oxbridge grads". Or make sure whoever it is had a roughly similar culture to yourself (comms style, language), is available in a similar time zone, or has done similar work in the past. It's not that these will ensure you have good programmers, it's more that you can say to your boss, "I acted conservatively but even then sometimes you don't get the right hire".

All of which point towards advantaging programmers in the West. Either you have all these qualities (culture, tz, experience), or you have to discount quite a bit.

Naturally this isn't universal. You are gonna find people in Asia who somehow make a Western salary, and good on them.

The reality I see, is that all of us are overworked / with a lot of responsibilities. So it is easy to miss important emails or details.

As long as we are close to each other, very important things don't get lost.

(Product) managers decide what to build. Engineers decide how to build it. You make it sound as if software engineering has no value. Clearly this isn't true as small local banks will have awful sites and apps despite the problem statement being pretty clear cut. The most successful tech companies also happen to be the ones that have attracted the top engineering talent. Generally, ime, an engineer you pay $150k is worth more than two engineers at $75k.

> why is programming difficult to offshore"

Lack of professionalism and absence of a professional engineering culture in many of the places you'd seek to outsource to save money.

Doesn't mean that professionalism doesn't exist, it's just that the ones that have it are already busy with their own thing and not interested in being low-cost labor

Is it just me, or does the link lead to a different article, "Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software" sometimes? I tried opening the link and it sometimes goes to the one titled like this post, sometimes to the other one - for the same URL.

This seems like a very ironic problem when considering the content of the "alternate" article being presented... Example of an excerpt: "The problem is that you thought you requested a core product with a couple of extra features, if they were easy enough to implement. Meanwhile, the dev team heard something else. They heard about some exciting challenges they could tackle… and a slew of boring, basic features they couldn’t be bothered to test properly or care about."