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

This paragraph would lead me to believe that the author may not have tried setting up a company and hiring abroad:

"There's probably some added legal hassle and maybe even accounting-related hassle, but it doesn't seem significant (arguably even less in some situation, since people from other countries can work as contractors rather than employees)."

As programmers we'd like the simplest possible implementation of hiring: I would like to post a job offer for role x at salary y regardless of hiring location.

The reality of implementing that as a business in a compliant manner - involving international payment methods, tax reporting implications across multiple jurisdictions, legal implications, etc do not strike me as trivial -- if you're a small company they're time-consuming and require expensive consulting, and if you're a large company it may be difficult to get your internal tools and processes to align with them.

I'd love to be proven wrong, and would like these systems to be simpler and fairer. They certainly shouldn't be torn down until the positive reasons for their existence are understood and handled.

I feel like many common narratives around 'programmers can work from anywhere' come from a naive point of view and rarely include details about how to compliantly achieve those results, from either the business or individual's point of view.

Yup.

Worked in healthcare IT in the USA. Beans counters were utterly determined to send our work overseas. Old story of training our replacements.

We could teach them programming, testing, our stack.

But we couldn't teach them our healthcare system. Stupid small stuff that challenged us were completely opaque to our colleagues. Stuff like definitions of "visit" vs "episodes of care" and how each customer had different rules. (Made worse by sharing data between orgs.)

(My billion dollar idea was to help our counterparts adapt our stack for their local markets. India, Malaysia, and Vietnam have healthcare too, right? Get in on the ground floor of those emerging markets. Alas.)

"An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus."

Disagree. A team can be coached to commit to a common goal.

A dysfunctional authoritarian culture is probably faster than a dysfunctional democracy, for sure. But then you are comparing which broken system is less broken, not what would be the optimal setup.

Take a sports team. They are not micromanaged. They are given a common task, a common strategy, guidance, but in the field they are alone.

I think one of the failures in thinking around project cost and outcome is that not enough people realize that the effort around a project scales logarithmically, not linearly. This really means that small projects don't "scale down" as much as you think they do. Some for instances - You are not really going to spend only 1% of the time in meetings for a $10K project compared to a $1M project. There might well be 100X the code but it's neither going to be 100X as complex nor take 100X the the man-hours to write. A couple of the "Challenging" features might be substantially more challenging in the $1M project, but not 100X so, nor will there be 100X as many. Most importantly, is that in the $10K project the expectation isn't that you'll get 1% of the quality... but that's exactly what often gets sacrificed in order to make a $10K project cost ~ $10K.

I have experience as a programmer in both worlds, and there are certainly pros and cons with each culture.

In an Eastern-European "authoritarian" (Bulgarian) setting, you are given tasks with not much room for interpretation and are expected to deliver a tangible "no-bullshit" result within a reasonable time frame. Not much time is spent on meetings, you don't want to ask too many questions, praise is won by delivering a technically-efficient solution which doesn't question the business intents and preconceptions of management.

In a North-Western European setting, everything is questionable and debatable, sometimes at irritating levels. Fairly incompetent people are raising their voice on insignificant matters and the decision-making debate changes direction quite sporadically. By everyone focusing too much on the business side, what you get is a technically-mediocre product which solves many problems to many people, but doesn't have much value as an integral part.