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

This map near the start of the OP makes me wonder whether, similar to the markets in the Bay Area and New York, the markets in Switzerland and Norway give programmers some credible alternative (not available in for example Ukraine or Vietnam) that can be resorted to by a large fraction of programmer-employees.

First a little background:

The military is a highly confrontational culture, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In that kind of culture you tell people the disagreement immediately without tripping over pleasantries. It also means people are not easily offended until you try to waste their time or bullshit them with cleverness.

In the military people have to certify to do anything (super bureaucratic) so you generally know who your actual experts are without guessing and without a bunch of lying Dunning-Kruger insanity. It also means people are generally better about knowing their limitations and staying in their lane.

That being said, in the military I have no trouble or reservations about telling a superior they are wrong and why when it comes to an area I am well qualified. Knowing that the superior can immediately reconsider before making the authoritarian decisions of an iron fisted dictator. Superiors are generally better about considering the advise of their experts because the decision maker owns all risks and consequences.

In the corporate world you have to employ tact and really be careful how you deliver the message if the topic is not something already extremely objective. There is a lot of noise in the corporate world and far less interpersonal structure leaving everything open to interpretation. I find when I am at the day job communicating anything comprising more than two steps I go far beyond normal to be precise in my wording just to be clear.

There also exists a common phrase being thrown under the bus or more commonly known as a scapegoat. This does exist in the military but there are many conventions in place to catch those kinds of failures. Once that is identified it is a major reputation destroyer, which results in a huge occupational risk. It seems to more commonly apply in the corporate world when people are pushed into a corner and risks associated with that behavior are minor.

In most of my corporate employers there generally isn’t a central authority that owns any significant business risk or job terminating consequence when things go sideways (except maybe some senior management), which is certainly different from an authoritarian culture. In the corporate world there is plenty of room to blame external factors when things fall apart.

Immigration dynamics within Europe are way too peculiar and can't be extrapolated to a global level. And immigration (visa/bureaucratic hassles mainly) is probably the #1 fact that needs to be considered when analyzing the payment gap problem.

Hiring out of state (but still in the US) means dealing with taxes for the other state, plus probably adds complexity and maybe cost to providing health insurance. The best quality per dollar spent on health insurance in the US is often for plans that have little or very poor coverage (that is, pays few or no providers, especially for non-emergency care) outside a given state or geographic area.

Yes, that's right, lots of people (and companies) in the US pay outrageous-by-OECD-standards rates for health insurance that barely even applies in most of the country.