>>So, what do we do? Do I go back to swinging a hammer in 5 years? Or start selling my artwork? How can I compete with $5/hr coders who are better than me? If I were a company, I would want to outsource my job too.
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>>http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india.html
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>I think all this is part of a greater problem. There are enormous economic disparities between different countries (and within countries, for that matter), which have never been addressed adequately. The extremes between rich and poor seem to be increasing, according to many recent reports. Really, it should come as no surprise that, if people in some developing countries get wages that are one or two orders of magnitude lower than their counterparts in richer countries, companies start taking advantage of the cheaper labor in developing countries.
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>I understand that U.S. programmers - and presummably, programmers in Europe and some other countries - are worried about outsourcing, but the real problem, the more serious problem, is the underlying inequality, and extreme poverty in many nations. This is bound to cause trouble sooner or later to everyone involved - both the poor and the rich. This is the case with the current outsourcing debate, but also with ecological problems, and probably a few others more.

I may not have a solid understand, but are we truly "rich" here? The wages may be significantly higher here, but isn't the cost of living also? Are there any charts, I wonder, that show the disparity in a balanced way?