What can we, the highly paid locals, can do to justify our high salaries at that hypothetical future point?
(playing starcraft taught me a tremendous amount of respect for East Asian creativity and work ethic)
* fucking largest economy by far as your domestic market ie no import duties or import/export taxes
* truly massive investment by Government and Private sector into CS research
* high tech economy focused mostly on services which demands all tools it can get to improve business processes
* high disposable income via financial instruments for cheap debt (also less taxes than most developed countries)
* largest talent pool of Universities that keeps bringing in the best and brightest across the world
The ability to sell is far far less important than the systemic reasons listed above that give the US an incredible edge in the software industry.
Maybe these offices are just following the great standards set by the people working at the HQ.
Even then, there are a bunch of companies that have their engineering based in other countries.
I personally worked for a few companies that are major player in their fields (although not unicorns) that have offices here in the Greece.
Most of these companies have one thing in common, the leadership, everyone at the C level, work and live in the US. In fact, the companies I worked for had HQs in the SV.
I don't think SV has a significantly better talent pool. My anecdote is that my local team has had more than a couple laughs looking at code written by our SV-based colleagues.
But I think that building your business there certainly gives you a huge advantage.
Your engineering doesn't need to be there.
and I'm fair certain engineering won't be there in the future. Probably not even in the US. Just the research-y type stuff might stay here longer to be close to the universities. But assuming the market is left to its own development, ginormous US based engineering teams will likely go the way of the Dodo bird in the future.
I would expect salaries to fall but I wouldn't expect software development to move entirely. It should make sense for a lot of companies to pay a premium to keep their workforce closer to their leadership.
Well, truth be told they're already surpassed us. If you want cheaper, you might as well go to Spain or Italy or even France.
I think a lot of devs in the West would be almost shocked at the amount of money devs make in other places.