However, if you think for a second that you can replace US developers, building products for Americans with someone from Nigeria you are off your ass. The hardest part of software development isn't yolo-ing code into an IDE. It's collecting requirements, troubleshooting and translating that into both code and requirements docs for other teams.
This is hard for native english speakers and approaching impossible for offshore teams. It works reasonable well with teams in the Americas because the timezones are close and the culture/language barriers aren't as high.
I've been a SWE for decades and have worked on large, complex projects. I've always been an IC, never officially a manager (personal choice), but at the moment as part of my regular job writing code I am also managing a team of 10 developers from a country where they are being paid around 1/5th our rates and they are doing a very good job at at it.
I don't make the hiring decisions where I am at the moment, and this was the decision. It turned out that, yes, good developers from country X can easily replace good developers from country Y.
It's the same skills, you either have them or you don't.
Looking at some of the crap coming out of the faangms - and a few others - I'll take a bet on the non-us developers ('nigerians')/ ui-deciders making a quite a few substantial improvements, and certainly not changing things just for the fuck of it. My hosts file is now full of the software-i-use-the-most's ip adresses so they don't/ can't auto-update when they try to phone home and all end up looking the same, whereas previously each had 'character'.
This arrogance is why you'll be out of a job in ten years. The rest of the world is here to eat your lunch, yet American egos refuse to see the signs.
Come try to get my salary, I'm doing my best to stay ahead and justify it. We'll see who wins but I've been here before :)
Pre-agile development laundered all that through a bunch of heavyweight documents and such. And while it had issues - leading to the whole agile thing - it also didn't completely not work.
That's absurd. They're not even close to the most privileged class today, let alone in history. The most privileged class of people today are old money, born wealthy. Apart from them, there are plenty of new-money C level execs, finance people, celebrities, and so on who are rich enough to never work again, let alone unionize. Religious leaders can be extremely privileged as well.