Ask Slashdot: Why Are American Tech Workers Paid So Well?

Slashdot reader davidwr is "an American-born, American-educated mid-career IT professional." But he's still curious about why American geeks earn more than their IT counterparts overseas: If I'm a mid-career programmer looking for a job, why should I expect to be paid a whole lot more than my peer in India when applying for a job that could easily be outsourced to India? If I do get the job, why should I expect to keep it more than a year or two instead of being told "your job is being outsourced" before 2020? Is my American education and 5-25 years of experience in the American workplace really worth it to an employer?

Should we, as an industry, lower our salary expectations -- and that of students entering the field -- to make us more competitive with our peers in India and similar "much cheaper labor than first world" economies? If not, what should we be doing to make ourselves competitive in ways that our peers overseas cannot duplicate?
What's the secret ingredient that justifies those higher salaries? Leave your answers in the comments. Why are American tech workers paid so well?

Comments

Asking the wrong question

[Required Snark]

If you are wondering about pay disparity, a much more interesting question is why are US execs paid so much more then US workers? All of the issues of different culture and economy disappear, so there are no extraneous factors to consider.

The short answer: Karl Marx was right. We live in a late stage capitalistic society and economic activity is organized so that profit is disproportionately channeled to the rich. The rich don't actually earn the money as much as they take it from everyone else. It's kind of like the mafia system, where everyone has to kick money up to the level above them for the privilege of having income.

Given that, consider what it means when a US person looses their job to an offshore worker or a 1HB worker. It's not like the cost of anything goes down as a result, so what happens instead is the execs have an even larger slice of the pie. Right now the best way to become really rich in the US is to eliminate the jobs of US workers. As others have already pointed out, somewhere along the line this will no longer be the case because all the wealth will be concentrated in the hands of the richest, and the rest of the country will be just like the average worker in the third world.

It's important to realize that the US is not doing this alone. Since the end of the Cold War the US, China and Russia are all on the path to oligarchy. They started at different places, and the societal organizations are different, but all three countries are going in the same direction. In some ways it is easier for this to happen in China and Russia because they have never had much of a middle class, but in the US the disruption is more visible because it takes two or three generations to transfer the wealth of the middle class to the oligarchs.

Note to Libertards: I never said that Marx was right about everything, just that he was right about how capitalism ultimately produces a system where the few become extremely rich and everyone else has nothing.