Also worth pointing out Anthropic is a sponsor of The Economist. Probably muddies the water some more.

Also an analogy with the globalization of manufacturing era. People have I think been prone to assuming that the West has a "magic ingredient" which entitles it to revenues from skilled work forever. A presumption that people overseas, especially in the "south" and "east", wouldn't acquire the same skills or culture. The idea that it is so absolutely critical to software development to be in an office in Silicon Valley that it's worth paying enormous premiums even relative to the rest of America and the West (+).

That is being disrupted. Ironically, by American AI firms who want a cut of all software engineering salaries globally.

(+) UK software developer working for an American multinational here, aware that my salary is "great by UK standards but not by American ones"

The only crime here is stopping before AI replaces the CEOs and politicians.

This makes no sense outside of SV.

If you work in the broader corporate world, your heads-down work may typically be writing software, but you're really more like staff IT. You get promoted into some kind of management role like "architect" and end up owning all the implementation instead of just the code.

You get passed the football a lot because that's more effective teamwork. You have weight in meetings because the business is smart enough to realize you are not just writing code. Your maintenance is basically all the operations short of the accounting and client manager stuff for that project.

AI is irrelevant unless you're really feeling a time crunch and have little alternative. Nobody cares how you do it. The meetings are a way bigger deal than the code. These types of devs are the equivalent of a bureaucrat who can sign off on a construction job and then grab a shovel.

This is the actual "future" of dev work... ahem it looks a lot like the past and present for everyone else.

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