In the case of China, a big part of the problem was that the government was too slow to encourage CS education. While it has been pushing CS for the past 10 yea

In the case of China, a big part of the problem was that the government was too slow to encourage CS education. While it has been pushing CS for the past 10 years, the result is a pyramid with a very very wide base as many juniors are produced every year but very few engineers with the 10+ years experience you'd expect from a senior engineer. So the main problem is the ratio to true seniors who can lead teams or solve problems that reach into many domains are in small compared to the total number of developers. Over time this will work itself out. Salaries for seniors are rapidly approaching NA rates, it's no longer viable to outsource to China purely for cost reasons. I expect in 4-5 years if the trends hold they will reach parity. But right now the issue isn't about money -- those senior engineers have their pick of their projects and it's very common for them choose lower paying roles if they can work on problems and tech that interests them. 10 years ago, Chinese dev offices looked like sweatshops with as many people crammed in as possible. Now there isn't much difference between NA dev offices and Chinese ones -- at least in 1st and 2nd tier cities. Really the whole development culture has shifted from everyone wanting to work at big foreign firms with safe jobs to everyone wanting to be in a startup. It's done a complete 180.