I have heard some way out schemes in my life, but this one takes the cake. A pirate ship off the coast of Los Angeles with H1B failures coding enterprise systems? Yeah right.
The demand for highly qualified programming staff is high, but not that high. What people forget is that the trends toward the demand for highly competent software staffs is growing, and the demand for highly engineered software is diminishing. That is to say that Open Source will grow, and it doesn't matter where that comes from, but that implementing software *on site* is the toughest and most demanding job in the industry. It is the equivalent of changing a tire on a moving car. The moving car is the business of the enterprise, and they're not going to paddle off to some boat in order to get their specs.
I'm betting that the market is going to get tougher, not easier, and that the necessity of having personal contact is going to be greater, not less. For all the marvelous things we do with software, our interactions are only going to get more complex. It is with software as it is with law - even though it belongs to everyone and is sortof open source, when you need yours, it's all about intimate contact with the squad who is going to take you through it.
For software engineering, I can see that such flighty ideas might have weight. The question is, what kind of character wants to work on a rusted out ship? I think the best programmers are going to want to drive nice cars and get dates...
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