When an outsourcer returns home and can’t find skilled workers – because they’ve left the field – what’s the solution?

The Great IT Skills Mismatch, Episode 10,000,007:

I was just contacted by a Ruby software developer here in NM who is looking for a local developer to hire.

I was studying Ruby right up until this very same developer told me he was outsourcing his coding to Mexico a few years ago. I dropped that course of study like a red-hot rock. What a shame, now.

But it was still the right decision. No one can wait years for a slim payoff on a high-effort, high-stakes investment.

What’s broken is that businesses want highly skilled people on the instant, and they want them cheap. I am curious, if any of you are Ruby on Rails developers: would you take a job for $15/22 hour?

The upshot is that a culture of people working very cheaply don’t have the money to create the demand that companies will need to hire. Then people compete for lower and lower wages, incentivizing businesses to fire the expensive and hire the cheap. We call that situation the Death Spiral.

The only solution I know is to learn tremendously difficult skills and to bill accordingly.