going, going...

"We have to face that there are two types of American programmers who are doomed to extinction. First, the bad ones. Traditionally, there have been more exceptionally bad programmers than exceptionally good ones. It's well known that there is something like an order-of-magnitude gap in productivity between the very best programmers and the very worst, but it's less known that the distribution of talent is quite asymmetrical, with a long-tail toward the less-than-competent. The untalented have long survived by coasting in larger teams and being the only game in town for smaller concerns. These are exactly the scenarios that the offshore shops already have firmly in their sights and where the "How much worse could offshoring be?" seed is most likely to find fertile soil.

As the "tail" of unproductive-but-employed programmers is chopped off, the productivity demanded of an employed programmer is going to increase dramatically. Programmers complacent in their skills and tools because they've met programmers who are less productive will quickly find themselves on the edge of the cliff. "