If you pay "Romania rate" for Romanians then those people can easily be hired by companies which are willing to pay a few dollars extra.
I think we have begun to see this with people hired in India: if you pay "Indian rate" then you get the bottom of the barrel. If you want very good developers in India you need to pay above "Indian rate".
The market for very good developers is no longer local.
What you just said applies to SV too. Pay average you get an average SV engineer that likely isn’t particularly more effective than engineers abroad, the only advantage being physical locality.
On the other hand, companies are quite terrible at determining and utilizing actual value. So I do think there’s a lot of really good developers that aren’t making “above average” rates for whatever reason. heck, see all the engineers that go off and start companies that they then sell back to the behemoths for several multiples more - they take a pay cut in the short term because they believe they’re being undervalued wherever they are.
Very good developers in India generally don’t make $500k+ USD/year, which is the going rate for very good developers in the Bay Area. Salaries are heterogeneous within areas, but they’re still also heterogeneous across areas even when you hold talent level constant.
I think we have begun to see this with people hired in India: if you pay "Indian rate" then you get the bottom of the barrel. If you want very good developers in India you need to pay above "Indian rate".
The market for very good developers is no longer local.