[FirmwareBurner]

>They said thanks but no thanks, Melbourne doesn't need you - whereas tradesmen, plumbers, miners etc have no problem whatsoever moving there, year after year.

Well, tradesmen build houses, schools, and hospitals people and a growing society need. There's only so much demand and value for society that (non-SV) programmers add. You could survive in a world with only tradesmen and farmers, but not so much with only JS coders.

Programmers are valued in places like the US because US is the home to big-tech, an industry generating trillions in revenue for the US, but the US is the global outlier here. In other places of the world that don't have big-tech, programmers have much less value to society.

South Park also did an episode on this.