I've spend the past 7 years living in about 25 or so countries around the world and one thing that really surprised is how far most of the world is behind the US in terms of business digitalization at a process level. You don't necessarily notice it at first as a visitor because these companies all have websites and apps and whatnot, many of which are nicer than their US counterparts, but these are often just a superficial gloss and fundamentally there's a lot more companies either literally paper driven or who have created a digital copy of the same paper process they've been using for decades and called it a day without really changing anything at all.

Japan in particular stood out because I'd always thought of it as the ultra futuristic land of robots, but a lot of simple tasks I'd expect to do on an app or website involve sending a fax or an in-person visit.

This type of approach doesn't add much value to the business. They still employee the same people doing the same work to accomplish the same result in the same amount of time, but now they need to pay a programmer as well.

Again, we had this problem in the US in the 90s, people would make jokes about how tech had promised a "paperless office" but they had more paper than ever--but that was only because the old dudes working back then insisted on printing every damn thing they received digitally! So much work at that time used to go into making printer friendly versions of every piece of information, experience with Crystal Reports was always an important box to tick on any job application.

I do wonder how willing EU countries would be to do this though, with an older population and a lot more sensitivity to preserving jobs at any cost.

Not sure this is true. I started contracting in the UK as a programmer in 2001, no qualifications, a high school drop out. Outside London (the north) I could make £300 a day back then pretty steady.

Never been short of work for long, always contracted. Not needed my CV for 15 years at this point and £800-£900 a day is common amongst peers. My story also doesn't feel unusual amongst people I work with.

Subjective account, but I've personally only felt the curve going up. Perhaps I'll have my shock one day.

You didn't do any IT work in the late 90s I guess? During the dotcom boom and Y2K hype it was major money. I was only starting so I didn't make a lot but every job came with a company car. They were screaming for people.

There was a bit of a lull pre crisis but even in 2008 I wrote custom callcenter integrations and it was really good money. About 50k euro plus car. And this was in Holland, nothing like London kind of money.