In my experience, the jobs of the mediocre get outsourced to said sweatshops to be done by equally mediocre people for cheaper. I've worked for two big banks as a software dev, and there are plenty of long term, extremely high paid positions for Java engineers that'll never get outsourced.

The model seems to be: have a group of on-site, well paid smart people build out a toolset, toss it to offshore to build useless CRUD features onto.

> Really well paid is, like, 250k/year, and it is somewhat hard to extract it from just Java in an average bank.

I disagree. There were a bunch of engineers at both banks that were clearing ~200-300k a year, and not in San Francisco. Granted, some of them were Oracle DBAs, but there were a bunch of Java-specific people as well.