[chrischen]

The same reason they didn’t hire someone from the Texas suburbs rate in the first place.

An employee’s rate depends on how much they would be going for in the market, and living costs are part of the employee’s expenses—not that of the company’s.

[notyourday]

Suddenly the market becomes really large, including India, China and Eastern Europe in addition to the mid-west.

[TallGuyShort]

There's a bit of a spectrum. Companies have learned to have employees working from home, but they're all in the timezone they were in before, they already got to work together in-person before being in this situation, and entire teams were put into the same situation at once. That's a step toward full support of remote people all over the globe, but the further you get the more you have to factor in legal overhead, cultural and situational differences, time zone difference, etc.

To be clear - I'm a big fan of remote work, I'm just saying that companies have been forced to solve only a subset of the problem they face before the market really can scale to be that large for everyone.

[notyourday]

"Remote work" is globalization of white collar jobs. It is baffling to me highly paid tech workers do not see it.

"Work from home" is the first step. If a company embraces work from home, it embraces completely asynchronous communication. As soon as that becomes an acceptable way of solving problems, Vlad making $50k/year in Ukraine who will do 65 hours a week will become a contender to replace Jackson in SF, who is making $250k/year and refuses to work more than 40 hours a week because of work/life balance.

[dpoochieni]

I do not know if its my non traditional background (no degree in computer science, big emphasis in history and philosophy since middle school) but I'm baffled by how politically naive many people in software can be. I understand why you might not like it but in pretending politics do not matter or won't affect you, you are letting other people decide and most importantly, think for you.

How many people think tech companies are just completely well-intentioned in everything they do? Curb your enthusiasm, a healthy chug of skepticism is needed.

[bcrosby95]

I chose CS as my major in 2001. Yeah, during the dotcom crash and the outsourcing frenzy. I was told I would never have a job.

I'm not saying it will never pass. But history has shown it's much harder than you're making it out to be. We already had a great outsourcing attempt 20 years ago which had questionable results. And now pay is higher than ever.

Maybe they will be successful this time. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I haven't based my life around earning an SF bay area salary. My retirement is already paid for. My house is 80% paid for. College funds for children are mostly paid for.

[hiram112]

> And now pay is higher than ever.

I think this is, as usual, specific to the Bay Area and maybe NYC, and also limited to the top 10% of developers at tech companies.

I don't think tech salaries are all that great even in other big cities like DC or Denver, especially as home prices have also passed their 2007 highs, while salaries were stagnant and bonuses or equity are nothing like in FAANG companies. This is especially true when non-managers salary cap at about 40, which is when many professionals in other industries are just getting started making good money.

A lot of small cities might have no real tech companies and only a few large Fortune 500 companies that employ half the software engineers in the whole city. All it takes is one or two of them to decide to offshore half the IT department to Bangalore while signing a big deal with Cognizant or Infosys for the other half in house (i.e. H1Bs brought in from India). If you're stuck in that city, you're looking at wage stagnation for a long while.

It's still okay if you're a good developer - top 25% - at age 27 making $90K in a low COL city, while most of your peers are barely out of grad school. But it's not when you're 40 making $120K and all your peers - nurses, government workers, sales, lawyers, entrepreneurs - have caught up, often with far more stability and better working conditions. I think software engineering has gotten to be a dead-end career for a lot of us not working at tech companies in big cities, and globalization and H1Bs have continued eating away at the industry for the majority of us working as contractors and at big corps.

[notyourday]

> I'm not saying it will never pass. But history has shown it's much harder than you're making it out to be. We already had a great outsourcing attempt 20 years ago which had questionable results. And now pay is higher than ever.

The technological barriers in the last 20 years prevented effective outsourcing of tech jobs. Since the technology did not work, the cultural acceptance of it did not matter.

I did one of the first live streaming events over the internet in 1995. It involved a convert venue, a dedicated T1 line to the data center hosting the web server, a Cisco 2501, a computer camera that i rigged to a frame grabber, and a "beefy" web server running on Sparc10. After we got the telco to install the line it took about 2 days to do the rest. The "broadcast" lasted between 11pm and 3am. I think it had about 9 concurrent viewers at its peak and 12 total. The promoter of the venue paid ~$4k to do it. That's the accessible "telepresence" at the time.

I was at a company that had offices on the West Coast, NYC, DC and UK in 2000 or so. We had a video conference system and IP phones. It was possible to do a "meeting" with the other offices and it worked pretty well -- sound was fine video a bit jerky. It helped that we had our own network. Someone tried to take a headend home and use the his at home cable connection. It sucked. The video barely did 5-10 frames a second.

Today I can walk into most of random coffee shops and do a professional quality video call. The technology is here. The only blocker for leveling playing field is cultural. The circumstances are forcing companies to remote the cultural barrier. Would they put it back when the lock downs are over? I seriously doubt, especially if they save $200k/year per high paid employee.

[1MoreThing]

Markets are still going to be separated by time zones.

[notyourday]

There are US traders that trade in HK. They maintain HK hours. Money apparently is good.

[RHSeeger]

And an employee in the Texas suburbs will generally be "going for" less, given it's a different market. Sure, as more people are working remotely, the gaps will close more, but someone living in a cheaper area is generally going to be willing to accept less pay. As such, the going rate in the cheaper area will generally be lower.

[chrischen]

That is a conflation of cause and effect. Employees in general may be paid less in Texas, but that doesn’t mean the location is the cause.

As companies go remote, they will depress salaries as a side effect of no longer having a locality-sensitive hiring constraint. But again the cause is the hiring constraint—not the location the employee is in.