[ggreer]

I'm guessing people will live in cheap places that are considered to be in the same region as expensive places. For example: live in Tracy or Fairfield or Hollister while collecting a bay area salary. Or live in Vancouver, WA while collecting a Portland salary. The latter is especially enticing as Washington has no state income tax.

In the long term though, if companies go remote I don't see how they can continue to have salaries based on cost of living. In a hypothetical perfectly frictionless economy with perfect competition, companies that pay salaries based on the value contributed by the employee would be more efficient and outcompete those that paid based on the employee's expenses.

[erik_seaberg]

People really do commute from Tracy and Vancouver today.

Your expenses don't matter to employers, but if the industry goes fully remote we'll no longer see labor markets with shortages and higher offers.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

The number of engineers isn't changing. If a bunch of engineers leave silicon valley, and some companies decide having people onsite is still critical, the bidding wars for the engineers who remain goes higher. All in all, I don't think much will change. If engineers refuse lower salaries, they simply won't leave the bay area -- keeping things in aggregate as they currently are.