[esperent]

Sorry to burst your schadenfreude bubble, but I've been living in SEA and charging European prices for freelance work for over five years now, during which time I've had several EU companies offer me full time work at EU wages. More and more, people are hired for their skills, work ethic, and so on, while their location becomes less and less important. Google is fighting the tide here, and the next generation of management will be more comfortable with remote work. Hopefully, that means in the near future a Guatemalan dev will get paid a similar amount to a European/US dev of equal skill. We're long overdue a reckoning in terms of location inequality.

[dekimir]

I'd find it more convincing if you've been living in, say, Lisbon and charging Seattle prices. If I were hiring devs in Seattle, I'd be delighted to pay them EU wages.

[bmiller2]

I think he means South East Asia

[dekimir]

Oh! Well, I'm embarrassed... ^_^

Makes much more sense now, thanks.

[fred_is_fred]

It's unfortunately a tax nightmare for companies - even if you believe that it shouldn't be. Paying someone US dollars while the work in Guatamala might violate local laws.

[Google234]

Yeah, your model might work for simple things where a freelancer can contribute to but remote is difficult for complex projects.

[true_religion]

I have been remote for 3+ years. Our team is fully remote. Although in theory, we could go into any of the local offices no one on the tech staff does that.

Admittedly, it’s not FAANG, but rather one of the Big 3 so you may not think our projects are quite as complex. We do however write software that is the core support for multi billion dollar companies.

I used to think that tech companies would jump on remote work first, but now I doubt it. Tech companies put an emphasis on things like political ethics, mission, and putting the company first. All of the above are hard to foster without a face to face community.

[esperent]

Although freelance I work with the same company, mostly, and their core dev team is entirely remote. Their company deals with pretty complex projects. Maybe not Google level complex but in spite of how much it gets talked about here, that's not all that matters. The majority of companies and projects will do just fine if they go fully remote.

[dekimir]

> but remote is difficult for complex projects

A bit difficult, yes, but far from uncommon. Witness Linux, Scylla, RedHat, GitLab, Firefox, WordPress...