[ghaff]

Logically, to the degree that a company really is indifferent to where in the US people live, I'd expect a new equilibrium to develop that's somewhere between the Bay Area and Arkansas. But, as you say, there's a lot of inertia and Google isn't likely to one morning announce an across-the-board pay cut in the Bay Area so they can redistribute it to workers in other locations. But you could certainly imagine things like premiums for new grads shrinking.

[geoelectric]

Equilibrium is what I expect. That may have a more sharp effect than the math would suggest, though. Bay Area SWE salaries inflated via competition in a way I suspect completely deflates with area pressure off. The cross-effects of a limited pool tend to be multiplicative, not additive.

The fact that the people doing the hiring probably enjoy those salaries too is maybe the biggest counterargument I'd have to my own prediction and the reason I think it'll take a bit to change. I'm firmly convinced that's one of the phenomena that have kept college degrees inflating--cognitive dissonance around admitting you shouldn't perpetuate your own experience.

FWIW, I think a lot of techies would probably love to have the freedom to live wherever they want and make a decent living. The comp gold rush has been fun, but the industry will arguably be better when it's gone. But the transition period--especially for those of us already at FAANGs or similar--that gets spicy.

Personally I'm hoping it means in a decade or so I can pseudo-retire to an easy remote job somewhere cheap enough to be happy on what an easy remote job pays. Given how hard actual early retirement can be to swing nowadays, that'd be a great holdover strategy to have available.

[majormajor]

> Bay Area SWE salaries inflated via competition in a way I suspect completely deflates with area pressure off.

It will be very interesting to see just how big the pool of people who can pass the interviews[0] but weren't willing to relocate is.

The demographics (and housing prices!) in the tech hubs reflect a big influx of highly-paid developers. If only 10% of the folks who could pass those interviews and get those offers were willing to relocation, that'll cause a much larger downward pressure on prices than if, say, 75% were, in which case the pool doesn't expand as much.

[0] the usefulness of the algorithm interview can be debated, but I don't see remote work putting any pressure on this process

[geoelectric]

If anything, I expect more questionable snake oil strategies for hiring and managing remote to come and go. The same old problems predicting actual performance will persist, and honestly probably not any worse than now, but people will try to "solve" them for the new format.

The open office movement should be all anyone needs to see to believe that the no-office movement will have legs. We perpetuated an employment style for years that widely known to be worse for both employees and employers on many levels than a traditional layout, and merely absorbed that as the cost of doing business.

If it works well it'll hit all the much faster, but in tech, anyway, all you need to hear is "less overhead" and "cheap office rental" to know it'll become popular no matter how well it does or doesn't work. I dunno other knowledge worker industries but I can't imagine they're much more altruistic.

[anewaccount2021]

> The demographics (and housing prices!) in the tech hubs reflect a big influx of highly-paid developers

How? For at least the last decade, your typical developer in the Bay Area has been a renter...long since priced-out of a single-family home. Even FAANG developers are priced out of the better suburbs.

[majormajor]

A lot of Bay Area tech companies have basically been constantly hiring for a decade, with a lot of new companies constantly being formed as well. Talk to those folks who've been hired, and a large portion of them did not live in the Bay Area a decade ago.

The rental prices and turnover speed are another indicator of this - sure, the ones buying houses are the ones who've hit the stock jackpot, but the competition for places of any sort is intensified by the importation of well-paid talent.