[daevout]

> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess"

Also, remote work opens the door to replace expensive domestic workers with cheap foreign ones. If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less.

For what it's worth, this might finally open the eyes of many SWEs that they're plain workers with little bargaining power and that their inflated salaries are a historical accident owning to many of the current tech barons having been engineers themselves at one point, throwing a larger bone than they otherwise would have to. Other than that, there's few reasons, and certainly no market-based ones, why those salaries should be as high as they are, when they're cheap just across the border.

If remote work being granted and taken arbitrarily -- with not even an attempt at justifying it in terms of business demands -- hasn't alerted you to the feudal reality of the modern tech corporation, perhaps being laid off will do the trick.

Broad pro labour legislation would be the answer here, but while the libertarian crackpot religion remains strong in overclass circles, there's not going to be anything of the sort.

[sokoloff]

> If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less.

Well, naturally, if that’s the all-else-equal trade that’s on offer, they’d be foolish to not take it.

[daevout]

Of course, the problem is that the trade is on offer at all.

In the antiquated view that the government exists for the protection of the people, rather than to coddle corporations and sacrificing at the altar of competitiveness, it would be simply shut down.

[sokoloff]

If the antiquated view is that people in one country don’t have to compete in a global marketplace but rather are owed a higher-paying job by virtue of birthplace, I’m OK with the new view (even though I had the good fortune to have that birthplace).