[hn_throwaway_99]

In addition to the great points in the other comments, I'd also point out that remote work is a double edged sword. I remember in the early 00s when the .com bubble burst, and there was huge talk of software work being outsourced to India and China. It never really happened, for lots of different reasons.

This time around, though, companies are much more comfortable with remote work, and Zoom/Meet/etc. has gotten much, much better than options from 15+ years ago. I've already seen an explosion of outsourcing to Latin America and Eastern Europe - the developers I've worked with from those locales have been great, usually great English skills, and much better time zone overlap. This trend has absolutely been pushing down dev salaries in the US, especially for more junior devs.

[dakiol]

There’s a difference between remote work within a country (the one everyone is in favour of) versus remote work worldwide (or at least to some range of time zones). The former doesn’t require anything extra regarding legal stuff, while the latter does (and it’s way less common than the former).

All the companies I have worked for in a remote fashion were offering remote within the country and also on the countries they have a legal presence (which were 2 or 3 at most)

[vunderba]

While I do think that better video conferencing + higher bandwidth has certainly helped the outsourcing movement, I still find that its fairly limited for many companies.

At least 50% of the positions that I come across on hiring boards that allow for fully remote still have a qualifying regional clarification (U.S. only). It's probably a combination of complexities around accounting/taxes and time zones.

However if a company can support outsourcing they can facilitate much easier communication between the onshore and offshore dev teams by restricting offshore hires by LONGITUDE not LATITUDE - e.g. United States companies hiring from Central and South America for example.