[jlgreco]

* It seems a lot of people on HN are favourable to policies allowing working from home. Most companies still don't have such policies, but I suspect that if telecommuting ever becomes commonplace (e.g. due to software development process or technological changes), it will depress salaries far more than the measly 60~80k H1Bs per year have ever done. For every H1B holder there are certainly many others who are skillful enough programmers and speak English, but cannot work in the US due to the limited number of visas, or don't have a degree, or don't want to take the risk of working under the constraints of H1B, or simply don't want to move to the US for any old reason.*

Or live in states with poor economies and no tech jobs of their own and are willing to work for less than what a Bay Area programmer is.

[mrgordon]

It depends on the job. While I don't doubt that is true for a simple web development task, most programmers who live in states with poor economies and no tech jobs probably have not written service-oriented distributed systems on AWS that have handled Google/Amazon/Dropbox/insert-big-tech-company-here size loads reliably with fault tolerance etc. I can see how that knowledge will eventually become more common all over the world, but the companies in the Bay Area will be on to the next technologies and want senior people with 5+ years in SomeNewWebScaleDB and production experience with EvenMoreTrendyLanguage which is still likely to be less common outside of tech hubs.

We'll certainly tend towards more telecommuting and less emphasis on physical location though.

[nandemo]

Exactly. In fact, I was thinking not only of India and China, countries that are traditional sources of H1B programmers, but also Western Europe, Mexico, Brazil, etc.