> specially now that remote work is becoming a commonly available option.
I said this somewhere else in the thread but repeating here - remote work is only a short term solution and a big long term threat. Once all the tools are processes are established to deal with remote work, your job will be instantly shipped to a cheaper country - Canada, Latin America, Eastern Europe or India. American workers should realize that remote work is not going to be like 2020-21 forever. Shareholder class is ruthless.
Yes and no. They tried that in the 90s and it didn't work out. It turns out timezones, language and culture matter. So yes, remote work will mean that US white collar workers will have to compete with workers in other countries, but that's not impossible. We may find that yes, that drags down compensation in the US, but it also pulls up compensation in the rest of the world, and there's just a wider range, more developers available in general and more coding happens as software continues to eat the world. How AI figure into this is anybody's guess - don't believe anyone who claims to know.
> that drags down compensation in the US, but it also pulls up compensation in the rest of the world, and there's just a wider range, more developers available in general
Agreed. And my point is that is horrible for American middle class, great for American shareholder class and great for software industry in cheaper places. Just like it was for manufacturing.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think American compensation will go down much, and the to extent that it does, it's because more people can work good jobs that were only available in the top-tier cities before. That is, most people in Michigan won't get SF salaries, but they won't have SF expenses either, and overall they'll be fine. They'll pull the average down, but it won't be horrible for anyone.
Remote work has been the reality for years now and yet this hasn’t happened. If anything it’s the opposite and companies are focusing on more in person workers.
It hasn't really been a reality the way it is today. During covid, we were forced to implement norms and tools for remote working (like Zoom). Also, we learned about replacing an expensive worker for a cheaper one one at a time. Earlier, there used to be entire teams in some remote location, so it was similar to having 2 islands (one large, one small) with a bridge which was crossed may be once or twice a year during annual trips to HQ. Now with one-new-person-at-a-time, teams don't lose productivity but over time, American workers are replaced with cheaper ones.
Source: seeing it myself in my current company. Also remembers: shareholder class is ruthless. If I can see this, they are seeing and acting on it as well.
> It hasn't really been a reality the way it is today
Holy hell you seem to be spamming this around.
It may not have been a reality for you and the company that you work for. It has been a reality for a lot of people and none of the 'new factors' that you used in your comments to argue that 'this time it is different' are actually new. There isnt anything new about this remote work. A lot of companies were already doing it way before, including outsourcing overseas. The new situation and trends do not change that - in fact, it makes it easier for American devs to compete by avoiding living in expensive metropolises like SF and NY. Which is helpful to those who live in such metropolises too since it would put a downward pressure on the price of everything there. Something which the real estate sector would definitely hate, I gather. Hence the pressure on the major corporations regarding RTO from that industry and the politicians they back...
Sure, it makes sense but that relocation is happening with or without me and i'd rather have a remote job and spend time with my family instead of commuting. This is basically asking "would you rather eat cake now and have your cake taken away later or choose not to eat the cake that's just sitting there and have it taken away later regarless?". I choose to eat the cake however ephemeral it may be.
Or you can delay the inevitable by making it hard to transition to remote. You can contribute in ways big and small. Have that cake supply flowing for a few more decades. And if enough people resist and companies give up on fully remote, you don't even have to worry about losing those cakes.
I think a lot of workers do see this. My suspicion is that the current vocal minority is comprised of: truly smart people (10x developers) who will be irreplaceable and liked the comfort of remote work during covid, foreign workers for whom this is a golden opportunity, useful idiots who think 2020-21 is going to be the norm with 150-200K packages out of school and 1M TC for 6 years of experience.
> What do you suggest that a "useful idiot" like myself should do?
Seek a cluster of companies which have a culture based on in-office work. They are not going to change overnight and will be the last ones to replace American workforce with foreign ones.
> all I see are doomsday predictions
I agree and maybe that's the psychological effect of seeing multiple rounds of layoffs in the last year with new headcount only in foreign locales. Also, because when I look at how American manufacturing sector declined due to outsourcing, how China rose to prominence, how that enriched the upper class but shredded the working class, how a demagogue like Trump tapped into their resentment to gain incredible political power - it is very difficult to not connect the dots with what is happening now.
I will be extremely happy if my predictions are proven wrong.
> Seek a cluster of companies which have a culture based on in-office work
Won't those be the first companies to go under if your prediction happens and they're left competing with overseas remote companies with much lower operating costs? Especially given that they're not only paying higher US salaries, but also physical office space.
Depends on the industry and moats these companies have. eg. I don't see any competition emerging for operating systems or adtech or healthcare systems from nimble players anytime soon. I see plenty of nimble competition in the nascent fields of AI, Crypto etc.
Moving to a cheaper location allows them to cut a major % of the salary requirement due to living costs. Companies are already saving billions by creating satellite offices in cheaper states and providing remote work in that state or region - some even without requiring any days in the office.
When the salary requirement is reduced by cutting out the cost of living like that, what ends up being the salary minimum is not so much different from what the overseas dev would want. Its not like top talent in that country will work for the American companies for dimes so that American shareholders can have a payday. You either pay that dev something that will make it worth for him to not go for a major local company and lose the social status and perks associated with it (very important in many local cultures), or he will just take a more traditional career route and work for the local giants.
And its not like sloppy copy-paste work from juniors who accept $10-15/hour when they start their career was not available before. If any company that is worth its salt was not able to run a major tech business with such juniors before, they wont be able to run it now either.
Therefore what remote work in the US hurts is basically the outrageous real estate sector and its margins. Which is why they put pressure on companies for RTO through the politicians it backs...
> what ends up being the salary minimum is not so much different from what the overseas dev would want
This is FUD. Based on both qualitative data - my company, which pays Canadians much less than the cheapest US workers, and Latin Americans less than Canadians - and quantitative comparison of median total comps:
American workers, who think they can live in Midwest on SV salaries are delusional. If they think they can live in Midwest on 80% of SV salaries, time to know that it's not 2021 anymore. Your competition is with Toronto (proficiency of English, cultural compatibility etc) and depending on what your company wants, you are competing with Bogota and Sao Paulo.
> Therefore what remote work in the US hurts is basically the outrageous real estate sector and its margins.
Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and large replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.
Your qualitative data refutes your own argument: Leaving aside that you are using the average wages as a comparison, so that the wages of the guy in Sao Paulo or Bogota cannot be directly compared to - holy hell - the salary of a guy in San Fran, the numbers outright say that there isnt so much difference in between sending a job to Toronto vs sending it to some underutilized American state. To boot, the Midwest is not the only American region and the midwest is not so poor in technology sector, especially Texas. And amazingly, populated and highly talent-rich India is missing from that list, a top outsourcing location, and instead a random Bogota is in. Why not pick Aleut Islands - the average pay of a dev there would be much, much lower there due to the scarce presence of devs.
So who do you think that you will employ in Bogota and how many of them are there? All the top-tier talent that those countries have historically been producing before was flowing into places like San Fran or other tech hubs as immigrants. You think that if the kind of remote work offshoring that you imagine happens, you will be able to grab ~200,000 people from top talent tier in those countries? A number way above the population of many cities of those countries?
No. In such a situation, either the top immigrant talent now in SF will flow back to their homeland, still not reducing the price of the talent in those countries because there is no way in hell the education systems of those countries can churn out hundreds of thousands of tech graduates a year. So basically its another case of relocation of talent - this time, the immigrant talent goes back to their own countries to work for the same companies from there just like the American talent goes back to another US state to work for the same companies from there.
Take India as an example instead - a country that can actually educate that much talent and already has a large tech sector that is not only advanced but segments of it were actually geared to do the very specific thing that you are prophesizing doom about - getting the outsourced jobs of richer countries.
Did that change anything? Has the average pay in SF constantly increased over the last 2 decades or not? Has India been able to get American companies to outsource all development jobs?
...
Long story short, you are prophesizing doom about something that was already prophesized to happen, and just did not. Its not that American companies were not able to outsource to Bogota or Trinidad or Tobago before. They were. And it did not change anything. It seems like the already present reality of remote work stayed outside your radar for whatsover reason. But it existed, and it did not cause doom.
> Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and large replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.
$300k/year salaries and positions in SF may suffer until remote work brings down cost of living in the hellish real estate landscape and general prices, there is no doubt about it.
However I doubt that the loss of such positions are related to remote work - all the layoffs that we saw in the past year has been due to the companies trying to shore up stock prices due to the loss of the zero interest economy. Its not like they laid off 200,000 people and then hired 200,000 remote offshore devs in their place...
The only reason the shareholder class hasn’t been gutted is that the people you’re saying they’ll lay off are on their side. Both parties have large minorities just begging for a popular directive to do so.
Tell me again how that worked out for our manufacturing sector. Walmarts thrived, workers are poor, governments picked up the tab for their workers' safety nets, "manufacturing jobs" became a boogeyman for the successful presidential bid by Trump. That's the future we will be repeating on steroids by gutting one of the remaining ladder to upper middle class.
I said this somewhere else in the thread but repeating here - remote work is only a short term solution and a big long term threat. Once all the tools are processes are established to deal with remote work, your job will be instantly shipped to a cheaper country - Canada, Latin America, Eastern Europe or India. American workers should realize that remote work is not going to be like 2020-21 forever. Shareholder class is ruthless.