Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t justify our higher salaries anymore.
1. It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities. This makes them more competitive relative to outsourcing because a lower wage in a cheaper city goes farther.
2. It opens up the job pool. If you work remote, you can work at any company that takes remote workers regardless of where you live.
3. It reduces the cost of switching jobs. Many people are stuck in jobs they don't want because there are few other local opportunities and switching jobs means uprooting and moving. For a single 20-something in an apartment, that doesn't sound so bad. But once you have a partner with their own career, kids with meaningful friendships, a mortgage, etc. then moving can be extremely disruptive.
In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees.
1. The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive. Meanwhile in the most expensive Indian city, one could live like a king at 1/3 the cost of the cheapest American city with far more culture and things to do. And if you were willing to move to the cheapest Indian cities you could halve that again.
2. Correct. Given that the majority of SW jobs, especially the highest paying ones, were located in the U.S. this is a net benefit to anyone living outside the U.S. even before you take cost into consideration. More American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global jobs opened up to someone living in SF.
3. Efficiency approximately = lower costs. In this case costs = developer salaries.
So you’re right. We got more efficient. We reduced the average cost of developer salaries per job. Since very few people are willing to take a pay cut this means jobs are moving/will move to places where people are willing to work for less.
As someone who is Indian and frequently visits the sub continent (writing this from a suburb in Delhi) I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live in the cheapest Indian cities (just left my family’s home city which falls into this bracket).
I’m not sure if you’ve travelled much around the sub continent but I’d say you’re quite badly romanticising it. Yes we have our own culture which is different to that of the USA but, as with all things, there are A Lot of aspects of the culture here which are not admirable.
Well, no, not really. Top tier Indian cities like Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai are expensive and horribly dysfunctional when it comes to pollution, traffic, hygiene, dealing with government bureaucracy, etc. Having money insulates you from some but by no means all of this.
Real estate is about 2x-1x the price (I bet the cheap stuff is much worse than in the US though).
Cars and more expensive big purchases are cheaper in the US. And don't forget, the US has absolutely first-class-bar-none access to financial services, with abundant cheap loans, so you can support a much nicer lifestyle on the same income.
> More American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global jobs opened up to someone living in SF.
As someone living in EU and working (and job hunting) for American companies for the last N years I just have never seen it happen. American companies were opening subsidiaries in Europe long before COVID - they were just making everyone go to office there. Surge of remote work didn't seem to bring new American jobs to Europe as far as I could see - if anyone was hiring remotely, it were the same companies that already were hiring for in-office jobs before. Meanwhile, most remote jobs by American companies seem to be open for American residents only.
Thing is, for most locations, you still need to establish a legal presense to hire there, and that is enough of bureacratic burden for most companies to expand their geography very sparingly
> The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive.
I currently live in Seattle. On Zillow, I can find a house in the small town where I grew up with the same stats as mine (square footage, number of bedrooms, baths). That house is about a fourth of the cost that Zillow says my current home is worth.
Oh, and the house in the small town has a 750' storage building out back. And another 1,500' shop. And five acres of land. And a fish pond.
Efficiency does not necessarily mean lower costs. More efficient workers could mean more valuable workers, and thus something employers are willing to pay more for in a competitive labor market.
>In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees.
It increases the efficiency of the market as a whole, but that's not the same as saying that first world software engineers (already highly paid and previously protected from foreign competition) would be better off.
Claims 1 would be difficult to back with evidence.
Some may accept a significantly lower pay (to go such a long way), but many wouldn't.
Overall my observation is that costs of living doesn't proportionally follow compensation. The far stretched example is how offshore staff often live in countries with costs of living at about a fifth, earning a third of their counterparts in the U.S or other top paying countries
Of course for skilled jobs perfectly doable remote such as software engineers.
I may be biased by the fact it also makes sense, a worker understands the value provided to the business is more or less equal, and since we live in a market society, why wouldn't it be expected to earn the same. In effect we don't earn the same no matter the location, but it is somewhere between that and aligned to location comp.
I find that some tech workers don't understand economics that well. In general more efficiency for an industry means less wages per unit of output worked across a whole industry. The benefit of "efficiency" usually accrues to customers of a service, not providers.
Efficiency benefits society at large, at the expense of the people being made more efficient. This is just capitalism and the result of price (and also sometimes societal respect) being a function of scarcity of a product/skill.
There's a reason construction unions, doctor's associations, and the like exist - to promote members interests (i.e. predominately money). If you can cartel an industry to produce lower efficiencies; assuming that a disruptor can't break into your market and ruin your party your members will accrue higher salaries and usually given our system more respect from peers in society. Locally I'm hearing "get a trade"; and when I say I'm a SWE people sneer - the respect for the profession IMO due to "efficiency/AI" has crashed over the last decade.
> when I say I'm a SWE people sneer - the respect for the profession IMO due to "efficiency/AI" has crashed over the last decade.
Tbf, a lot of SWEs sneered at other professions getting automated by AI - even on HN.
There isn't much sympathy to be given to SWEs and techies simply because we are paid significantly higher than other white collar roles with comparable or worse working hours like accounting, marketing, other engineering disciplines, dentistry, nursing, and even various subfields of medicine like primary care physicians.
A lot of techies who are complaining on HN need to realize that in reality they are the elite even though they don't think they are.
Why does Jeff in Cary NC deserve a $200K TC working 40 hours and remote first and just a BS in CS when a CPA at PwC makes $120K TC with added debt from a masters in accounting, a Management Consultant at BCG makes $175K TC with added MBA debt, an Biomedical Engineer at Biogen earning around $120K TC with added debt from bio undergrad and grad school, a journalist working for a local newspaper earning $30k-50k with debt from journalism school, and a teacher earns $50K with debt from getting an education credential on top of a bachelors?
That may be true in the US, but isn't that true worldwide in general. In fact in many countries techies are a bit of a underclass. But I get your point.
My comment was more I think that "sneer" is more around the profession's worth. A few years ago people would go "wow, that's cool". Very different now which shows status of a job is determined by perceived job prospects, security, and impact.
It was going to happen anyways. I was working remote 2-3 days a week before 2020 hit and that was mainly due to how bad my commute was time-wise. It was exhausting. But it's because the team I was working with was all in other cities and countries and so I was driving to an office location just to badge in. I barely even talked to anyone there. It became a terrible job for that reason alone. Much of what made my career was developing professional contacts and colleagues and Covid took all that away from me to the point that it killed my career. Now a lot of us are in the same situation and I'm here to tell you, I think this is it--it's never coming back this time. You can hope it does, but hope is not a strategy.
The people I worked with were pretty distributed before COVID--partially because functions (and geo regions) were distributed anyway--and partly for other reasons. When COVID hit there was basically very little effort to co-locate most teams. Some companies did try to pull people back but in a lot of cases, it was a matter of RTO but that was a good way to do a mass layoff. Many companies didn't want to do that.
I did (and sometimes still do) attend professional events but the level of interpersonal-contact pre-COVID was gone long before I semi-retired.
I started a company during COVID and we hired: one engineer in SF, one in NY, three in different areas of Israel, plus co-Founders in Boston and Baltimore. There’s no way we could have hired all this specialized talent in any one city at a price we could afford. I also missed the in-person dynamics, but I can’t imagine how you’d build this kind of team without remote work.
Startups are a different deal. Everyone knows everyone, people are hired for their specific talents, management barely exists, there are no executive types disconnected from the reality in the lower levels of the company, no turf wars of middle management, etc. (This is why I prefer working for startups.)
Big corporations are the opposite. Doing something that looks good locally / helps a quarterly report but works to the detriment of the company as a whole is often par of the course :(
I am an offshore worker (I live in Europe and generally work for American companies) and make a good deal less than Americans with the same job (but more than I would at a European company) - it’s not just outsourcing for 10% the cost to a developing country.
Sure, but many companies outsourcing aren't looking for the best, they are looking for the cheapest, and surprise-surprise the cheapest are not the best. Some of them are goddamn awful - close to zero value, but upper management typically never hears about that and just thinks they are saving money because they are cheap.
There is also a big difference in mindset between an employee hoping to advance their career at a company, trying to become a SME, pushing initiatives, incentivized by stock grants, actually caring about customers, etc, and a vendor employee - even a good one - to who this is just a temporary gig, and has no vested interest in the quality of the codebase or building value for the company.
In many companies there is little flow of real information from the bottom up. Upper management only hears what everyone understands they want to hear.
If the top down message is "this is the direction, make it work", and people further down in the hierarchy understand that the boss doesn't want to hear that his plan (e.g. hire the cheapest to save money) isn't working, then he is not going to hear it.
Companies don't even care, honestly. Some have uptime requirements that they get fined over if things go sideways, but besides that, they don't even care.
If you work in the Bay Area, want to raise kids in a house you own, and don't own one yet, then "can report to a Bay Area office" isn't going to work as your competitive advantage for much longer anyway.
This argument would make a lot more sense if you replaced remote work with unions. All that power and opportunity and they squandered it thinking their bosses and management was on their side.
Go ahead, downvote. As if working in the office would have magically protected you these layoffs.
> The only way to stop the race to the bottom in wages and standards is for working people of all races, religions and immigration status to stand together
> Find resources to help union members know their rights and ensure they are prepared to defend themselves and the immigrant members of their families and communities in the event of workplace or community raids
What about this one that explicitly advocates for non-Americans?
The first article you link has the following explaining their stance on immigration [0]:
“This approach will ensure that immigration does not depress wages and working conditions or encourage marginal low-wage industries that depend heavily on substandard wages, benefits and working conditions.”
And:
(1) an independent commission to assess and manage future flows, based on labor market shortages that are determined on the basis of actual need;
(2) a secure and effective worker authorization mechanism;
(3) rational operational control of the border;
(4) adjustment of status for the current undocumented population; and
(5) improvement, not expansion, of temporary worker programs, limited to temporary or seasonal, not permanent, jobs.
Imagine if there was a push to create a professional organization to handle qualification, certifications etc. Like there is for doctors, dentist, accountants and other fields
Just outright insane.