When companies started announcing "permanent 100% WFH" last Spring I knew it would never last. I feel bad for the people who picked up and moved from SV or NYC and now are being told to expect to be back in their old office by June. Though it was naive to think you could move to a cabin in Wyoming with a Starlink and continue to pull an SV or NYC level TC.
Maybe this is the case with companies that announced "permanent 100% WFH", but Google never announced this.
As someone working at Google, there was never any surprise Google did not announce a permanent WFH solution, since it has not been part of the company culture nor did they put out any expectations you would be able to WFH permanently.
> move to a cabin in Wyoming with a Starlink and continue to pull an SV or NYC level TC.
so why exactly shouldn't that be possible!? It's not like the work/output decreased (for the most part). The only legitimate way for compensation to drop should be due to competition - allowing remote should also mean allowing more people to apply for a position, and thus, higher supply of potential workers. This _should_ naturally lower compensation, but not immediately.
Well, the salaries are inflated b/c cost of living (an engineer in NYC is no different than an engineer in Pittsburgh except in salary), but your point of increasing applicants means an increase in supply of applicants for that position, many of which are happy to make $80,000/year in a cabin instead of $180,000. Soooo why would the company overpay? It wouldn’t make sense.
>competition - allowing remote should also mean allowing more people to apply for a position
That's exactly how it would happen, and it would happen very quickly. There are talented software engineers all over the US and the world, SV does not have the only ones.
