I’m not surprised. Like everything else enabled by the internet, the short term gains from accessibility become long term inequality.
Remote work means employees are now competing with entire time zones rather than just the people in their locality.
It’s kind of shocking to me how quickly and fully people embraced it. Hate your 1hr commute? It’s a moat against your competition with a 2 hour commute.
Precisely, it baffled me how people here went on with it seeing only the first order consequences. I'm a grad student in Chile and I get emails from recruiters in the US three or four times a week. I haven't picked up a job and don't plan to until I finish my degree (soon), and I haven't thoroughly evaluated the quality of each offer. Meanwhile recruiters in my country don't look as much, might as well be because American employers have much to gain from a remote worker compared to local employers. Several of my friends are from Argentina, and they all work for US companies either remotely or on-site, something I would have had a hard time believing just five years ago. This decade will be interesting.
I want to start off by saying that I am not a dev, my job is engineering that uses advanced mathematical theory to solve physical problems.
I have only set up a LinkedIn profile. Recruiters have my email from there, the conferences I've attended and contact information I've passed to my friends (being an engineering grad student helps). It varies, but the lowest is 45k/year, which living in the capital (even more if I lived in a village) of Chile means that as a single male I would live comfortably and without worries.
Yes, 45k USD remote for US companies, as opposed to entry level salary for MSc grads of 18k for the field I'm working in, in Chile. As I said, that's the lowest salary offer of remote jobs. The theory is numerical analysis of partial differential equations, specifically, the finite element method (for CFD, fluid-structure interaction, thin shell mechanics, buckling, and so on). To have a basic understanding of how to code custom FEM programs one needs at least an understanding of the fundamentals of functional analysis + analysis of PDEs + tensor calculus + the specific theory of physical application involved. These are non-trivial skills that take years and years to develop, so I would advise to anyone interested that it's best to get a job as a dev instead. I do it out of passion and because my family has a history of civil/mech eng.
The reason for such spread, I suspect, is that there is not much market for FEM professionals outside of the US and Europe, and if it exists, it's very small and unsophisticated.
> It’s kind of shocking to me how quickly and fully people embraced it.
HN is an outlier. People in law, finance and other office-worker industries expected to be asked to return to office at some point. It's only here where I observed a significant percentage that thought corporate WFH-forever policies were to accommodate their highly compensated employees, as opposed to opening a pathway to hire from cheaper regions at lower salaries in the future.
Can anyone explain me how so? I though it was supposed to improve inequality. As in you didn't have to be a Stanford grad, or be born in the US, or live in unaffordable places like Amsterdam, London or the Bay Area, to get access to good jobs?
So now some hard working individual from Africa, India or Vietnam who didn't win the lottery of birth can also get a good job too if he proves himself worthy, and also it will ease some of the housing pressure on those uber-expensive western tech-hub cities, while brining more money to developing nations. Win-win.
That all sounds to me like a global net benefit for the greater good of humanity. Is it not? More money in the hands of the working class in developing nations means less poverty, less global inequality, less emigration.
Now if your only moat was physical proximity, but not your skillset, well then ... tough, I guess, but I don't think this is a problem for most TBH. Offshoring and outsourcing is nothing new and has been a thing for decades and most western tech workers in expensive cities haven't gone extinct.
Plus, workers in rich western nations have plenty of other lucrative career prospects with moats around them if that's what they want: law, medicine, investment banking, defense and other government jobs, etc. People who went into SW development because of passion, will be fine either way.
I agree that it increases equality but it’s a race to the lowest common denominator. If we just look at the US for instance. Assume typical Bay Area engineer makes 250k/yr. Rest of the country (exclude tech hubs), that number is <130k. Do you think Bay Area engineers when competing for remote jobs make closer to 250k or 130k? My guess is much much closer to the latter.
Sure, but that's how capitalism works. It seeks to optimize every cost of the organization including labor. Now consider the following:
Outside of family obligations, nothing is forcing people to live in the Bay Area to begin with, they choose to do that willingly because they prioritize their careers above everything else. There's no rule saying everyone must live in the Bay Area. You can find a tech job in more affordable cities as well, just that it might not be your dream job at a company that pampers you. People cramming like sardines in tech-hubs is precisely the problem that remote work can alleviate. Now, the speculation driven housing problem is another issue on its own though.
If I zoom out for a broader picture, and looking at it from a cold, hartless, games theory perspective, devs in the Bay Area making less money so that devs worldwide, especially in developing nations, make more money, feels like a worthy sacrifice for the good of the planet/mankind. Same thing happened to manufacturing and it might happen to certain parts of SW development.
Nothing is stopping the Bay Area tech workers from unionizing and getting better protection against remote workers from abroad taking their jobs at lower wages. They're certainly a hefty majority there and they could do it if they wanted to, but so far they choose to pursue individualism because "I can make more money than others by negotiating for myself; fuck you I got mine, you go get yours".
Or who knows, maybe a push for unionization would actually accelerate the move to globalized remote work. This coming decade will be interesting.
Bay Area remote workers at top paying companies aren’t competing internationally so much as across the US. Wages might go down across the board vs going up in other places due to the race to the bottom nature of these things. But housing and stuff will likely continue to go up.
For my medium size company, before wfh applying for a job was competing with people living in the sf Bay Area, now it’s competing with the entire US and the actually company throws out resumes from high cost of living areas including any from CA
Remote work means employees are now competing with entire time zones rather than just the people in their locality.
It’s kind of shocking to me how quickly and fully people embraced it. Hate your 1hr commute? It’s a moat against your competition with a 2 hour commute.