6 ms·

I think it’s much more likely that, rather than empowering employees to live rich and fulfilling lives outside of work, a massive shift to remote will drive dow

I think it’s much more likely that, rather than empowering employees to live rich and fulfilling lives outside of work, a massive shift to remote will drive down wages everywhere to the level of the cheapest locations where talent can be found - so instead of living on an SF salary in Coer d’Alene you’ll be living on a Lagos or Jakarta salary - while obliterating the distinction between “work life” and “home life” and massively sharpening the knife of competition hanging over every engineer’s head This may be different in firms where the workers actually have a say in the management of the company, but god knows there aren’t too many of those

121789 6y ago
You said this much better than I could. I'd expect the power of management to increase over individual ICs, too.
sb52191 6y ago
"I think it’s much more likely that, rather than empowering employees to live rich and fulfilling lives outside of work, a massive shift to remote will drive down wages everywhere to the level of the cheapest locations where talent can be found - so instead of living on an SF salary in Coer d’Alene you’ll be living on a Lagos or Jakarta salary" I disagree. If companies felt they could readily get the same level of talent outside the US, why wouldn't they do that currently? Just set up their business in a foreign country and recruit internationally? And if they're still hiring domestically, why are you so sure they're going to dramatically reduce salaries? They still have to attract talent. If an employee wants to move from the bay area to Wyoming, and their employer says their pay will be cut 50%, what's to stop them from applying to Twitter or another company allowing full remote with (I'm assuming, I haven't checked) a much more competitive salary? "while obliterating the distinction between “work life” and “home life”" I've seen far too many emails sent by people at 11:30 PM and followed up with another email at 6 AM for me to believe this hasn't already happened. Not to mention the self imposed aspect of it (neither of those emails NEEDED to be sent at those times).
- hadlock 6y ago
  Last couple of companies I worked at, they are already outsourcing "average" work. We had a QA manager in the bay area, and then he had a team of six people in SE asia doing QA/QA automation. On the engineering side we had a team of 20 engineers in eastern Europe working for less than 30k/year usd working on bug fixes and test coverage, UI fixes, modifying legacy code from the original monolith that didn't change a whole lot etc In the bay area we only had five engineers, mostly focuses on architecture, R&D, new products etc, and even then they only came in two-three days a week mostly for face to face meetings. The VP had a lake house in tahoe and would work remote for 2 months every summer. I can see a bunch of legacy code maintenance/qa work moving offshore further, but there will always be a core group of five to ten engineers who meet at the central office a couple times a month. Remote will increase but humans still need face to face contact periodically.
  - bluekite2000 6y ago
    Yeah I know a bunch of QA companies in Vietnam. How did your company find them? I am Vietnamese American myself and have spent a lot of time in the region. It is an amazing place w/ a hungry yet educated youth population, great food, beautiful beaches and quite fast internet. Surprised not many American companies heading there to recruit.
    - hadlock 6y ago
      We initially hired the QA manager as our first QA hire, then he built the team in his country. After a couple of years we paid for his visa and he lives in the US now and has been with the company for over five years. We went through Vietnam including Nha-trang on a tourist trip two years ago, of which I think Nha-trang is sort of their tech capital, I was really impressed with the level of development there and how modern it was, although I didn't talk with anyone directly in the industry while I was there. It definitely had an international modern vibe compared to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
      - bluekite2000 6y ago
tanilama 6y ago
> Lagos or Jakarta salary This is fear mongering to say the least. Nobody is stopping those companies hiring from the said regions today. And it is super unlikely western engineers would want to relocate to the said regions given the choice. Let's all admit outsourcing is a thing and it has been for more than 20 years. The reason outsourcing is dialed back is much more interesting to understand, and offers insight from perspective other than costs. The high CoL in Bay Area is not sustainable. Software engineering is already democratized in a way, Bay Area no longer holds monopoly. The high salary here is a reflection of prosperity of past decade of internet bloom, but there is no momentum to keep it that way as the party will end never-the-less eventually. If anything, I see those remote working as a welcoming trend, to redistribute tech talents and money across US/Canada. Yes, the salary will go down, but it probably reflect better the reality we are already living.
- fnord77 6y ago
  The bay area is unique in that it has two major research universities where a lot of computer science was developed. Berkeley and Stanford will continue to drive innovation.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    And yet the collegiate programming contests includes high performing computer science schools from every region. You can raise an incredible programmer from Wisconsin, Colorado, Texas, Virginia, and Ohio just fine.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Innovation is not generally about hiring people who are really good at programming contests.
      - t-writescode 6y ago
        Does it have to come from schools that are known for what they did 40 years ago?
ashtonkem 6y ago
Those engineers are already available in cheaper international locations, and they have yet to drive down engineering salaries down to subsistence level in the US.
- DevKoala 6y ago
  Because company policies were not as open to remote talent. It took us over a year of lackluster local talent interviews in SF to convince our CTO that we have to go for remote talent. By the time the pandemic hit, we were ready to be our most effective as a geo distributed team.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    Do you hire in Jakarta?
  - polynomial 6y ago
    And yet there seem to be many companies that are fine with lackluster? Seems to be very much a reflection of how engineering is managed at a company.
the_duke 6y ago
There are multiple sibling comments dismissing this argument because it could have happened already, but consider this: Few companies were very accepting and open about remote work or had the structure to support it with any kind of scale (hiring, HR, legal, team structure, meetings vs async communication, ...) If companies adapt their processes and workflows to include remote workers as first class employees, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to seamlessly integrate team members not only across the country, but across the globe. This avoids the usual cost of outsourcing (communication and coordination overhead, lack of integration, etc), while still opening up a large, much cheaper labor pool. This doesn't have to be primarily negative, but it very much has the potential to put a lot of downward pressure on salaries and should be considered.
Consultant32452 6y ago
I would like to offer a more nuanced position. People bring many attributes/abilities to work which have value. These include knowledge, integrity, communication, personality, etc. In the past, being willing/able to live in a place like the Bay Area was one of those attributes. Now that one attribute is less valuable. But the rest of the value proposition hasn't changed. I understand why a person who REALLY wants to live in the Bay Area would be concerned about that. But for most of us in the world, not much is changing. In fact, salaries for the rest of us might go up because demand for our labor will go up.
devit 6y ago
Or in other words, people in Lagos and Jakarta will now have access to higher salaries (not as high as SF ones, but higher than their alternatives) because they can now work for Facebook and similar companies, rather than being discriminated because they happened to be born in Africa.
- kthxbye123 6y ago
  That's great for them, but it means the current employees day-dreaming about leaving their luxuriously appointed home office in their palatial Mountain West exurban home for a Wednesday afternoon skiing trip are going to need to seriously readjust their expectations towards "splitting an apartment in Sacramento instead of SF"
throwlaplace 6y ago
>will drive down wages everywhere to the level of the cheapest locations where talent can be found god forbid we earn the same as everyone else with our skills instead of an arbitrarily inflated quantity thanks to luck of the draw wrt lat/lon we were born near.

121789 6y ago

You said this much better than I could. I'd expect the power of management to increase over individual ICs, too.

sb52191 6y ago

"I think it’s much more likely that, rather than empowering employees to live rich and fulfilling lives outside of work, a massive shift to remote will drive down wages everywhere to the level of the cheapest locations where talent can be found - so instead of living on an SF salary in Coer d’Alene you’ll be living on a Lagos or Jakarta salary" I disagree. If companies felt they could readily get the same level of talent outside the US, why wouldn't they do that currently? Just set up their business in a foreign country and recruit internationally? And if they're still hiring domestically, why are you so sure they're going to dramatically reduce salaries? They still have to attract talent. If an employee wants to move from the bay area to Wyoming, and their employer says their pay will be cut 50%, what's to stop them from applying to Twitter or another company allowing full remote with (I'm assuming, I haven't checked) a much more competitive salary? "while obliterating the distinction between “work life” and “home life”" I've seen far too many emails sent by people at 11:30 PM and followed up with another email at 6 AM for me to believe this hasn't already happened. Not to mention the self imposed aspect of it (neither of those emails NEEDED to be sent at those times).

hadlock 6y ago
Last couple of companies I worked at, they are already outsourcing "average" work. We had a QA manager in the bay area, and then he had a team of six people in SE asia doing QA/QA automation. On the engineering side we had a team of 20 engineers in eastern Europe working for less than 30k/year usd working on bug fixes and test coverage, UI fixes, modifying legacy code from the original monolith that didn't change a whole lot etc In the bay area we only had five engineers, mostly focuses on architecture, R&D, new products etc, and even then they only came in two-three days a week mostly for face to face meetings. The VP had a lake house in tahoe and would work remote for 2 months every summer. I can see a bunch of legacy code maintenance/qa work moving offshore further, but there will always be a core group of five to ten engineers who meet at the central office a couple times a month. Remote will increase but humans still need face to face contact periodically.
- bluekite2000 6y ago
  Yeah I know a bunch of QA companies in Vietnam. How did your company find them? I am Vietnamese American myself and have spent a lot of time in the region. It is an amazing place w/ a hungry yet educated youth population, great food, beautiful beaches and quite fast internet. Surprised not many American companies heading there to recruit.
  - hadlock 6y ago
    We initially hired the QA manager as our first QA hire, then he built the team in his country. After a couple of years we paid for his visa and he lives in the US now and has been with the company for over five years. We went through Vietnam including Nha-trang on a tourist trip two years ago, of which I think Nha-trang is sort of their tech capital, I was really impressed with the level of development there and how modern it was, although I didn't talk with anyone directly in the industry while I was there. It definitely had an international modern vibe compared to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
    - bluekite2000 6y ago

tanilama 6y ago

> Lagos or Jakarta salary This is fear mongering to say the least. Nobody is stopping those companies hiring from the said regions today. And it is super unlikely western engineers would want to relocate to the said regions given the choice. Let's all admit outsourcing is a thing and it has been for more than 20 years. The reason outsourcing is dialed back is much more interesting to understand, and offers insight from perspective other than costs. The high CoL in Bay Area is not sustainable. Software engineering is already democratized in a way, Bay Area no longer holds monopoly. The high salary here is a reflection of prosperity of past decade of internet bloom, but there is no momentum to keep it that way as the party will end never-the-less eventually. If anything, I see those remote working as a welcoming trend, to redistribute tech talents and money across US/Canada. Yes, the salary will go down, but it probably reflect better the reality we are already living.

fnord77 6y ago
The bay area is unique in that it has two major research universities where a lot of computer science was developed. Berkeley and Stanford will continue to drive innovation.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  And yet the collegiate programming contests includes high performing computer science schools from every region. You can raise an incredible programmer from Wisconsin, Colorado, Texas, Virginia, and Ohio just fine.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Innovation is not generally about hiring people who are really good at programming contests.
    - t-writescode 6y ago
      Does it have to come from schools that are known for what they did 40 years ago?

ashtonkem 6y ago

Those engineers are already available in cheaper international locations, and they have yet to drive down engineering salaries down to subsistence level in the US.

DevKoala 6y ago
Because company policies were not as open to remote talent. It took us over a year of lackluster local talent interviews in SF to convince our CTO that we have to go for remote talent. By the time the pandemic hit, we were ready to be our most effective as a geo distributed team.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Do you hire in Jakarta?
- polynomial 6y ago
  And yet there seem to be many companies that are fine with lackluster? Seems to be very much a reflection of how engineering is managed at a company.

the_duke 6y ago

There are multiple sibling comments dismissing this argument because it could have happened already, but consider this: Few companies were very accepting and open about remote work or had the structure to support it with any kind of scale (hiring, HR, legal, team structure, meetings vs async communication, ...) If companies adapt their processes and workflows to include remote workers as first class employees, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to seamlessly integrate team members not only across the country, but across the globe. This avoids the usual cost of outsourcing (communication and coordination overhead, lack of integration, etc), while still opening up a large, much cheaper labor pool. This doesn't have to be primarily negative, but it very much has the potential to put a lot of downward pressure on salaries and should be considered.

Consultant32452 6y ago

I would like to offer a more nuanced position. People bring many attributes/abilities to work which have value. These include knowledge, integrity, communication, personality, etc. In the past, being willing/able to live in a place like the Bay Area was one of those attributes. Now that one attribute is less valuable. But the rest of the value proposition hasn't changed. I understand why a person who REALLY wants to live in the Bay Area would be concerned about that. But for most of us in the world, not much is changing. In fact, salaries for the rest of us might go up because demand for our labor will go up.

devit 6y ago

Or in other words, people in Lagos and Jakarta will now have access to higher salaries (not as high as SF ones, but higher than their alternatives) because they can now work for Facebook and similar companies, rather than being discriminated because they happened to be born in Africa.

kthxbye123 6y ago
That's great for them, but it means the current employees day-dreaming about leaving their luxuriously appointed home office in their palatial Mountain West exurban home for a Wednesday afternoon skiing trip are going to need to seriously readjust their expectations towards "splitting an apartment in Sacramento instead of SF"

throwlaplace 6y ago

>will drive down wages everywhere to the level of the cheapest locations where talent can be found god forbid we earn the same as everyone else with our skills instead of an arbitrarily inflated quantity thanks to luck of the draw wrt lat/lon we were born near.