Most of the comments so far are about his take on there potentially being less need for people to write software in the future. The more interesting part of the

Most of the comments so far are about his take on there potentially being less need for people to write software in the future. The more interesting part of the article IMO is the bit about salaries: > Most people would like to believe salaries are determined by a cost-plus model, where you get a tiny bit less than the value you add to the company. However, in reality, they are really determined by the competition. Companies are forced to pay as much as possible to keep the talent for leaving. In a competitive labor market, this is often a good thing for the employees. He goes on to concisely explain why people get paid so much for working in the Bay Area, and why they won’t get paid like that elsewhere. I think this is a keen insight, and should be sobering to the large cohort of HN that is clamoring for all the tech giants to go full remote. As we saw already this week, when Facebook decides they don’t actually need you to live near Menlo Park anymore, that also means they don’t need to pay you Menlo Park wages any longer. I think there’s actually a significant risk to Silicon Valley here, which is the following potential vicious cycle: - Big Tech decides all/mostly remote is the future. - Big Tech mostly stops hiring in the Bay Area because why pay more for talent when they no longer “have to.” - The COVID reset layoffs continue, resulting in a lot of Bay Area engineers looking for work at the same time. - Supply and demand mean that engineers wages start dropping as smaller companies no longer have to compete with the giants (as a hiring manager in SF I’ve already seen this start happening). - Engineers who can no longer command crazy salaries to justify the rent start leaving the area (this is also already happening). - Rents start to drop, and the housing market softens a little. - Tech workers who have relatively recently bought homes get nervous and look to exit before they get underwater on million+ dollar loans. - The housing market softens further... At this point most of these things sound like a much needed reprieve for the insane local housing market, but the funny thing about bubbles is the way they get hotter and hotter for a long time, and then tend to pop relatively quickly. Sometimes these things can lead to vicious cycles that take quite a while to come back from, where a bear market feeds on itself. I love working in software. I loved it before I moved to the Bay Area and quadrupled my earnings. I’ll love it even if it all comes back down to earth and is just a “normal job” again. But I think that could really happen, and I think Big Tech embracing remote is a great way to pop the balloon in the Bay Area with the result not being a utopia where people get to make Bay Area wages and then live on the beach in Cancun, but rather they get to make Omaha wages and live in... Omaha. I haven’t really seen this community wake up to that possibility yet, which is surprising to me considering it’s a fairly obvious conclusion to the top paying companies all opening up the floodgates of worker supply by truly embracing remote work.