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> Not only does a an employee's location not change the employers' demand, the moving also does not change the supply available to employer. Moving or not, the

> Not only does a an employee's location not change the employers' demand, the moving also does not change the supply available to employer. Moving or not, the employer could always find a new employee abroad if supply was indeed plentiful. The company tolerating remote workers changes the supply to the company. The people moving immediately are seeing the first effect here, but if it becomes permanent, the people who don't move will inevitably get the same paycut. Why pay $200K for someone in SF when someone in Des Moines will take $140K, but wasn't willing to relocate five years ago?

jayd16 6y ago
>The company tolerating remote workers changes the supply to the company. The crux is that the supply curve is not fully known. For argument's sake, you can imagine both that talent is distributed uniformly as well as imagine top talent was already pulled towards urban centers. We don't know exactly what the answer is but one thing that does not make sense is that the supply is somehow linked to local cost of living. You admit yourself that this current offer to relocate is artificial and not a product of the market reaching equilibrium, so why accept it?
- majormajor 6y ago
  The supply may not explode - maybe most talent was already tilted towards those expensive areas since that's where so many jobs were - but for any given employer in a given city, today's supply is a lower bound for their supply if they accept remote workers. It can only go up. There's a potential scenario of now "company in cheap city X is willing to pay for SF talent, but couldn't convince them to relocate before, but can now hire them remote" that would also push up demand for top talent, but it seems much more likely to me that demand for top talent stays about the same while supply increases at least a small amount, which would push down wages.

jayd16 6y ago

>The company tolerating remote workers changes the supply to the company. The crux is that the supply curve is not fully known. For argument's sake, you can imagine both that talent is distributed uniformly as well as imagine top talent was already pulled towards urban centers. We don't know exactly what the answer is but one thing that does not make sense is that the supply is somehow linked to local cost of living. You admit yourself that this current offer to relocate is artificial and not a product of the market reaching equilibrium, so why accept it?

majormajor 6y ago
The supply may not explode - maybe most talent was already tilted towards those expensive areas since that's where so many jobs were - but for any given employer in a given city, today's supply is a lower bound for their supply if they accept remote workers. It can only go up. There's a potential scenario of now "company in cheap city X is willing to pay for SF talent, but couldn't convince them to relocate before, but can now hire them remote" that would also push up demand for top talent, but it seems much more likely to me that demand for top talent stays about the same while supply increases at least a small amount, which would push down wages.